The thing that frustrates me the most about this situation is the waste of human capital this represents for society. Now, I'm a firm believer that society is advanced mostly by a small minority of highly talented individuals - the intelligent, creative, charismatic, and hardworking few change the game for everyone else.
Now, what happens when those rare talents are born into the cycle of poverty? What lessons do they learn? Too often, their talents just get them into trouble. They find themselves caught up in crime, addiction, and the other short-term thinking failures of poverty, and thus unable to express their talent. Worse, society simply expects nothing of them. They have no role models, and they have no external motivations to be and do better.
Even those who can do better often simply escape, leaving the culture of their birth behind. Frankly, I did that. I was raised about one step above what southerners call "white trash". My father, a tremendously intelligent and charismatic man, was constantly lured by petty crime and get-rich-quick ideas, and wasted his life. His interactions with the wealthy men he worked for generated feelings not of admiration and example, but contempt. To this day, when I'm not sure what to do about a situation, I think of what he would have done, and do the opposite. And he took a big step up himself - I remember visiting my grandfather's farm in rural Kentucky as a child. I didn't notice the lack of electricity or running water at the time. I notice it now. My father escaped sharecropping, but he never escaped his own demons.
I see the effects of those escapes now in my sister's life. She loves living in the rural south, but is constantly brought down by the ignorance and awful habits of her neighbors. Everyone in her area (southern Virginia) who has any brains simply moves away. What's left are the addicts, the fools, and the spiteful. Sure, it's beautiful there, but I don't see how she can stand living around people with so little ambition. I do, however, see how she suffers in poverty and hopelessness.
Me, I got up and left. I made a good career for myself, living in a nice safe neighborhood in a beautiful city, making a good income in a safe field, raising my kids safe from the things that got me as a child. I can't imagine going back to that life.
But oh, so many lost souls. So much talent put to waste in jail or in the grave. This is what we allow poverty to do to our society.
I can relate. Dad died when I was 13, Mom and 3 kids moved to a single-wide in rural Florida. I was buried in books and calculators from the time I could walk to the library, but I had no positive role models. I had no idea of the value or importance of the PSAT and SAT, I had no idea what I would do once I graduated from High School. I lucked into the local community college offering scholarships for the top of the local HS graduating class, lucked into a moonlighting GE engineer teaching a programming (Fortran!) class, then started to work toward a State university, a Fortune 500 job, and a career as a software developer rather than a cook/kitchen manager like I might have been. I married a HS guidance counselor who by both trade and passion wants to give kids a vision for what they could have and don't see... and I have much the same vision. My real career dream, beyond getting to be a software developer, is to help even one kid short-circuit the journey I took to realizing their potential.
"who by both trade and passion wants to give kids a vision for what they could have and don't see"
There's definitely a huge need for this- but I think for everyone, not necessarily just those in poverty. From my middle class home town, most people I was familiar with from elementary school seem to be working at restaurants and the like. I could have definitely used a mentor to help me see the possibilities that my parents weren't familiar with. Now that I'm finally developing the self-awareness necessary to really go somewhere (hopefully) I've tried to think on how to help kids realize their potential, but in such a way as to be scalable. While maybe apps could help with self-esteem, it's probably not possible at this point to replace the knowledge and experience of a good mentor with a standalone information system.
I know the frustration I've experienced, so I can only imagine what it's got to be like coming from less- props to you for making it.
> "There's definitely a huge need for this- but I think for everyone, not necessarily just those in poverty."
Absolutely. My wife works across the economic range, and there are opportunities everywhere. I've given talks at her school career days about software development, but that's certainly not the right fit for everyone (though perhaps everyone should at least try a little.) I do think that online forums open up worlds of experience and ideas that weren't as accessible in the past - like a vast library, perhaps a bit poorly edited. I think there's a key place for - coaches/mentors/counselors/teachers/friends - I don't know the best term - to help people adapt knowledge and ideas to their own interests, experiences and ambitions. I suspect the really great relationships like this don't scale. Someone might say 'Khan Academy', but I think the best situations are probably more like Y Combinator, and that looks more like a traditional classroom than it does an app. I say let 1000 flowers bloom... any attempt to lend a hand up to someone is to be valued.
> "Now, I'm a firm believer that society is advanced mostly by a small minority of highly talented individuals - the intelligent, creative, charismatic, and hardworking few change the game for everyone else."
I think my idea is consistent with both the Great Man theory and its critics. I'm concerned that, due to the negative impacts of poverty and other social failure modes, we're preventing the formation of Great Men (and Great Women - one of the grand social ills that we've only halfway addressed is sexism).
Most people will "squander" their time in the sense that they'll never accomplish anything that contributes meaningfully to society. That's totally okay. Like beat said, society is advanced mostly by a small minority of highly talented individuals.
What's not okay is when members of this small minority, who have the potential to do great things, instead remain stuck in poverty.
The fact that people like you can escape is very encouraging: it means we still have class mobility -- if you've got the skills and work ethic, you can be born into the lower class and quickly rise above that.
Don't kid yourself. There's a wide gulf between a worldview based on a few anecdotal successes and the more realistic picture emerging from a flood of statistics, which not only show the rarity of mobility, but indicate that it's declining - esp. for those unfortunate enough to be born at the bottom.
Yes, people can win Olympic Gold (we're not competing against robots yet), but very few will and those who do will have to make extraordinary sacrifices. So yes, give them credit. But don't - whatever you do - look at people who haven't managed to keep their heads about water, and think "well, this one guy made it against all odds and you didn't, so you must be a lazy, stupid human."
That may be fair (if harsh) in a supportive world where it takes rare talent to fail. But it's a monstrous attitude in a world where the opposite is so clearly the case.
Financially successful doesn't necessarily mean the same thing as being financially "successful relative to the rest of the population", for what it's worth.
No, not quickly, on the contrary, there's an inverse relationship:
"...the United States and United Kingdom had the lowest intergenerational vertical social mobility ..."
"...Studies have also found "a clear negative relationship" between income inequality and intergenerational mobility.[27] Countries with low levels of inequality such as Denmark, Norway and Finland had some of the greatest mobility, while the two countries with the high level of inequality -- Chile and Brazil—had some of the lowest mobility. A 2012 graph plotting the relationship between inequality and mobility in the United States and twelve other developed countries has been dubbed "The Great Gatsby Curve"[27][28][29]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_mobility#Country_compari...
Well, if prisons were busy handing out guns, shovels, and grappling hooks to every prisoner, even begging the prisoners to take them, and the prisoners just ignored them, then I think your analogy would fit.
I went to a public school in a poor neighborhood, and very well-meaning teachers were trying to give students the tools to break out of poverty. Except for the Asians (who do routinely break out), the kids of most cultural groups were more likely to laugh in the teachers' faces! It was pretty disgusting to watch, really.
In my experience, those who were smart, grabbed every break-out tool that was offered to them, and were lucky enough to stay in decent health throughout their youth, all managed to escape the poverty.
It's true that getting crippled or bedridden in your teens or 20s can make it harder to escape both from prison and from poverty, and that's totally out of your control, but there is plenty that you can actually do to improve your chances, and 99% of young people (that I've seen) did none of it.
"The fact that people like you can escape is very encouraging: it means we still have class mobility"
Sorry, my analogy is perfectly apt. Your argument was that the fact that there were survivors means there is mobility, but in no way is that reasoning sound. You must compare the number who thrive to the number who don't, or else your methodology is terribly compromised.
Of course, now (but not before) you've started to do that, albeit in the rather unscientific method of, people who know who fit your judgment of certain criteria. There are various other cognitive biases at play here, e.g. fundamental attribution error.
But even if we were to pretend that you, unlike anyone else, could somehow accurately judge the reality of the situation based on your childhood memories, take a look at the criteria you mentioned. You had to include "were lucky enough to stay in decent health" - as if health was merely determined by luck, and not wealth! Access to doctors, medicine, and quality food are not distributed evenly in society.
You, just like me and everyone else, don't have anywhere near the ability to draw reasonable conclusions about class mobility (or lack thereof) as methodological research. But please don't go promoting fallacious thinking by saying things like "the fact that you survived means we have mobility." It means no such thing.
Skills and work ethic are learned behaviors. You're technically correct that those things can help you rise above, but you're missing the point that environment is the key factor.
We still have class mobility, to a degree. Not enough of a degree, which is my concern. My daughter, who is 20, is concerned that society is actually going backwards, and there's less opportunity for her generation than for previous generations.
Pretty harsh. I'd bet the shirt you are wearing was made by a hard working person you consider not important enough to matter, yet worth taking a shirt from.
How "advanced" is a society without shirts? I tend to think the idea that some people "advance society" is bull. Society advances as a whole or not at all.
Outside of the SV bubble, it's extraordinarily difficult to fail without seeing your credit take a serious hit. And boy howdy is getting back on your feet hard when you (a) can't get an apartment, and (b) find yourself getting screened out of otherwise available jobs. Forget getting money on loan, this is just getting access to the basics of economical survival - work to do and a place to sleep.
The fact that we punish economic failure by making economic success even harder to achieve is evidence of the deep insanity within American culture. Sink or swim is a misnomer. Swim or be drowned is closer to the mark.
So it's great that we're making technical progress on every front imaginable. But how many of these advances see their promise still born in a culture that pays more attention to recycling its trash than the people it discards on its streets?
This winner-take-all/losers-get-ruin problem goes way beyond the business cycle. As Reuters noted a couple of years ago, entrepreneurship has been suffering a decades-long retreat. Having peaked in 1987, it's declined precipitously ever since.
In just about every way imaginable, SV is the exception not the rule. For those who are young enough, smart enough, skilled enough, male enough, credentialed enough, connected enough, unencumbered enough, and possibly delusional enough it's great. But strike any one of those factors from the list, and watch the curve get steep. Start crossing off two or more and the odds on the lottery start looking good.
Those are the odds that the rest of America sees. So it's no wonder they're backing further and further away from risk, regardless of the long-terms costs the country. Until this country has a social contract that's worth a damn, people are going to be very adverse to even the slightest setback. And for good reason.
After all, there's a big difference between the kind of failure that can be chalked up "a valuable learning experience" and failure so catastrophically crushingly severe you never, ever, get back on your feet. There's a lot of that in America. It's where the Fear comes from. That's what drives most people. Not dreams of being one of the great or the good. Those are luxuries for the fortunate few. Most people just live in constant dread of being thrown in the street.
I'm glad to see a few studies bearing out the sort of things I perceived growing up.
'To him, the obvious conclusion is to radically change our thinking. “Just like you wouldn’t charge them $1,000 to fill out a form, you shouldn’t charge them $1,000 in cognitive complexity,” he says. One study found that if you offer help with filling out the Fafsa form, pickup goes up significantly.'
I believe this is exactly the right sort of thinking. Finding ways to encourage and enable people to start moving gradually in order to build positive momentum.
The "front loading" of forms, waiting lists and probationary periods are like mountains. Some people break themselves on the ascent, others spend themselves reaching the summit and have no energy to continue safely down the far side. These man made mountains need not remain arbitrarily steep.
As mostly an outside observer in both countries (fortunately), this is one of the big differences I see between the American and Danish welfare systems. The Danish one has a reputation for being much more generous, which is true to some extent, but is not as true in terms of throughput as it is in terms of latency. The Danish system does a lot of short-term "business": people get onto the system in a matter of days, use it for 6-12 months, then get off again. (By "the system" I mean a range of things: housing subsidy, retraining, cash welfare, mental-health treatment, etc.) Whereas the American one seems incapable of delivering anything with less than a 6-month waiting list, with an extremely bureaucratic and unfriendly process almost always serving as the gatekeeper.
>'Whereas the American one seems incapable of delivering anything with less than a 6-month waiting list..'
My family was on a wait list for housing assistance from the time I was a child until I dropped out of school and started working, making us ineligible. The list is currently closed and was last open over half a decade ago, for less than two weeks - like something out of a fantasy novel.
>...with an extremely bureaucratic and unfriendly process almost always serving as the gatekeeper.'
Well, there's a popular notion in the US that the process should be as difficult and unfriendly as possible - that people seeking public assistance are not just lazy, but living well. The 'welfare queen' [1] still haunts the system 40 years later.
The problem is that while there are a great many deserving people who wouldn't abuse the system, there are also plenty who would.
Worse is that if you overhear one person on the bus (like I did when I was in college) talking about having another child so she could get a larger welfare check, it has a way of getting to you. It's an anecdote so it doesn't really count from a scientific perspective. But emotionally, that's HUGE.
When I use my brain I realize that it would be far more effective to cut the military budget by 10% than the welfare budget by 10% in terms of reducing taxes. But somehow I still feel some kind of moral outrage about the person who considered a welfare payment her divine right for existing rather than a temporary thing that well-intentioned people created for the sake of trying to help lift less fortunate folks out of poverty.
Emotionally I feel less bad about the military because at least something's getting done as a result. People have jobs (even if they're not the most efficient) and technology is advanced (even at a cost greater than a private company might capable of) and actual tangible things happen. In some ways that's easier to justify, even if that justification is completely wrong given the graft and corruption that's rampant in the military-industrial complex.
It also is very upsetting from a felt-justice perspective. Here I am working hard end paying my taxes so that (in a very, very small way $ or % wise) I'm empowering someone else to just sit around and get paid to do nothing but pop out babies and raise them poorly.
Thinking critically I realize that I have no actual idea what my opinion of acceptable false positives and false negatives is, or how the system actually performs irrespective of my judgement. But as human beings we're wired to reject "unjust" gains for others even at our own expense. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimatum_game
"Well, there's a popular notion in the US that the process should be as difficult and unfriendly as possible - that people seeking public assistance are not just lazy, but living well. The 'welfare queen' [1] still haunts the system 40 years later."
Again, I realize that it's ENTIRELY possible that the subjects of this article are the exception rather than the rule. But it's hard to use your brain rather than react to your emotions when this kind of thing gets written up.
Ultimately the problem is that not everyone can think critically all the time about everything and then react appropriately.
I used to think similar to this, even though I was and grew up poor. But after working with a few NGOs I've found the system is designed to screen out the people that need the help. At the same time the people that know how to work the system get the most aid.
Most welfare requires that you report 0 income, so instead of searching for work working welfare becomes the job. Showing up every day to the local office, wait in line, fill in papers, come back tomorrow, and repeat.
A few years ago I had a friend quit her job as a social worker because she was expecting a baby and her company didn't provide health insurance. She was able to get Medicaid by going on unemployment as a single mother with child. Then she had to stay unemployed because the cost of daycare was more than her income. Social welfare in the US is so screwed up because you have to be backed into a corner to get it and then have to stay there because your time becomes devoted to keeping track of all the paperwork.
>'...the cost of daycare was more than her income.'
Covering the gap when coming off of assistance is a major problem.
The sharp cutoffs and various criteria for violations turn leaving assistance into a leap of faith.
A small raise becomes a big problem when the increase adds up to far less than the food benefit you'll lose all at once for exceeding the income limit. Likewise, you can't build a basic emergency fund when two thousand dollars in the bank will kill your SSI.
The SSI one also tends to discourage disabled people from doing any work, because any ability to earn income, even a small amount intermittently, is taken as evidence that you aren't really permanently disabled. I have an American uncle with MS, who can't work at all now, but in earlier stages of the disease he probably could have worked some of the time (not a steady job, because he'd be relatively better for a few months then relatively worse again, but a part-time job for part of the year would probably have been ok). But he was advised that SSI disability just isn't set up for that: you can't be completely disabled some months a year and work part-time other months. You are either permanently disabled and get a monthly benefit, or you aren't disabled and get nothing. Since he wouldn't be able to work regularly enough to support himself through work, he went on SSI disability and didn't work at all, which was probably not ideal for either the economy or him.
> Here I am working hard end paying my taxes so that (in a very, very small way $ or % wise) I'm empowering someone else to just sit around and get paid to do nothing but pop out babies and raise them poorly.
Personally, what causes me to feel moral outrage is when I encounter this sort of derogatory statements, aimed at the poor. Based on something once overheard on a bus, nonetheless.
The fact that there is a tiny percentage abusing the help is a very poor excuse for not giving help to the much, much larger percentage of people who are deeply, genuinely in need of it.
As a continuation of your realization that your opinions are probably based on irrational emotions: why is this irrational anger aimed at the part of society that is least well off? For instance, I wonder what is the percentage of actually rich people who are payed with tax dollars to do nothing of value, or even something destructive.
>> Here I am working hard end paying my taxes so that (in a very, very small way $ or % wise) I'm empowering someone else to just sit around and get paid to do nothing but pop out babies and raise them poorly.
>Personally, what causes me to feel moral outrage is when I encounter this sort of derogatory statements, aimed at the poor. Based on something once overheard on a bus, nonetheless.
The idea that I overheard it on a bus makes it less credible doesn't really hold water in my mind. It was in an informal setting and thus more likely to be true. And if someone's motivation to have another child is to collect more welfare I'm not so convinced that it's an entirely unreasonable assumption that they're not going to do the best job raising them. If this mother couldn't think through the thoughts necessary to realize that welfare shouldn't be a system that you milk for all it's worth and instead is a system designed to help you get back on your feet (at least ostensibly) then I'm not so confident she's going to do a stellar job of everything else. She might very well teach them through actions if not words, that going on welfare is preferable to real work. That's a potent recipe for dependency.
>The fact that there is a tiny percentage abusing the help is a very poor excuse for not giving help to the much, much larger percentage of people who are deeply, genuinely in need of it.
That's a big fat [citation needed]. Furthermore if you assume that those who are abusing the system know the right things to say when they're interviewed or to put down on the forms I can't really figure out how you could reasonably determine the percentage of people abusing the system. Hire a million PIs to follow folks around? It's not as though the people fill out forms and check the box that says "I am lying about my need" which first off, isn't there and second would obviously disqualify them.
Finally I think it's incredibly offensive that you assume you know how I feel about the rich based on what I've said about SOME poor folks who are abusing welfare. You might THINK you know, but that does not translate into actual knowledge.
In reality I hate all rent-seekers rich and poor alike. If you want an income you should have to work for it like everyone else. I find the idea that someone can eat, sleep and live off the hard work of others morally outrageous. It doesn't matter to me the amount of ill-gotten gains that allows people to squander their lives without doing anything useful for society.
>'But it's hard to use your brain rather than react to your emotions when this kind of thing gets written up.'
No doubt.
I've seen more than a few otherwise measured people lose it when it comes to this topic.
It's fascinating that the same people who seemingly recognize the folly of hasty generalizations about everything from brands to race or religion will vehemently defend the same with regard to income.
I wonder if it's simply lack of exposure?
Where I grew up around DC there's certainly far less personal interaction across classes than there is among different ethnicities, faiths or automobiles.
If someone's primary exposure to an entire class of people happens through the 'news' with a peppering of half heard conversations in the few instances of mixing (public transit, DMV, sometimes grade school) it's easy to see how they could end up with strongly felt yet thinly supported views.
> It's fascinating that the same people who seemingly recognize the folly of hasty generalizations about everything from brands to race or religion will vehemently defend the same with regard to income.
I guess a sort-of defense of myself (and perhaps others) is that I'm not saying that "all poor people deserve to be poor" or "all people on welfare are worthless shitbags who abuse it" or "no welfare goes to deserving people at all".
In fact, that was the VERY FIRST THING that I wrote in my first comment: "The problem is that while there are a great many deserving people who wouldn't abuse the system, there are also plenty who would."
I do understand that it's not a 100% black and white issue, not all welfare is bad! But on the flip side, not all welfare is good either.
One of the big problems is that it's incredibly difficult to know what the good/bad ratio is because the agencies who distribute the money have the wrong incentives. Because it's very difficult to really know (or measure) if someone NEEDS assistance versus WANTS assistance they instead ensure adherence to things which ARE measurable. Like correctly filling out forms. Which, all other things being equal, will tend to favor the repeat applicants, those who have friends/relatives who have already applied and successfully received assistance, and things of that nature.
Furthermore if you're trying to make a career in public service you want to always have a bigger budget and more staff so there's no incentive for management to try and prevent abuse; so long as the abuser does a good enough job on the paperwork management or staff can always plead ignorance if they are ever questioned.
The incentive for an abuser to abuse is that it's easier to not work and collect money than to work and perhaps collect less money, or the same amount of money, or perhaps only slightly more money. If you believe or figure out that your labor will never be worth more than $9/hr and that caps your income at $1440 a month before taxes and substantially less after. Even if you have less income from welfare, food stamps, housing, etc it might make sense to do because of the increased free time you would have and thus the better lifestyle. It also gives you opportunities to work under the table and make far more than you could if you had a regular hourly job if you've got some ambition.
Okay so we've established that there's motive for people to abuse and motive for those responsible for preventing it to look the other way. Why is it so hard to imagine that it does in fact happen and that it might not be a trivially small percentage? I honestly don't know what it is, might be 10% or it might be 50% but I'd need to see some large scale, serious investigation of a scientific nature with outside observers (not self-reporting) to be convinced it's only 2%.
I agree that this sentiment is a major issue for public support of welfare systems. A few (admittedly speculative) thoughts on what's different in Denmark, where such sentiment isn't absent, but I think is a bit weaker and less influential:
1. In a way, the U.S. makes for a foil that enhances the perception that the welfare state is necessary for a society we'd like to live in. People are afraid of Copenhagen ending up like San Francisco or Detroit, with homeless people everywhere, dangerous ghettos, etc., and there's a perception that the welfare system is one thing keeping that possibility at bay, and keeping Copenhagen a fairly safe and nice place to live. The "are you trying to turn us into America?" trump-card is a huge PR/positioning problem for the (smallish) free-market/libertarian parties, because a lot of people are genuinely afraid of it.
2. A decent amount of stuff that is "welfare" in the U.S. is instead just something everyone gets, so there is no issue over eligibility and whether people are gaming it. Everyone gets free healthcare, subsidized childcare, free university, paid paternity/maternity leave, etc., so there aren't debates over things like Medicaid or CHIP. Even the public-housing system is open to anyone (there are waitlists for popular buildings, but no income/wealth cutoff).
3. There's a general feeling that even people who really are up to no good are still somehow "our responsibility". It's kind of the society-level version of what southern Europeans feel on the extended-family level. To a Greek, your uncle might be a lazy jerk and/or an alcoholic, but he's still your uncle and it's seen as at least partly the family's responsibility to make sure he's not homeless or resorting to crime to eat: it'd be shameful to the family if one of theirs was not taken care of. In Denmark it's sort of the same, except it's not the individual family's responsibility, but the state's, to make sure everyone in the "extended family" is off the streets and able to eat.
4. Low-end jobs just pay a lot more. Even working as a supermarket check-out clerk, barista, or McDonald's employee, pays ~$35k-$40k if you do it full-time. So being employed makes a qualitative class difference: in the U.S., minimum-wage workers and welfare recipients are both "lower-class" or "poor", whereas in Denmark, welfare recipients are mostly "poor" while minimum-wage workers are "middle class". As a result, people tend not to feel envious of those on welfare, but more pity towards them.
5. There's a greater cultural acceptance of the idea that people can be temporarily disabled. You can be on disability or sick leave for 6 months for a physical or mental health problem, and then go back to work; it's not only for people who are permanently disabled. This is seen as relatively normal, and such sick leaves are relatively common. Since many people have either taken one themselves, or have friends/family who have, it's not seen as much as something that "other" people are doing to take your tax money, but something that many people, including your own social circle, might need.
In general, the fact that many people will use the welfare system at some point in their life, even if only briefly, means people are very interested in ensuring that it's quick and efficient. Whereas my impression is that most Americans don't have a personal interest in the welfare system being quick and friendly, because they don't expect to use it.
>'I think that ignores the fact that the forms and such are there in the first place precisely to contain the tide of applicants.'
This thought did cross my mind, but I've done lots of work in the public sector - local, federal, education and health.
As a rule, these agencies just aren't that clever, not even close.
In my experience, bad forms and the like are generally a matter of "That's how we've always done it."
That's not to say the concern isn't real. Surely it wouldn't serve to simplify an intake form without altering other parts of the process. To fail to do that would just be moving the bottleneck.
Ideally, sticking with the mountain analogy, you'd end up with a steady stream of healthy, willing and ultimately productive hands coming into the valley via a long, winding, but relatively safe pass.
It doesn't have to literally take the form of "hey, we can scare people off by making the forms longer! And my mustache is twirlier today!"
Rather, it's more like: with a reasonable flow of applicants, they can be lax in checking them, and maybe call the applicant if they need to get more information or something doesn't look right.
But as the influx gets too large, they have to adopt an attitude of "give us everything we might possibly need to validate you, the first time around, or we can't afford to process it". They may not be deliberately trying to scare people off, but the massive influx does lead, somehow, to ever longer forms.
Heck, I see "that's the way we've always done it" and awful mountains of paperwork inside the enterprise. You'd think Fortune 100 businesses would be interested in internal efficiency, but they're not.
Another article in the increasing line of studies of the poor getting poorer.
tl;dr:
The poor are worse at managing time and money because they are exhausted all the time and have fewer/no options (i.e. costlier credits than the wealthy)
I just wish that articles like this focused more on how to solve it. It's nice that it acknowledges the problem. But that is not enough. The end of the piece gives a small snippet of examples of what works.
How do we start promoting things that do work? That really work? I think that does not get done in part because many people really do not want "the poor" to solve their problems. I do not understand why that is but there seems to be a hostile attitude towards poor people, as if being poor is evidence of lack of good morals or something and thus you deserve to suffer.
But this doesn't just hurt people who are currently poor. It means anyone who falls down gets kicked while they are down so it becomes unlikely they can get back up. This is not a good paradigm for society. It hurts everyone.
I recently finished reading the book mentioned in the article and in the book, they have a chapter focused on ways to improve the situation for people living in poverty. What I got from it was that programs to help poor people need to be tweaked to not tax their bandwidth as much and there is no real one size fits all solution.
One example in the book is the computer skills programs that are often offered by employment services offices. These programs are usually several weeks long and build on knowledge from previous weeks. For someone who is struggling financially, attending these classes weekly could be difficult. You miss one class, and the next class makes no sense and you feel like you're wasting your time. The authors' suggestion is to restructure these classes to be more modular and allow people to attend these classes based on their schedules.
I think it's not so much that people don't want the poor to solve their problems. It's that they don't want to make it easier for them. People feel that they themselves did just fine without all the benefits that the poor get, so why should we make it easier for them?
As for your last paragraph: I have been homeless for about 2.5 years. Programs to "help the homeless" mostly really, really suck and a lot of them a) piss away the time of the intended recipients b) require the intended recipients to accept enormous disrespect and c) reinforce a subsistence existence. Many of the programs that look to get poor people off the street require you to first be guilty of something, admit your guilt and then be their property.
I have no doubt that it isn't exactly consciously intentional but those attitudes are in there somewhere or this would be better. (There are some programs that are better than that but the default model is pretty awful, to the point of being actively hostile.)
I don't think it's that people don't want "the poor" to solve their problems, but there isn't an immediate benefit for others to solve that problem for them. Many have their own problems (even if they aren't as series as those faced by others).
I was under the impression that basic income was designed to give the poor the base they need to relieve the pressures of being poor enough that they could actually focus on getting a leg up instead of devoting all of their resources to simply surviving week to week.
a) I don't think this article mentions basic income. So I kind of think that is not relevant to this discussion.
b) I am not for basic income. I don't think completely screwing over the economy helps people at the bottom. I think "basic income" likely would screw over the economy.
Hostile attitude towards poor? I don't think so. Most of us are just busy trying to make a living/career, raise a family etc. There is not enough free time to go around. And whatever free time that is left is sucked up by TV/internet.
I wrote about this in more detail here: http://blog.seliger.com/2014/06/15/talking-about-progressive... , but one underappreciated facet of this dynamic is the extent to which the infrastructure we've collectively put in place to help people financially and otherwise has an enormous time cost of its own.
I do grant writing for nonprofit and public agencies. Virtually all federal, state, and local programs either mandate or imply that case managers must be hired or deployed. Each one of those people, and each one of their interactions, carries a cost. The situation is different from but still analogous to the one pg describes in "Makers Schedule, Managers Schedule": http://paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html .
The time cost of welfare a big part of why I think an unconditional direct cash subsidy is a better plan than our current welfare system. The bureaucratic efficiency losses for both welfare recipients and grantors is more than enough to pay for expanding the recipient pool.
>>It wasn’t that the poor participants were doing better; it was that the rich ones were doing worse.
I reminds me of a sentence from a recent study of breastfeeding vs. formula milk - "It's not that natural milk is better for babies - it's that baby formula is worse for the babies".
In a capitalist society, the key to "a good life" is passing a certain threshold of capital accumulation. The poor, not having much to begin with, has to constantly fight this uphill battle of trying to save more money, of finding more resources constantly, adding to their net worth, etc. This article shows that there is even an adverse psychological effect that makes reaching the goal still harder. All this seems to require big intervention of the governments part to level the playing field and make capital accumulation possible.
Unfortunately in the US, one bad financial decision, one loss of job, one bad case of illness or one trouble at home can reset the pool to 0 and often negative due the extensive background and credit history checking. It is the US government's responsibility to fix this because we submit to its authority, fund its existence and elect its officials for the purpose of trusting it to steward our nation and its people. Sadly when I tune into the political discourse it's all about gun/abortion/tax/federal debt and whatever other kinds of "freedom". Why is helping people never and enhancing social mobility on the table. And I am so so tired of politicians parading education as the silver bullet.
We are hackers, and for those of us with whom this article resonates, we can connect those with time but little money (e.g. teenagers looking for charities to contribute to) with the poor through technology. The teens could help with chores, maintenance, errands, filling out forms. Taking some of the time-pressure off might help them to get out of the cycle.
I actually think this is one of the great problems of our time (how wealth inequality lowers productivity by suppressing people who might otherwise contribute to society) and have experienced it acutely at times. One of my mottos is that you can have money or time but not both, but if you do manage to achieve both, then you are in a position to change the world.
I'm not sure I would quite take the matching approach you propose, but I've often thought that a better contracting service like fiverr (where people could make money quickly for the skills they truly excel at) could change the world by giving people alternatives to things like credit cards and payday loans. But there needs to be no little or no friction to make it feasible. Right now it's a PITA to make money through most of the online freelance sites because it's too hands-on, and technology doesn't do nearly enough.
Anyway, just wanted to say hi because this is something that I would like to work on also.
In my experience, in everything from going out to lunch to planning a camping trip to having a party to asking someone out to doing any work-- you have to do it, and yes let other people know you're doing it, but you have to be doing it regardless.
Things generally don't work if you say "I'll do it if you agree to do it too."
Nonsense. If I can't find someone to go to the movies with me, I probably won't go. I care about this issue, and am willing to work toward it - and it might even be fundable through grants, and other philanthropy. So I'd recommend contacting me if it interests you.
The comments seem to focus mostly on the financial aspects but I found the portion regarding how time is spent interesting. (True, the article does tie them together to an extent).
As far as financial poverty... my personal opinion is that "finance" is too widely regarded as an unalterable given that is intrinsic to the human condition. Certainly the concept of money has produced a system that has advanced human control over our environment, but a bit of perspective suggests it is a concept that we did without for tens of thousands of years. And, I suspect sometime in the future we will do without it again.
Maybe not "poor people need money" but rather "hungry people need food" might be the type of larger and more directly useful framework to address some of these problems within. Certainly we are at the level we should be able to provide basic food, clothing and shelter to all members of our species and no one should suffer and die from want. If we aren't doing this, given what we have and what we can do, then there is something wrong with the system and this needs correcting before we will be able to move much further. IMHOP. Maybe the thing that got us here (the concept of money) is becoming a conceptual problem that is now keeping us from advancing further. I don't have a fix. I just see what I think is part of the problem.
There's a saying, it goes like this: "its expensive being poor", and its really the truth. If you don't have enough money to buy in bulk, you end up paying way more for the smaller amount of product. If you can't afford to spend time on something because you have a limited number of calories before you become unproductive, and therefore have to work on aquiring more calories, then you're stuck in a feedback loop of no progress. And so it goes.
This is why the truly rich (not necessarily wealthy) find pleasure in lifes' simple, cheap, offerings. It's almost impossible to find vegetables as good as the ones we grow in our home garden, but yet it takes on average 30 minutes of work every day to keep things in order .. finding that balance is what is key to moving from being poor to rich, in my opinion. The time not spent getting in the car to go grocery shopping is instead spent maintaining a well-ordered garden plot ..
There's a great quote from a Terry Pratchett Discworld novel:
"The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.
Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness."
I generally have the suspicion that "boots" and the like offer only micro-optimizations. Buying a $100-150 bag advertised for durability versus a $30-40 generic brand backpack. Or buying a MacBook Pro versus a midrange laptop with Windows.
While there may be optimizations to be found in these situations, I also wonder about the cognitive cost per optimization, and I wonder if it might not be better to put the most of your mind on a job or geography transition.
You're right -- if that were the issue, it would be a bad objection; let me try again.
The problem is that in real life, most such cases (of buying the more expensive item) don't result in a pure savings, but rather, leave you better off in some ways and worse off in others. The cheaper shoes, IOW, will not actually be so bad that you have to replace them entirely, and you will in fact end up with with more liquid savings. The temporary discomfort and greater savings are much harder to compare to the alternative than the example suggests, so wealthier people do not always have some obvious choice that leaves them better off in every way.
So, on top of that, it's not an issue that is fixable simply by pointing this out to the poorer person and loaning them the money.
A classic one in the US would be the choice of visiting the doctors. The rich can afford to have regular checkups(or insurance) and get a sniffle checked out early. The poor can not afford to visit the doctor over minor ailments and because of this end up spending big in lost time at work and more expensive one off treatments for a serious illness they didn't nip in the bud.
But I'd have to concede that you'd be right to say it still doesn't fit the boots analogy with out some rather lax semantics around up front vs long term cost. You could also argue that any individual might get lucky/unlucky and so it's not clear cut there, but I think it would be fair to argue that in aggregate the outcome on cost is a reasonable example.
My most recent purchase is a 900$ Bosch dishwasher that is saving me so much time (and time is money) and saving money indirectly because I am cooking more often at home as I don't find washing dishes to be taxing any more. Home cooked, all natural food is healthy in the long run. The sink is empty and it makes me feel less cluttered and more efficient. So it is a chain reaction and the effects are compounded. One thing leads to another. There is a 10000$ difference between a 500$ dishwasher and a 900$ dishwasher.
I have seen plenty of cases that are really that clear cut, usually centered around item quality. For example, cheap tools vs. expensive ones. The "X Factor" that makes the more expensive item not strictly better is the question of use. I.E., I don't buy Snapon wrenches because I am not a professional mechanic, but neither do I buy cheapo pot-metal tools because I use them enough that the extra money spent on quality is well worth it.
Not really true. Buying in bulk is a minor savings that offsets the cost if a big car or big house or whatever. The core issue is that life has transaction costs on that the wealthier folks don't need to worry about, but a poor person faces catastrophic collapse by going over budget with no way to borrow against the future.
A simple example is the concept of living paycheck to paycheck... If you work on contract or hourly and payment is delayed (either because there weren't enough hours to work or your client is slow to pay), one of two things happens:
1) You are wealthy enough to have credit and perhaps a bit of cash savings, and you can pay your bills with that savings/credit card. When your paycheck comes, you pay down the short-term credit and you are as good as if it never happens.
2) You have no credit and no savings. You must directly choose between which bills you can and cannot pay. Some bills go into default or incur late fees. Other bills may cancel service because you cannot be relied upon to pay. In this scenario, when the paycheck comes, you pay your late bills, but you are left with the extra fees, lost services, and are at a net-loss going into the next period.
Compound scenario 2 for a few periods, and you start to incur heavily negative consequences that are very difficult to overcome.
- Repairing things that break (e.g. "My car needs $300 in maintenance" is a big deal when you were just barely going to break even on the month and have no savings)
- Random expenses for kids' school
None of these things are necessarily all that pricy, but when your minimal cost of living is equal to or only slightly less than you make, you have a problem. The worst part is that it accumulates. As these non-negotiable costs arise, you end up making compromises (e.g. taking out credit you're not sure you can repay soon), and those compromises make it harder to handle unexpected costs in the future (e.g. because you're still paying off interest on the last one).
The thing about being rich or poor isn't about how much money you have, per se. It's about how much money you have that you don't really need right now. Quality of life is pretty crap up to a certain point, then it rises quickly once you get past the point of treading water, then it tapers off somewhat later because at that point it's all basically "I do not have to worry about basic needs."
I watched a guy who had just gotten out of prison trying to make it back into society. A lot of things cost more for him. One example: Car insurance. He didn't have the money to pay 6 months of insurance in one chunk, so he had to buy it one month at a time. Well, the insurance companies charge extra for that.
He couldn't afford a decent car, so he got a car that was cheap, and which (no surprise) broke down a lot. When it broke down, he had to pay to have it fixed, plus to take the bus to get to work.
I agree that shopping can be a trap. If you don't have money to do a big, occasional shop for food/etc, you'll likely make a series of smaller trips to a supermarket, buying few things but still losing time, fuel and maintenance on each drive of your car, for example. Lose time and you're under more pressure elsewhere in life.
Strange that little correlation data is provided. Microdata is available from the BLS on what people spend time on, sliced by income and poverty.
Checking whether poverty or low income are correlated with having little time should be a fairly straightforward python/pandas job. It seems unlikely that the money-poor are also time-poor (given that the main cause of money-poverty is not working), but it's straightforward to check in any case.
> given that the main cause of money-poverty is not working
Is that really true? I'm not sure if my girlfriend's family qualifies as truly poor, but they certainly don't have much money. Her dad has two jobs--line cook and hotel janitor--and her mom is also a line cook. They frequently have to go to check cashing places, they have only one car so her mom relies on taking the bus to work (which takes over an hour each way, and also requires walking to the bus stop), and they rarely if ever do things like run the AC in their house. They do live in a house as opposed to an apartment, but that's a relatively new development. The house is also in a somewhat sketchy area--for example, her brother was robbed at gunpoint walking through an adjacent neighborhood at 10PM.
I wanted this to be an edit to the original post, but it looks like that post is locked into stone for now.
I wanted to expand on the robbery incident and illustrate how something like that is potentially even worse than you'd expect.
The reason he was walking through the neighborhood is because he doesn't have (and can't afford) a car, and he was walking back from work.
They made the "mistake" of calling 911 to report the incident. He was mildly beaten up, and they were worried about potential injuries, so they sent an ambulance. It turns out he was completely okay, and they put on a few bandages and that was it. Then he was hit with a $3k bill.
Her brother works part time at a minimum wage job while going to school. A random $3k bill out of the blue is really not affordable to him, so now he's on a payment plan paying off that debt.
This is on top of the items that were actually stolen from him, like his phone, which he had to replace, and the general trauma of having been robbed.
You could be right that transit takes up a lot of time, but why rely on anecdote? Stats are available. I linked to them. And if it wasn't 1:30AM (in India) when I posted that, I'd probably have munged them myself.
You're assuming that work is the primary consumer of time. Have you ever tried packing up a baby, a toddler, and a sullen/rebellious pre-teen and taken them on the bus for two hours each way to fill out paperwork that is so far beyond your comprehension level that it may as well be in a foreign language? That's a normal state of affairs for many of the non-working poor.
Lack of transportation, combined with living in "undesirable" neighborhoods far from the business centers, is an ugly combination. It makes even basic engagement like grocery shopping a very time-consuming experience.
You're one of the lucky retail employees that work a full 40 hour week. Your annual gross salary is somewhere in the 24-30k range.
That's not enough to support a 2br apartment and car, so you're relying on public transit. You work retail, so your hours suck and you're often stuck bumming rides or waiting for the bus, which only runs every half hour when the mall closes.
When I was in college, I worked in a mall restaurant. That was a pretty common scenario for waitresses, line cooks, retail assistant managers, and similar roles.
Not necessarily. Efficiency of delivery matters - the homeless are very time-poor because every basic necessity of life costs a huge amount of time to acquire, even if they are free monetarily.
Every meal involves a multi-hour line. Every shelter bed too. Every free clinic, etc etc, you get the point.
The net effect is, despite having well-funded charities providing for their basic needs, they have neither the time nor the bandwidth to make any substantial improvement in the long run.
Contrast this situation to transitional homes, where once admitted people are guaranteed shelter, clothing, and food for a period of time, where (basically) the same services are provided but without the daily time sink, and the success rates are much higher (this of course, should account for the fact that transitional homes mostly exclude those who still have major mental health or substance abuse problems).
Both institutions are a source of "free money", but one works a hell of a lot better, largely because it frees them up for higher-order goals.
One of the points of the article is that our welfare system is very expensive for the poor in terms of time, cognitive bandwidth, and opportunity cost.
It would be cheaper to just give everyone free money. In fact, that's the basis of the the various Guaranteed Minimum Income ideas that have been floating around for the past 45 years or so.
Not necessarily - one issue facing poor USA is the Financial Cliff of coming off of welfare. In some tax and unemployment environments, working that 2nd job actually nets less cash, because at a magic number ~27k, unemployment benefits kick out , and a little bit higher and income tax burdens raise ( there was one deduction in particular the last few years)
So, to make working a second job "worth the jump" it needed to bring in $5k+ more, which very few jobs do on the outset.
It's not only the cliff itself, but threat of the cliff and qualification hysteresis. For some benefits, if it's determined that your categorization changes, then getting accepted into the former level of benefit can take a long time. E.g. if you're told that more than X dollars in your checking account will result in a reduction of benefits, and getting your old status back might take a year, then it's logical to be risk averse and stay well clear of any jobs that could take you over the limit even for a day.
The actual numbers are far worse with children, between $20K and $60K there's a no (wo)mans land for single moms where they'll make more money off .gov at $20K than off .com at $60K. Its pretty sick.
Curious, but what by metric are you judging welfare to not work?
I'm pretty sure fewer people die of malnutrition and more people can eat better food as a result of welfare. I'm pretty sure more people have the ability to keep a roof over their heads because of welfare, too.
Given the current unemployment rates it also seems odd that we'd want to predicate the "success" of welfare on whether it is able to make even more people join the workforce.
There are, of course, many flaws with the system. But asserting that it doesn't work doesn't advance discourse in any meaningful way.
Now, what happens when those rare talents are born into the cycle of poverty? What lessons do they learn? Too often, their talents just get them into trouble. They find themselves caught up in crime, addiction, and the other short-term thinking failures of poverty, and thus unable to express their talent. Worse, society simply expects nothing of them. They have no role models, and they have no external motivations to be and do better.
Even those who can do better often simply escape, leaving the culture of their birth behind. Frankly, I did that. I was raised about one step above what southerners call "white trash". My father, a tremendously intelligent and charismatic man, was constantly lured by petty crime and get-rich-quick ideas, and wasted his life. His interactions with the wealthy men he worked for generated feelings not of admiration and example, but contempt. To this day, when I'm not sure what to do about a situation, I think of what he would have done, and do the opposite. And he took a big step up himself - I remember visiting my grandfather's farm in rural Kentucky as a child. I didn't notice the lack of electricity or running water at the time. I notice it now. My father escaped sharecropping, but he never escaped his own demons.
I see the effects of those escapes now in my sister's life. She loves living in the rural south, but is constantly brought down by the ignorance and awful habits of her neighbors. Everyone in her area (southern Virginia) who has any brains simply moves away. What's left are the addicts, the fools, and the spiteful. Sure, it's beautiful there, but I don't see how she can stand living around people with so little ambition. I do, however, see how she suffers in poverty and hopelessness.
Me, I got up and left. I made a good career for myself, living in a nice safe neighborhood in a beautiful city, making a good income in a safe field, raising my kids safe from the things that got me as a child. I can't imagine going back to that life.
But oh, so many lost souls. So much talent put to waste in jail or in the grave. This is what we allow poverty to do to our society.