12 ms·

Why Do Some Poor Kids Thrive?

137 points by pmcpinto 11y ago

kelukelugames 11y ago
dang, five dollar bet this gets to 100 points. :) This in response to an earlier exchange about how race and gender related posts get many votes in the beginning and are then flagged to death, but ones about class always make it to the top. Is there a way to see how many times an article has been flagged? I would like to gather data for my assertions.
- gyardley 11y ago
  I too would enjoy seeing this. I submitted an race-and-gender-related article around a month ago that fell off the front page quickly enough to make me cock an eyebrow and wonder if the flagging system isn't giving a small percentage of users an inappropriate veto over certain topics of discussion. I know I've seen a tool out there that tracks the ranking of HN articles over time. Perhaps the slope of the descent would serve as a good proxy for flagging.
  - wallflower 11y ago
    Quickly looking at the article you submitted, it was the 'Not a Black Chair' that floated into the stream about a month ago. I did not flag it, and I think others may have flagged it. The comment to point ratio also contributes to front-page decay to avoid flamewars. This isn't the target audience for comfortable or uncomfortable discussions about race/gender/privilege. In my opinion, the author of that article exhibited behavior that, if you take away race and gender from the equation, would be questionable, at best, if you were an individual working at a company (the relationship with a coworker and others). Those facts clouded what the author was saying about race and gender. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11287491 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11287491
- ap22213 11y ago
  While I can relate to you in regard to the decreasing number of tech relevant articles (I wish there were more of them), I actually enjoy reading articles about class and the comments that follow.
  - kelukelugames 11y ago
    I post some of the class articles. They are much more acceptable than gender and race for discussion by a primarily white and male crowd.
coldtea 11y ago
Statistics and chances. Some poor kids are bound to thrive eventually -- and chances make sure those kids have some things that other poor kids don't (a mentor in their life, a parent who isn't working 2 jobs or drinking but can spend some time with them, live in a good school district, their curiousness wasn't beaten out of them by bad early experiences, looks enabling them to be taken for better than other poor kids are, a chance higher IQ, etc.). The same way millions can finish a game in Easy mode, but there are still some people that can finish it in Hard and Ultra Hard mode. http://thewireless.co.nz/articles/the-pencilsword-on-a-plate http://thewireless.co.nz/articles/the-pencilsword-on-a-plate
- ap22213 11y ago
  Yep, luck. I'm the child of a single mom of 4 who made $7000 / year, and I'm the first of my extended family to graduate college and the first millionaire (my younger brother got to middle class). Luck is the way that I succeeded. 1st, being born with a high IQ helped. But, that clearly wasn't enough since I had the lowest IQ of my family. And, 40% of my gifted class didn't even graduate high school. 2nd, being born with a personable and friendly demeanor helped a lot, probably more than my intelligence. However, by having intelligence, I was better able to make good choices of friends. 3rd, being born with height potential was huge. It's been clear to me that people in powerful positions are much taller than average. 4th, being born with symmetric features and attractiveness was important. Again, this attribute helps in making and keeping relationships. And, when people think of someone, they often think of me first. 5th, being cautious and risk adverse was hugely important. I was involved with the gangs and criminal activity like many of my peers, but I was extremely careful about what things that I would do. Also, many of my peers ended up having kids in their teens, which was very devastating. Many became addicted to drugs and died. Many died of accidents and suicide. Of my friends, over 15 died before I was 25 (I lost count). 6th, having a mentor was good for me in making good life choices. A retired, highly educated engineer took me under her wing and mentored me in my late teens. Before I met her, I had not even considered going to college. I looked forward to being a manager at a retail store. Even though I was in the honors and gifted program and ranked #11 out of my class, I never once received any college guidance from my school. So, her help was amazingly helpful. 7th, (sorry, this is getting long), living at a time when college was affordable and accessible was critical. I went to college in the 90s when tuition was under $2500 a semester, and I was accepted with many marks on my academic record. Even though I wasted time in college, I was able to graduate with only $40k in debt. 8th, picking the right major was extremely important. I floundered around for a couple years at college and almost dropped out. Then, I had a roommate who turned me on to computers (I never had one, since they were very expensive). I took a couple programming classes and found it to be a creative outlet. And, at the time, graduates were making $30-45k, which seemed great to me. But, looking back on it all, it was mostly luck. I wish I could say that I had some part in it, but really, I didn't. The only very important (maybe most important) decisions that I made didn't happen until I was over 30. I moved to a wealthy area and I married up. Without doing those things, it would have been much much harder to gain access to connections and capital.
venomsnake 11y ago
In short - being passionate for something is helping forward. Having no safety net meants you have only one shot. If all the stars allign correctly. That is not surprising at all. People are their best when they are engaded in something bigger than themselves.
rdtsc 11y ago
I grew up poor. Not Africa poor, but ex Soviet Union falling apart poor. One thing that made a huge difference was parents who sacrificed their career to make sure they were home with me after school. They encouraged education. Mom never finished more than 7 grades of school, but she saved money for and for the 8th of March, equivalent to mothers day (oh the irony) got me cheapest ZX Spectrum clone we could find. It was history after that, but it was just an example of what I think made a huge difference for me.
- archildress 11y ago
  Beautiful story. Thanks for sharing.
- galfarragem 11y ago
  To raise kids, money beyond a low threshold is not relevant, providing a good education is. Money, or better, social capital gets importance when these kids become young adults and have chosen career paths with less demand.
  - mc32 11y ago
    Maybe to some degree these kids are the same kids who when society was agricultural were the ones who ran away from home despite the taboo against leaving the family went to the city and tried striking it out their own way. It's not the dame as the George Foremans or the Merle Haggards of the world who while making good had fortunate accidents help them along the way. Or maybe it is exactly the same, just expressed differently.
  - superuser2 11y ago
    >money beyond a low threshold is not relevant, providing a good education is. Except that a good education is usually gated behind 1) high property values and property taxes in a suburban neighborhood, 2) high tuition, or 3) extremely competitive tests/lotteries to get into the small handful of good schools in failing urban districts. Not everyone has a parent who can afford to be away from work long enough to be an effective substitute for a good school district.
archildress 11y ago
One of my favorite podcasts, Hidden Brain, had a great episode this week about "Grit", which one of the researchers defined as "passion and perseverance for long-terms goals." "The thing that was revelatory to me was not that effort matters—everybody knows that effort matters," Angela told Shankar. "What was revelatory to me was how much it matters." I still think there's this question of "why do some kids have more grit than others?" to be answered, but perhaps this is a start? Worth a listen: http://www.npr.org/2016/04/04/472162167/the-power-and-problem-of-grit http://www.npr.org/2016/04/04/472162167/the-power-and-proble...
- savvas_tj 11y ago
  The "why do some kids have more grit than others?" questions could just come down to mix of inheriting that trait and/or living in an environment that fosters the development and growth that trait. There is an interesting book called "The Sports Gene" that has a section that talks about how someone bred sled dogs based on their "grit" characteristic and was able to be a successful dog sledder because of it. Also that book is also a great read about how inherited traits and environment interact with each other. And thanks for the podcast suggestion.
pg_is_a_butt 11y ago
why do some headline authors not respect journalism? why doesn't everyone fail?
askyourmother 11y ago
Some of the most famous self-made wealthy individuals in the UK were from poor backgrounds of varying degree. I remember more than one stating that they felt if they wanted to escape that world, they had to make their own luck, grab every opportunity, be ready to change direction if fortuitous winds prevail, and essentially be there in body and mind to really give it a go. In some cases they literally start with nothing - failed school exams, work to acquire a very small amount of capital, see their first opportunity and go for it. Which can be seen as a series of well executed gambles.
- TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
  There's an insane amount of survivor bias in those stories. How many people put made equivalent effort but were broken by some random circumstance, or saved by outright luck or family connections? It happens in technology too. I'm not sure how many people remember Dragon Dictate, but they were well ahead of the game in voice recognition in the 90s and 00s. Then they made a bad mistake and got into a marketing partnership with individuals they would have been better off avoiding. This not only killed their business, it also meant they no longer own their own IP, which is currently wasting away in business limbo. That's the point of the OP. Grit will only get you so far. It's not about individual hero stories, it's about the probability of success for equivalent effort for entire populations, and how vulnerable they are to the effects of a single bad mistake. That's where you can see the negative effects of some backgrounds, and the positive effects of others, most clearly.
- neffy 11y ago
  Yes, it's something of a selection problem. The assumption behind this belief set is that they were the select few who could do this. There is an alternative hypothesis that out of the large number of people with poor background who did this, they were the few somewhat randomly selected to succeed. Certainly if you look at their biographies there seems to be a consistent element of right person in right place at right time - which suggests that there might be a lot more 'right people' than get lucky.
  - WalterBright 11y ago
empath75 11y ago
There are a whole lot of tech jobs where learning on the job without a degree is completely viable. Seems like grabbing these kids out of high school is a business opportunity. I'm pretty sure that any random kid that's into anime and collecting cards can learn to do tech support.
- spo81rty 11y ago
  Myself and the other 3 main programmers in my last company all lacked a college degree. I think a degree is pretty useless for software development.
  - djKianoosh 11y ago
    I appreciate the fact that yall made it without a degree. But I wouldnt say "useless". More like "not necessary". A software engineering or CS degree can be useful, but not necessary to have an excellent career.
    - eropple 11y ago
      Agreed. I was a pretty good programmer before I got a CS degree. But I can say, honestly, that my degree program (not even a particularly good one) made me a much better one. I've consistently ended up in roles where other people in those roles were five to ten years older than me, not because I'm a supergenius (jesus, I'm not) but because I was able to derive some real synergy from the academic fit-and-finish applied by college to my existing skill set, and the lessons I learned in school to the skills I've learned since. And when I say "my courses", I don't just mean CS. I have a B.A., not a B.S., because I wanted more breadth than being a mushroom sweating it out in the computer science lab. I did pick up a lot of actually useful, practicable knowledge around algorithmic analysis (turns out that intuitively understanding Big-Oh is really useful if you don't want to be a bottom-level code grinder), distributed systems (there's a reason I'm still the guy who acquaintances go to when they need to build such a thing), and low-level computer architecture (which still has to matter to somebody even when you're using very high level languages), but the humanities were fantastically important, too. Political science and economics courses have been invaluable; poli-sci for having something of a mental map of groups and organizations and an idea of the way that they change and flow in a larger community, and economics from the perspective of microeconomics, specifically the study of elastic goods and demand curves in general. I might have stumbled on what I learned in college, especially around "how to learn", without going to college, but I think it's more likely that I wouldn't, or that I would have dismissed it as unimportant, because one of the greatest benefits of college was twisting my arm to do things I didn't want want to do (and those were among them. I also graduated with under $30K of debt--state schools aren't that expensive and I'd been working summers--after four years, and paid it off by age 27, while working at companies that definitely would never have looked at me twice if I didn't have a degree and making a lot more money for it.
AmitShipEasy 11y ago
No distractions.
- IkmoIkmo 11y ago
  > No distractions. Nothing like your parents asking you to borrow some money from your side job so they can pay the bills, as a 14 year old, to start your distraction free day. /s There's a million examples like this. Sure, rich kids have busy lives and can be stressed out by all kinds of high standards, don't get me wrong. But being poor means you have to think about every single little thing that you do, or that happens to you. A flat tire, or worse, having your bike stolen, is a disaster, it can mean weeks of disposable income lost. As a kid I was constantly stressed out and hopeless about the most insignificant things because they can hit like a brick. I remember I talked to a kid once who asked me whether we'd be using graphing calculators in a particular class. He was wondering whether he should drop the final years of hs maths where we'd be doing calculus for an easier hs math curriculum, because paying $150 for a graphing calculator was not an option for him. Distractions like that happen left and right, things 'normal' kids wouldn't even consider thinking about. There's a Christmas dinner coming up in 3 months and kids are supposed to wear something nice and formal? You're already stressing because you'll be the only kid with a bunch of 2nd hand regular clothing. In fact quite a few studies have shown that poor people have less mental bandwidth to deal with their every day lives, because they're bogged down (distracted) by all of the issues that come with a life of poverty, and that this lower bandwidth is a big hurdle in achieving the same level of performance as a normal person.
okyup 11y ago
Because they suffer more. Suffering is good. Without it, we tend to fall apart. With it, we tend to get better.
spo81rty 11y ago
I was born in a trailer park in Oklahoma. Lived in a 1 bedroom shack, and then lived with my grandparents until high school after my parents got divorced. I grew up very poor. But I loved computers, thanks to my dad having a Commodore 64. I excelled at math, loved computers, and went to DeVry to do computer programming. I was the first in my family to go to college. Started my first tech company at 22. With a lot of hard work, I believe anyone can break out of poverty.
- eropple 11y ago
  While it's cool that you've managed to do that, at the same time I think "with a lot of hard work" trivializes the amount of insanely hard work that large portions of the working class does do, with almost nothing to show for it. Poverty traps are real and they are very, very difficult to escape from, and in many ways it's destiny-by-dart-board.
  - wallflower 11y ago
    I recall an anecdote about a college professor who had students pull cards out of a bucket. What card you pulled out of a bucket determined your fate as a person born during the Middle Ages. Most of the cards were peasant or died at age n (where n < 25). I used to joke with some of my fellow geeks (ok, I still do) that if we were born two or three hundred years earlier, we would have had a horrible life in the fields, farming. Going back to why I replied, the sad fact about an information age economy is that working with information or your community (e.g. coding or using that information to trade) is leveraged and worth more than pure manual labor. At the highest level, you have CEOs with insane networks of personal relationships (I knew a family friend once who, with one phone call, got the best eye surgeon in the state to do an emergency operation on one of his friend's friends) and surgeons who can save lives. At the medium level, you have coders. From a rational economics standpoint, everyone is expendable. But the replacement costs are quite high for those higher up the power-law curve of the information economy.
    - hackuser 11y ago
      > I used to joke with some of my fellow geeks (ok, I still do) that if we were born two or three hundred years earlier, we would have had a horrible life in the fields, farming. And some people with the talent to code don't have the physiology to last long doing manual labor.
intrasight 11y ago
Why do some rich kids fail?
- josh_carterPDX 11y ago
  In my opinion, I think it has to do with their up bringing. If they were raised to have everything handed to them it's easy for them to give up when faced with adversity. I wasn't raised in a home of wealth, but I certainly saw kids growing up who did and could see their attitude towards things were certainly different than my own. If you've never had to struggle, how do you know how to handle it when you are struggling?
  - hackuser 11y ago
    It's interesting that people are careful with stereotypes and analysis of poor kids, but have no problem using them for wealthy kids. Kids born into wealth, at least moderate wealth, are much more likely to be successful than kids born into poverty, so it seems they figure out that struggle thing eventually.
    - josh_carterPDX 11y ago
      I don't disagree with that, nor was it my point. I just think that people that know what struggle looks like are more inclined to know how to handle it when it occurs.
- hackuser 11y ago
  Financial resources are necessary but not at all sufficient to success. Money does not replace parenting, which I think is probably most important. Also, money doesn't change people's natural talents, problems, personalities, etc. We're talking about human beings. Wealth can help compensate: Maybe if you lack a lot of talent you can still get through college, and that will keep out of minimum wage jobs over the long term.
tdaltonc 11y ago
The answer from the article: "... kids who found what researchers call an “identity project,” essentially a passion or hobby that helped motivate them, ... onto college or decent jobs. ... [however] Many of the kids who [had passion projects, still] veered off track. [They] wanted to get out of their parents’ house so badly that they took whatever job they could, before they had the chance to get the education or training to excel further." So the policy implications seem clear. Enable more poor kids to find passion projects. Once they have one, get them in to a living situation that, though meager, gives them the space to pursue their passion. Honestly, sounds like an apprenticeship or graduate school model, but for much younger people.
init 11y ago
I'm one of those poor kids who got out. My identity project was programming. An friend gave me a an old noisy Pentium II that became my best friend. I spent countless hours, day and night, learning to program. Skipped prom to program, dodged sports in high school, never attended parties. Programming was my identity. I started working before starting college. The prohibitive cost of college made me drop out to focus on my career on the first opportunity I had. My current job as a software engineer pays well. I live a comfortable life and can afford things I never had but my lack of college degree also causes me to have a very bad impostor syndrome. Maybe I should save up enough to go back to college and graduate.
- unclebucknasty 11y ago
  College doesn't "cure" imposter syndrome. I'm not sure what does.
  - JBReefer 11y ago
    Only time, I'd say. My best educated friends have Imposter syndrome the worst.
    - unclebucknasty 11y ago
      I think there's something to that. The more you learn, the more you realize you don't know. You also tend to be exposed to other well-educated people who are specialized in areas you are not.
  - eropple 11y ago
    For me, success. I started being much more willing to believe the projection of confidence that I had learned to do in order to sell myself as capable and competent once I realized that I was coming in above the level promised by that projection in the first place. It really is "fake it 'til you make it." But in my experience that does go away, a lot, once you can really say to yourself that you've made it (even just a little).
    - 11y ago
cheez 11y ago
Reading this article is like reading my life story. Get them out of their environment, let them be free, forgive them for messing up, and they will thrive.
Spooky23 11y ago
Good, attentive parents.
MrFoof 11y ago
I grew up poor. Literally across the street from the projects, which we absolutely qualified for, but didn't because my parents refused to for a myriad of reasons (mostly to avoid shame). We were Section 8 for the first 15 years of my life. My parents valued education in theory, but not as much in practice. My father learned the hard way and redeemed himself in his 20s -- managing to get into the Army Corp of Engineers after initially dropping out of high school. They pounded the importance of education into my sister and I when I was very young, but that seemed to taper off when I was about 9 or 10, when we were left to our own devices. How did I thrive? Simple. At around the age of 12 I realized that they were mostly idiots. They made terrible financial decisions (which they're paying for now, as they have no retirement savings), my father -- mostly working in factories/landfills -- made no career moves (on account of my mother discouraging him at every opportunity), and my mother simply parroted the advice spewed by the TV, but did the exact opposite. My goal was to avoid ending up like them at all costs -- ending up in a crappy part of a city 50 years in decline with "a good job" being something like working in a furniture store, and being complacent with it. I was fortunate in my early 20s (after I dropped out of a state college in which I felt I was getting a bad deal for my $) to work with an older QA engineer who took a similar path. He had it much worse than I when he grew up, but he could empathize with my upbringing, as it felt all too familiar to him. At the time he felt I was getting a raw deal from my employer, so he would invite me over on the weekends to have lunch with him and his wife (and his daughters, who were my age) to drive into all our heads on how to better make informed decisions about our current state at a given moment. Solid, extremely pragmatic advice from the two of them. As well as painful examples of mistakes both of them made along the way, to show they were far from perfect themselves. Much of it focusing on the long term even if it involves temporarily stunting yourself in the short term, or cutting ties with people you may have had relationships with but were ultimately toxic. Some of the advice was certainly hard to follow in practice, but I'm still to find a case where it wasn't the best move I could've made, and regretted not following some of it earlier.
samstave 11y ago
Intelligence?
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
josh_carterPDX 11y ago
This makes so much sense to me. I came from a single parent home and watched my Mom work two jobs just to ensure my Brother and I didn't feel like we were poor, but we both knew we didn't have money. When I graduated high school I joined the Navy to get college money. I believe that through the journey of going through adversity, it has taught me to appreciate everything I've worked for. It also drives and motivates me to build a foundation for my kids so they can have a childhood they look back on fondly. We're all products of our environment. Whether it's rising above it to be better or working to build a lasting legacy, we all want to look back in 40 years and appreciate the things we've accomplished in our lives. Sorry if that got all soapbox-y, but this is a huge thing for me. I wasn't born into money and never had a network of rich friends. And that's ok with me. Because looking back in my nearly 40 years I don't regret any of it. It's led me to what I'm doing today and I take nothing for granted.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
HN123467 11y ago
Throwaway account, fyi. I grew up in my folk's shop. Not really all that poor, I guess, in comparison to some of our customers. I mean, all 6 of my family at least had a toilet and a TV. All us kids still feel that good eating is Chef Boyardee and Twinkies (really). To this day, my brothers take all the bell pepper bits out of their Denver omelets at IHOP, one by one. Just can't stand the taste of fresh veggies. Power went out from time to time, but we did have it. We all did sports year round, mostly because it was a valid excuse to not work at the shop for my folks, that was nice I guess and means we weren't all that bad off. That shop was not fun either. It was an autoshop, so grease and asshole customers was life. My pants literally stood up on their own after work in the summers, there was that much grime in the fibers. The shop was a tin shack, so the winters were frozen and the summers were 120+ everyday by 11am. Still meant you had to fix the transmissions though. We all knew lathes and welders by 10 years old. Firefighting and carpentry became routine as us children were put to work. Don't misunderstand, I love my folks and I loved my life, but that child labor was not safe, though we all didn't know it at the time. Dad never had algebra, mom got to geometry, but that's it. The pastors would not shake Dad's hand as the grease that bakes into your fingernails makes you 'dirty' in their eyes. I love Jesus with all my heart and am a Christian, but the church can go fuck itself long and hard with the wrong end of a steel rake. Ok, have I proved my 'poor' cred then? Yeah, it wasn't as bad as other commenters here, but still, I know man's lot is labor. And I think that's what pulled all us kids out of it. Grit and a stiff upper lip. We all had our bones scarred by that life of labor. So, when it came to school and all this BS 'achievement metrics' that the colleges use to let you in, it was comparatively easy for us to accomplish. As such, when folk complained in college that algebra was too tough, we all found that bewildering. I went to a UC with my brothers and my sister went to a CSU and we all did Physics or Chemistry as they were the hardest majors. Nothing else really felt right as a use of all that money my folks saved up for us. Labor was our lot, as was Adam's, and we felt that was the only way. Now we all have good jobs or are in pretty good grad schools. And yes, I recognize that we had bootstraps to pull ourselves up with, and others do not, so my own family 'tithes' 10% to some charities we believe in. All us kids do something similar. Grit is the only thing that will pull you out. Hard work and Jesus' grace. Luck is also big, I guess, but you have to make your own luck.
rsmsky1 11y ago
I think it would be good to encourage passion projects and also encourage them to look at the long term and stay in school although finding a full time job could provide immediate money.
whiddershins 11y ago
Hidden in this article is the assumption that the 25 year old working at chick-fil-a is beyond saving, so we must try to do better with future generations. That's really sad for me. That guy is still a kid, from where I sit. And he will likely be doing work that bores him to tears for the next 50 years. We should be talking about fixing that. Figuring out a way to send some smart, creative, in poverty, 30 year olds to four year college for free.
- wavefunction 11y ago
  "Beyond saving"? What if he is doing a good job of providing for his family or he's a musician on the side or he just likes doing what he is doing? I think the first step down the road you describe in your last sentence would be that we (as individuals) shouldn't assess our personal goals and assume they are universal or shared with other individuals. This was a tough lesson for me to learn when I was younger, that imperfect systems are sometimes more acceptable or most appropriate when compared to some sort of perfected ideal.
- corysama 11y ago
  IMHO, that's a very negative extrapolation from the article content. We absolutely should be talking about fixing that --just not necessarily in this particular article.
- billmalarky 11y ago
  Probably a broken record statement, but what about basic income?
pjmorris 11y ago
Programming was my identity project. I suppose it still is. I grew up US rural South poor. My childhood started well, but went down hill to the point that, by high school, my single mom was raising three kids in a 2 bedroom single-wide trailer. I aced standardized tests, but my initial idea of what to do after high school was to keep my dishwasher job. Mom, the guidance counselors and our support system weren't of much help. Luckily, mom taught us about reading and libraries, and, luckily, the local community college offered scholarships to the top 10% of local high school students if they stuck around. CC was a nice change of pace from doing dishes, and connected me to programming, which led to a state school, a BSCS, a career, an MSCS, and, shortly, a PhD. My main excuse for the PhD is to be able to give back as I've been given to. The identity project was important, and not something I'd have been able to afford without help from society. I think I've paid much more in taxes as a developer than I'd have as a dishwasher/cook, so society's 'hand up' wasn't just a 'hand out'. I'm sure not everyone can follow the same path, but I'm sure glad the path was there, and I'm hopeful we'll see fit to leave paths like it out there.
- josh_carterPDX 11y ago
  Thank you for sharing this.
- ruairidhwm 11y ago
  Very impressive, I hope things are working out for you :)
  - pjmorris 11y ago
    Thanks. Some days better, some days worse, the end of the story has yet to be written.
ben_jones 11y ago
I feel like you could almost as easily say "Why do some people thrive?"
computerjunkie 11y ago
Story time. I grew up in a African nation were political instability, corruption and a poor economy for a country is not surprising. My family was doing fine, not great, but my parents valued education, kindness and respect above anything else. They did everything they could to ensure that we got the best education. It was until when my father fell ill and passed away when I was 10, thats when things started to go downhill. My mother had to provide for a family on her own. Most of the relatives from my father's side didn't bother to help, they had their own problems to deal with, add all of this on top of a economy which was non-existent in 2008. We had no place to stay for 4 months because we couldn't afford rent. I couldn't watch shows my peers watched because we couldn't afford cable/satellite TV, let alone a place to stay. There was food, electricity and water shortage for years(still is). Inflation was so high the government had to discontinue the currency. Teachers in my public school began to flee to other countries so that they could still provide for their family.I had to teach myself Physics, Biology, Chemistry and Mathematics.I took up subjects I was never assigned to do in order to get decent grades so that I could go to college. I had to do two A levels, instead of three because teachers thought my grades weren't good enough, other students made fun of me because of this.The environment I was in was a perfect recipe for disaster, for a young mind. But here I am, with a degree in Computer Science and working for a software company with like minded people because my father bought and introduced to me a cream rectangular box, big monochrome monitor and taught me how to type with a keyboard at the age of 5. This machine would become my identity project. Computers have been my survival tool, my passion, even when my peers thought I was delusional for pursing a career in Technology(they even made fun of me for thinking I had a chance). Environment plays a big part in your life but you have the choice to let it dictate your life or you take the wheel and determine your future. I could have given up but I chose not to, even though everything around me constantly said I should. I'm not in a place where I can say I made it but, but its sure as hell better than what I have experienced in my late childhood and adolescent years. For those young folks that are reading this and are in somewhat a disadvantaged situation, stay positive,stick to your identity project and never give up!
bane 11y ago
This really resonates with me. My family was initially very low-middle income, and some poor business and personal decisions caused us to fall, for a time, into poverty -- even spending several months homeless and living out of a motel. The area we eventually ended up in was very rural, fairly poor with quite a bit of rural poverty around -- my immediate neighbors didn't even have running water or an indoor bathroom. Having spent my earlier years in a more urban environment, I found the local children hard to relate to, and the distances between me and kids I got along with well enough were vast enough that they may as well have not existed. My parents worked very long hours and as a result I spent huge amounts of time virtually alone. Somewhere along the way I got into BBSs and the world opened up to me. My "life-raft" was a happenstance introduction to the demoscene and the discovery of other kids in my metro area who were interested in technology, art and global perspectives. It also happened to dovetail pretty nicely with my other school interests (music and art). I saved money to buy my first soundcard and learned how to upgrade computers. The desire to be part of the demoscene caused me to dive deeply into keeping up-to-date computers in my house and I learned to cobble together pretty decent ones for the time with very little money. This kind of intense hardware/software experience got me my first job and an entry into the IT world where I grew in skills and ideas, and eventually put myself through university up to an M.S. (the first in my family) with the help of some grants. Because of those connections I met my wife and have held great and wonderful jobs since then and have had a chance to travel the world and see things 10 year old me, sitting at the desk looking at pictures in history textbooks in the rented motel room my family lived in, would have never imagined I'd ever see in my life. It wasn't all smooth running, there were many struggles and many times I almost never made it. But one helpful hand, or a caring boss or teacher, helped me get through it. I never took the SATs for example, barely graduated high-school, was nearly bankrupt in the middle of college due to a medical emergency. I never want to repeat the stress and anger of that time again, but I know it wasn't all just me, I had plenty of help and that, combined with desire from my life-raft seemed to be what did it.
stretchwithme 11y ago
My identity project was not being poor. So I was a cashier and a filed bank teller. I delivered newspapers. I washed cars and delivered tires and packages. I washed windows and cleaned doctors offices. Then eventually went to college and got into software development. It baffles me when some people are surprised that its possible to work your way out of poverty. That's what most sane people do when they have the opportunity to do so. Of course, if you have a culture that deters hard work and self development, that makes it a lot hard. Its also harder when people say that environment determines the outcome instead of individual determination. The truth is its both, but telling people their effort is not what makes the difference is creating a environment that does not encourage the effort required to succeed. The idea that environment is everything can help ensure a bad environment prevents you from succeeding. And even the environment cannot be changed without individual effort.
- hackuser 11y ago
  It's an interesting and often-repeated theory, but the data is overwhelming: People born in poor environments do much worse than those born in wealthier environments. The massive difference in resources seems like a place to start. Compare the percentage of kids who get into college from poor urban public schools, where many kids aren't even functionally literate and classes lack books, and wealthy suburban public schools. But whatever the cause, the bar is far too high in poor neighborhoods for most people to get over.
  - stretchwithme 11y ago
    I would say that those born into poor cultures do poorly. Those cultures that are no longer poor were more conducive to escaping poverty. The evidence is compelling in places that dropped government control of everything and millions of people have moved out of poverty in just a generation or two. China is a good example. Everybody started out poor but they still had an ethic or working hard, saving for the future and education. Other people are born with the same opportunities but not the same values and don't take advantage of those opportunities. Its not the poor neighborhood. Its the poor ideas in people's heads. Change that and the neighborhood changes too.
paulpauper 11y ago
High IQ, probably.

137 points by pmcpinto 11y ago

dang, five dollar bet this gets to 100 points. :) This in response to an earlier exchange about how race and gender related posts get many votes in the beginning and are then flagged to death, but ones about class always make it to the top. Is there a way to see how many times an article has been flagged? I would like to gather data for my assertions.

gyardley 11y ago
I too would enjoy seeing this. I submitted an race-and-gender-related article around a month ago that fell off the front page quickly enough to make me cock an eyebrow and wonder if the flagging system isn't giving a small percentage of users an inappropriate veto over certain topics of discussion. I know I've seen a tool out there that tracks the ranking of HN articles over time. Perhaps the slope of the descent would serve as a good proxy for flagging.
- wallflower 11y ago
  Quickly looking at the article you submitted, it was the 'Not a Black Chair' that floated into the stream about a month ago. I did not flag it, and I think others may have flagged it. The comment to point ratio also contributes to front-page decay to avoid flamewars. This isn't the target audience for comfortable or uncomfortable discussions about race/gender/privilege. In my opinion, the author of that article exhibited behavior that, if you take away race and gender from the equation, would be questionable, at best, if you were an individual working at a company (the relationship with a coworker and others). Those facts clouded what the author was saying about race and gender. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11287491 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11287491
ap22213 11y ago
While I can relate to you in regard to the decreasing number of tech relevant articles (I wish there were more of them), I actually enjoy reading articles about class and the comments that follow.
- kelukelugames 11y ago
  I post some of the class articles. They are much more acceptable than gender and race for discussion by a primarily white and male crowd.

coldtea 11y ago

Statistics and chances. Some poor kids are bound to thrive eventually -- and chances make sure those kids have some things that other poor kids don't (a mentor in their life, a parent who isn't working 2 jobs or drinking but can spend some time with them, live in a good school district, their curiousness wasn't beaten out of them by bad early experiences, looks enabling them to be taken for better than other poor kids are, a chance higher IQ, etc.). The same way millions can finish a game in Easy mode, but there are still some people that can finish it in Hard and Ultra Hard mode. http://thewireless.co.nz/articles/the-pencilsword-on-a-plate http://thewireless.co.nz/articles/the-pencilsword-on-a-plate

ap22213 11y ago
Yep, luck. I'm the child of a single mom of 4 who made $7000 / year, and I'm the first of my extended family to graduate college and the first millionaire (my younger brother got to middle class). Luck is the way that I succeeded. 1st, being born with a high IQ helped. But, that clearly wasn't enough since I had the lowest IQ of my family. And, 40% of my gifted class didn't even graduate high school. 2nd, being born with a personable and friendly demeanor helped a lot, probably more than my intelligence. However, by having intelligence, I was better able to make good choices of friends. 3rd, being born with height potential was huge. It's been clear to me that people in powerful positions are much taller than average. 4th, being born with symmetric features and attractiveness was important. Again, this attribute helps in making and keeping relationships. And, when people think of someone, they often think of me first. 5th, being cautious and risk adverse was hugely important. I was involved with the gangs and criminal activity like many of my peers, but I was extremely careful about what things that I would do. Also, many of my peers ended up having kids in their teens, which was very devastating. Many became addicted to drugs and died. Many died of accidents and suicide. Of my friends, over 15 died before I was 25 (I lost count). 6th, having a mentor was good for me in making good life choices. A retired, highly educated engineer took me under her wing and mentored me in my late teens. Before I met her, I had not even considered going to college. I looked forward to being a manager at a retail store. Even though I was in the honors and gifted program and ranked #11 out of my class, I never once received any college guidance from my school. So, her help was amazingly helpful. 7th, (sorry, this is getting long), living at a time when college was affordable and accessible was critical. I went to college in the 90s when tuition was under $2500 a semester, and I was accepted with many marks on my academic record. Even though I wasted time in college, I was able to graduate with only $40k in debt. 8th, picking the right major was extremely important. I floundered around for a couple years at college and almost dropped out. Then, I had a roommate who turned me on to computers (I never had one, since they were very expensive). I took a couple programming classes and found it to be a creative outlet. And, at the time, graduates were making $30-45k, which seemed great to me. But, looking back on it all, it was mostly luck. I wish I could say that I had some part in it, but really, I didn't. The only very important (maybe most important) decisions that I made didn't happen until I was over 30. I moved to a wealthy area and I married up. Without doing those things, it would have been much much harder to gain access to connections and capital.

venomsnake 11y ago

In short - being passionate for something is helping forward. Having no safety net meants you have only one shot. If all the stars allign correctly. That is not surprising at all. People are their best when they are engaded in something bigger than themselves.

rdtsc 11y ago

I grew up poor. Not Africa poor, but ex Soviet Union falling apart poor. One thing that made a huge difference was parents who sacrificed their career to make sure they were home with me after school. They encouraged education. Mom never finished more than 7 grades of school, but she saved money for and for the 8th of March, equivalent to mothers day (oh the irony) got me cheapest ZX Spectrum clone we could find. It was history after that, but it was just an example of what I think made a huge difference for me.

archildress 11y ago
Beautiful story. Thanks for sharing.
galfarragem 11y ago
To raise kids, money beyond a low threshold is not relevant, providing a good education is. Money, or better, social capital gets importance when these kids become young adults and have chosen career paths with less demand.
- mc32 11y ago
  Maybe to some degree these kids are the same kids who when society was agricultural were the ones who ran away from home despite the taboo against leaving the family went to the city and tried striking it out their own way. It's not the dame as the George Foremans or the Merle Haggards of the world who while making good had fortunate accidents help them along the way. Or maybe it is exactly the same, just expressed differently.
- superuser2 11y ago
  >money beyond a low threshold is not relevant, providing a good education is. Except that a good education is usually gated behind 1) high property values and property taxes in a suburban neighborhood, 2) high tuition, or 3) extremely competitive tests/lotteries to get into the small handful of good schools in failing urban districts. Not everyone has a parent who can afford to be away from work long enough to be an effective substitute for a good school district.

archildress 11y ago

One of my favorite podcasts, Hidden Brain, had a great episode this week about "Grit", which one of the researchers defined as "passion and perseverance for long-terms goals." "The thing that was revelatory to me was not that effort matters—everybody knows that effort matters," Angela told Shankar. "What was revelatory to me was how much it matters." I still think there's this question of "why do some kids have more grit than others?" to be answered, but perhaps this is a start? Worth a listen: http://www.npr.org/2016/04/04/472162167/the-power-and-problem-of-grit http://www.npr.org/2016/04/04/472162167/the-power-and-proble...

savvas_tj 11y ago
The "why do some kids have more grit than others?" questions could just come down to mix of inheriting that trait and/or living in an environment that fosters the development and growth that trait. There is an interesting book called "The Sports Gene" that has a section that talks about how someone bred sled dogs based on their "grit" characteristic and was able to be a successful dog sledder because of it. Also that book is also a great read about how inherited traits and environment interact with each other. And thanks for the podcast suggestion.

pg_is_a_butt 11y ago

why do some headline authors not respect journalism? why doesn't everyone fail?

askyourmother 11y ago

Some of the most famous self-made wealthy individuals in the UK were from poor backgrounds of varying degree. I remember more than one stating that they felt if they wanted to escape that world, they had to make their own luck, grab every opportunity, be ready to change direction if fortuitous winds prevail, and essentially be there in body and mind to really give it a go. In some cases they literally start with nothing - failed school exams, work to acquire a very small amount of capital, see their first opportunity and go for it. Which can be seen as a series of well executed gambles.

TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
There's an insane amount of survivor bias in those stories. How many people put made equivalent effort but were broken by some random circumstance, or saved by outright luck or family connections? It happens in technology too. I'm not sure how many people remember Dragon Dictate, but they were well ahead of the game in voice recognition in the 90s and 00s. Then they made a bad mistake and got into a marketing partnership with individuals they would have been better off avoiding. This not only killed their business, it also meant they no longer own their own IP, which is currently wasting away in business limbo. That's the point of the OP. Grit will only get you so far. It's not about individual hero stories, it's about the probability of success for equivalent effort for entire populations, and how vulnerable they are to the effects of a single bad mistake. That's where you can see the negative effects of some backgrounds, and the positive effects of others, most clearly.
neffy 11y ago
Yes, it's something of a selection problem. The assumption behind this belief set is that they were the select few who could do this. There is an alternative hypothesis that out of the large number of people with poor background who did this, they were the few somewhat randomly selected to succeed. Certainly if you look at their biographies there seems to be a consistent element of right person in right place at right time - which suggests that there might be a lot more 'right people' than get lucky.
- WalterBright 11y ago

empath75 11y ago

There are a whole lot of tech jobs where learning on the job without a degree is completely viable. Seems like grabbing these kids out of high school is a business opportunity. I'm pretty sure that any random kid that's into anime and collecting cards can learn to do tech support.

spo81rty 11y ago
Myself and the other 3 main programmers in my last company all lacked a college degree. I think a degree is pretty useless for software development.
- djKianoosh 11y ago
  I appreciate the fact that yall made it without a degree. But I wouldnt say "useless". More like "not necessary". A software engineering or CS degree can be useful, but not necessary to have an excellent career.
  - eropple 11y ago
    Agreed. I was a pretty good programmer before I got a CS degree. But I can say, honestly, that my degree program (not even a particularly good one) made me a much better one. I've consistently ended up in roles where other people in those roles were five to ten years older than me, not because I'm a supergenius (jesus, I'm not) but because I was able to derive some real synergy from the academic fit-and-finish applied by college to my existing skill set, and the lessons I learned in school to the skills I've learned since. And when I say "my courses", I don't just mean CS. I have a B.A., not a B.S., because I wanted more breadth than being a mushroom sweating it out in the computer science lab. I did pick up a lot of actually useful, practicable knowledge around algorithmic analysis (turns out that intuitively understanding Big-Oh is really useful if you don't want to be a bottom-level code grinder), distributed systems (there's a reason I'm still the guy who acquaintances go to when they need to build such a thing), and low-level computer architecture (which still has to matter to somebody even when you're using very high level languages), but the humanities were fantastically important, too. Political science and economics courses have been invaluable; poli-sci for having something of a mental map of groups and organizations and an idea of the way that they change and flow in a larger community, and economics from the perspective of microeconomics, specifically the study of elastic goods and demand curves in general. I might have stumbled on what I learned in college, especially around "how to learn", without going to college, but I think it's more likely that I wouldn't, or that I would have dismissed it as unimportant, because one of the greatest benefits of college was twisting my arm to do things I didn't want want to do (and those were among them. I also graduated with under $30K of debt--state schools aren't that expensive and I'd been working summers--after four years, and paid it off by age 27, while working at companies that definitely would never have looked at me twice if I didn't have a degree and making a lot more money for it.

AmitShipEasy 11y ago

No distractions.

IkmoIkmo 11y ago
> No distractions. Nothing like your parents asking you to borrow some money from your side job so they can pay the bills, as a 14 year old, to start your distraction free day. /s There's a million examples like this. Sure, rich kids have busy lives and can be stressed out by all kinds of high standards, don't get me wrong. But being poor means you have to think about every single little thing that you do, or that happens to you. A flat tire, or worse, having your bike stolen, is a disaster, it can mean weeks of disposable income lost. As a kid I was constantly stressed out and hopeless about the most insignificant things because they can hit like a brick. I remember I talked to a kid once who asked me whether we'd be using graphing calculators in a particular class. He was wondering whether he should drop the final years of hs maths where we'd be doing calculus for an easier hs math curriculum, because paying $150 for a graphing calculator was not an option for him. Distractions like that happen left and right, things 'normal' kids wouldn't even consider thinking about. There's a Christmas dinner coming up in 3 months and kids are supposed to wear something nice and formal? You're already stressing because you'll be the only kid with a bunch of 2nd hand regular clothing. In fact quite a few studies have shown that poor people have less mental bandwidth to deal with their every day lives, because they're bogged down (distracted) by all of the issues that come with a life of poverty, and that this lower bandwidth is a big hurdle in achieving the same level of performance as a normal person.

okyup 11y ago

Because they suffer more. Suffering is good. Without it, we tend to fall apart. With it, we tend to get better.

spo81rty 11y ago

I was born in a trailer park in Oklahoma. Lived in a 1 bedroom shack, and then lived with my grandparents until high school after my parents got divorced. I grew up very poor. But I loved computers, thanks to my dad having a Commodore 64. I excelled at math, loved computers, and went to DeVry to do computer programming. I was the first in my family to go to college. Started my first tech company at 22. With a lot of hard work, I believe anyone can break out of poverty.

eropple 11y ago
While it's cool that you've managed to do that, at the same time I think "with a lot of hard work" trivializes the amount of insanely hard work that large portions of the working class does do, with almost nothing to show for it. Poverty traps are real and they are very, very difficult to escape from, and in many ways it's destiny-by-dart-board.
- wallflower 11y ago
  I recall an anecdote about a college professor who had students pull cards out of a bucket. What card you pulled out of a bucket determined your fate as a person born during the Middle Ages. Most of the cards were peasant or died at age n (where n < 25). I used to joke with some of my fellow geeks (ok, I still do) that if we were born two or three hundred years earlier, we would have had a horrible life in the fields, farming. Going back to why I replied, the sad fact about an information age economy is that working with information or your community (e.g. coding or using that information to trade) is leveraged and worth more than pure manual labor. At the highest level, you have CEOs with insane networks of personal relationships (I knew a family friend once who, with one phone call, got the best eye surgeon in the state to do an emergency operation on one of his friend's friends) and surgeons who can save lives. At the medium level, you have coders. From a rational economics standpoint, everyone is expendable. But the replacement costs are quite high for those higher up the power-law curve of the information economy.
  - hackuser 11y ago
    > I used to joke with some of my fellow geeks (ok, I still do) that if we were born two or three hundred years earlier, we would have had a horrible life in the fields, farming. And some people with the talent to code don't have the physiology to last long doing manual labor.

intrasight 11y ago

Why do some rich kids fail?

josh_carterPDX 11y ago
In my opinion, I think it has to do with their up bringing. If they were raised to have everything handed to them it's easy for them to give up when faced with adversity. I wasn't raised in a home of wealth, but I certainly saw kids growing up who did and could see their attitude towards things were certainly different than my own. If you've never had to struggle, how do you know how to handle it when you are struggling?
- hackuser 11y ago
  It's interesting that people are careful with stereotypes and analysis of poor kids, but have no problem using them for wealthy kids. Kids born into wealth, at least moderate wealth, are much more likely to be successful than kids born into poverty, so it seems they figure out that struggle thing eventually.
  - josh_carterPDX 11y ago
    I don't disagree with that, nor was it my point. I just think that people that know what struggle looks like are more inclined to know how to handle it when it occurs.
hackuser 11y ago
Financial resources are necessary but not at all sufficient to success. Money does not replace parenting, which I think is probably most important. Also, money doesn't change people's natural talents, problems, personalities, etc. We're talking about human beings. Wealth can help compensate: Maybe if you lack a lot of talent you can still get through college, and that will keep out of minimum wage jobs over the long term.

tdaltonc 11y ago

The answer from the article: "... kids who found what researchers call an “identity project,” essentially a passion or hobby that helped motivate them, ... onto college or decent jobs. ... [however] Many of the kids who [had passion projects, still] veered off track. [They] wanted to get out of their parents’ house so badly that they took whatever job they could, before they had the chance to get the education or training to excel further." So the policy implications seem clear. Enable more poor kids to find passion projects. Once they have one, get them in to a living situation that, though meager, gives them the space to pursue their passion. Honestly, sounds like an apprenticeship or graduate school model, but for much younger people.

init 11y ago

I'm one of those poor kids who got out. My identity project was programming. An friend gave me a an old noisy Pentium II that became my best friend. I spent countless hours, day and night, learning to program. Skipped prom to program, dodged sports in high school, never attended parties. Programming was my identity. I started working before starting college. The prohibitive cost of college made me drop out to focus on my career on the first opportunity I had. My current job as a software engineer pays well. I live a comfortable life and can afford things I never had but my lack of college degree also causes me to have a very bad impostor syndrome. Maybe I should save up enough to go back to college and graduate.

unclebucknasty 11y ago
College doesn't "cure" imposter syndrome. I'm not sure what does.
- JBReefer 11y ago
  Only time, I'd say. My best educated friends have Imposter syndrome the worst.
  - unclebucknasty 11y ago
    I think there's something to that. The more you learn, the more you realize you don't know. You also tend to be exposed to other well-educated people who are specialized in areas you are not.
- eropple 11y ago
  For me, success. I started being much more willing to believe the projection of confidence that I had learned to do in order to sell myself as capable and competent once I realized that I was coming in above the level promised by that projection in the first place. It really is "fake it 'til you make it." But in my experience that does go away, a lot, once you can really say to yourself that you've made it (even just a little).
  - 11y ago

cheez 11y ago

Reading this article is like reading my life story. Get them out of their environment, let them be free, forgive them for messing up, and they will thrive.

Spooky23 11y ago

Good, attentive parents.

MrFoof 11y ago

I grew up poor. Literally across the street from the projects, which we absolutely qualified for, but didn't because my parents refused to for a myriad of reasons (mostly to avoid shame). We were Section 8 for the first 15 years of my life. My parents valued education in theory, but not as much in practice. My father learned the hard way and redeemed himself in his 20s -- managing to get into the Army Corp of Engineers after initially dropping out of high school. They pounded the importance of education into my sister and I when I was very young, but that seemed to taper off when I was about 9 or 10, when we were left to our own devices. How did I thrive? Simple. At around the age of 12 I realized that they were mostly idiots. They made terrible financial decisions (which they're paying for now, as they have no retirement savings), my father -- mostly working in factories/landfills -- made no career moves (on account of my mother discouraging him at every opportunity), and my mother simply parroted the advice spewed by the TV, but did the exact opposite. My goal was to avoid ending up like them at all costs -- ending up in a crappy part of a city 50 years in decline with "a good job" being something like working in a furniture store, and being complacent with it. I was fortunate in my early 20s (after I dropped out of a state college in which I felt I was getting a bad deal for my $) to work with an older QA engineer who took a similar path. He had it much worse than I when he grew up, but he could empathize with my upbringing, as it felt all too familiar to him. At the time he felt I was getting a raw deal from my employer, so he would invite me over on the weekends to have lunch with him and his wife (and his daughters, who were my age) to drive into all our heads on how to better make informed decisions about our current state at a given moment. Solid, extremely pragmatic advice from the two of them. As well as painful examples of mistakes both of them made along the way, to show they were far from perfect themselves. Much of it focusing on the long term even if it involves temporarily stunting yourself in the short term, or cutting ties with people you may have had relationships with but were ultimately toxic. Some of the advice was certainly hard to follow in practice, but I'm still to find a case where it wasn't the best move I could've made, and regretted not following some of it earlier.

samstave 11y ago

Intelligence?

deleted 11y ago

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josh_carterPDX 11y ago

This makes so much sense to me. I came from a single parent home and watched my Mom work two jobs just to ensure my Brother and I didn't feel like we were poor, but we both knew we didn't have money. When I graduated high school I joined the Navy to get college money. I believe that through the journey of going through adversity, it has taught me to appreciate everything I've worked for. It also drives and motivates me to build a foundation for my kids so they can have a childhood they look back on fondly. We're all products of our environment. Whether it's rising above it to be better or working to build a lasting legacy, we all want to look back in 40 years and appreciate the things we've accomplished in our lives. Sorry if that got all soapbox-y, but this is a huge thing for me. I wasn't born into money and never had a network of rich friends. And that's ok with me. Because looking back in my nearly 40 years I don't regret any of it. It's led me to what I'm doing today and I take nothing for granted.

deleted 11y ago
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HN123467 11y ago

Throwaway account, fyi. I grew up in my folk's shop. Not really all that poor, I guess, in comparison to some of our customers. I mean, all 6 of my family at least had a toilet and a TV. All us kids still feel that good eating is Chef Boyardee and Twinkies (really). To this day, my brothers take all the bell pepper bits out of their Denver omelets at IHOP, one by one. Just can't stand the taste of fresh veggies. Power went out from time to time, but we did have it. We all did sports year round, mostly because it was a valid excuse to not work at the shop for my folks, that was nice I guess and means we weren't all that bad off. That shop was not fun either. It was an autoshop, so grease and asshole customers was life. My pants literally stood up on their own after work in the summers, there was that much grime in the fibers. The shop was a tin shack, so the winters were frozen and the summers were 120+ everyday by 11am. Still meant you had to fix the transmissions though. We all knew lathes and welders by 10 years old. Firefighting and carpentry became routine as us children were put to work. Don't misunderstand, I love my folks and I loved my life, but that child labor was not safe, though we all didn't know it at the time. Dad never had algebra, mom got to geometry, but that's it. The pastors would not shake Dad's hand as the grease that bakes into your fingernails makes you 'dirty' in their eyes. I love Jesus with all my heart and am a Christian, but the church can go fuck itself long and hard with the wrong end of a steel rake. Ok, have I proved my 'poor' cred then? Yeah, it wasn't as bad as other commenters here, but still, I know man's lot is labor. And I think that's what pulled all us kids out of it. Grit and a stiff upper lip. We all had our bones scarred by that life of labor. So, when it came to school and all this BS 'achievement metrics' that the colleges use to let you in, it was comparatively easy for us to accomplish. As such, when folk complained in college that algebra was too tough, we all found that bewildering. I went to a UC with my brothers and my sister went to a CSU and we all did Physics or Chemistry as they were the hardest majors. Nothing else really felt right as a use of all that money my folks saved up for us. Labor was our lot, as was Adam's, and we felt that was the only way. Now we all have good jobs or are in pretty good grad schools. And yes, I recognize that we had bootstraps to pull ourselves up with, and others do not, so my own family 'tithes' 10% to some charities we believe in. All us kids do something similar. Grit is the only thing that will pull you out. Hard work and Jesus' grace. Luck is also big, I guess, but you have to make your own luck.

rsmsky1 11y ago

I think it would be good to encourage passion projects and also encourage them to look at the long term and stay in school although finding a full time job could provide immediate money.

whiddershins 11y ago

Hidden in this article is the assumption that the 25 year old working at chick-fil-a is beyond saving, so we must try to do better with future generations. That's really sad for me. That guy is still a kid, from where I sit. And he will likely be doing work that bores him to tears for the next 50 years. We should be talking about fixing that. Figuring out a way to send some smart, creative, in poverty, 30 year olds to four year college for free.

wavefunction 11y ago
"Beyond saving"? What if he is doing a good job of providing for his family or he's a musician on the side or he just likes doing what he is doing? I think the first step down the road you describe in your last sentence would be that we (as individuals) shouldn't assess our personal goals and assume they are universal or shared with other individuals. This was a tough lesson for me to learn when I was younger, that imperfect systems are sometimes more acceptable or most appropriate when compared to some sort of perfected ideal.
corysama 11y ago
IMHO, that's a very negative extrapolation from the article content. We absolutely should be talking about fixing that --just not necessarily in this particular article.
billmalarky 11y ago
Probably a broken record statement, but what about basic income?

pjmorris 11y ago

Programming was my identity project. I suppose it still is. I grew up US rural South poor. My childhood started well, but went down hill to the point that, by high school, my single mom was raising three kids in a 2 bedroom single-wide trailer. I aced standardized tests, but my initial idea of what to do after high school was to keep my dishwasher job. Mom, the guidance counselors and our support system weren't of much help. Luckily, mom taught us about reading and libraries, and, luckily, the local community college offered scholarships to the top 10% of local high school students if they stuck around. CC was a nice change of pace from doing dishes, and connected me to programming, which led to a state school, a BSCS, a career, an MSCS, and, shortly, a PhD. My main excuse for the PhD is to be able to give back as I've been given to. The identity project was important, and not something I'd have been able to afford without help from society. I think I've paid much more in taxes as a developer than I'd have as a dishwasher/cook, so society's 'hand up' wasn't just a 'hand out'. I'm sure not everyone can follow the same path, but I'm sure glad the path was there, and I'm hopeful we'll see fit to leave paths like it out there.

josh_carterPDX 11y ago
Thank you for sharing this.
ruairidhwm 11y ago
Very impressive, I hope things are working out for you :)
- pjmorris 11y ago
  Thanks. Some days better, some days worse, the end of the story has yet to be written.

ben_jones 11y ago

I feel like you could almost as easily say "Why do some people thrive?"

computerjunkie 11y ago

Story time. I grew up in a African nation were political instability, corruption and a poor economy for a country is not surprising. My family was doing fine, not great, but my parents valued education, kindness and respect above anything else. They did everything they could to ensure that we got the best education. It was until when my father fell ill and passed away when I was 10, thats when things started to go downhill. My mother had to provide for a family on her own. Most of the relatives from my father's side didn't bother to help, they had their own problems to deal with, add all of this on top of a economy which was non-existent in 2008. We had no place to stay for 4 months because we couldn't afford rent. I couldn't watch shows my peers watched because we couldn't afford cable/satellite TV, let alone a place to stay. There was food, electricity and water shortage for years(still is). Inflation was so high the government had to discontinue the currency. Teachers in my public school began to flee to other countries so that they could still provide for their family.I had to teach myself Physics, Biology, Chemistry and Mathematics.I took up subjects I was never assigned to do in order to get decent grades so that I could go to college. I had to do two A levels, instead of three because teachers thought my grades weren't good enough, other students made fun of me because of this.The environment I was in was a perfect recipe for disaster, for a young mind. But here I am, with a degree in Computer Science and working for a software company with like minded people because my father bought and introduced to me a cream rectangular box, big monochrome monitor and taught me how to type with a keyboard at the age of 5. This machine would become my identity project. Computers have been my survival tool, my passion, even when my peers thought I was delusional for pursing a career in Technology(they even made fun of me for thinking I had a chance). Environment plays a big part in your life but you have the choice to let it dictate your life or you take the wheel and determine your future. I could have given up but I chose not to, even though everything around me constantly said I should. I'm not in a place where I can say I made it but, but its sure as hell better than what I have experienced in my late childhood and adolescent years. For those young folks that are reading this and are in somewhat a disadvantaged situation, stay positive,stick to your identity project and never give up!

bane 11y ago

This really resonates with me. My family was initially very low-middle income, and some poor business and personal decisions caused us to fall, for a time, into poverty -- even spending several months homeless and living out of a motel. The area we eventually ended up in was very rural, fairly poor with quite a bit of rural poverty around -- my immediate neighbors didn't even have running water or an indoor bathroom. Having spent my earlier years in a more urban environment, I found the local children hard to relate to, and the distances between me and kids I got along with well enough were vast enough that they may as well have not existed. My parents worked very long hours and as a result I spent huge amounts of time virtually alone. Somewhere along the way I got into BBSs and the world opened up to me. My "life-raft" was a happenstance introduction to the demoscene and the discovery of other kids in my metro area who were interested in technology, art and global perspectives. It also happened to dovetail pretty nicely with my other school interests (music and art). I saved money to buy my first soundcard and learned how to upgrade computers. The desire to be part of the demoscene caused me to dive deeply into keeping up-to-date computers in my house and I learned to cobble together pretty decent ones for the time with very little money. This kind of intense hardware/software experience got me my first job and an entry into the IT world where I grew in skills and ideas, and eventually put myself through university up to an M.S. (the first in my family) with the help of some grants. Because of those connections I met my wife and have held great and wonderful jobs since then and have had a chance to travel the world and see things 10 year old me, sitting at the desk looking at pictures in history textbooks in the rented motel room my family lived in, would have never imagined I'd ever see in my life. It wasn't all smooth running, there were many struggles and many times I almost never made it. But one helpful hand, or a caring boss or teacher, helped me get through it. I never took the SATs for example, barely graduated high-school, was nearly bankrupt in the middle of college due to a medical emergency. I never want to repeat the stress and anger of that time again, but I know it wasn't all just me, I had plenty of help and that, combined with desire from my life-raft seemed to be what did it.

stretchwithme 11y ago

My identity project was not being poor. So I was a cashier and a filed bank teller. I delivered newspapers. I washed cars and delivered tires and packages. I washed windows and cleaned doctors offices. Then eventually went to college and got into software development. It baffles me when some people are surprised that its possible to work your way out of poverty. That's what most sane people do when they have the opportunity to do so. Of course, if you have a culture that deters hard work and self development, that makes it a lot hard. Its also harder when people say that environment determines the outcome instead of individual determination. The truth is its both, but telling people their effort is not what makes the difference is creating a environment that does not encourage the effort required to succeed. The idea that environment is everything can help ensure a bad environment prevents you from succeeding. And even the environment cannot be changed without individual effort.

hackuser 11y ago
It's an interesting and often-repeated theory, but the data is overwhelming: People born in poor environments do much worse than those born in wealthier environments. The massive difference in resources seems like a place to start. Compare the percentage of kids who get into college from poor urban public schools, where many kids aren't even functionally literate and classes lack books, and wealthy suburban public schools. But whatever the cause, the bar is far too high in poor neighborhoods for most people to get over.
- stretchwithme 11y ago
  I would say that those born into poor cultures do poorly. Those cultures that are no longer poor were more conducive to escaping poverty. The evidence is compelling in places that dropped government control of everything and millions of people have moved out of poverty in just a generation or two. China is a good example. Everybody started out poor but they still had an ethic or working hard, saving for the future and education. Other people are born with the same opportunities but not the same values and don't take advantage of those opportunities. Its not the poor neighborhood. Its the poor ideas in people's heads. Change that and the neighborhood changes too.

paulpauper 11y ago

High IQ, probably.