14 ms·

The effects of living in a poor neighborhood

136 points by micaeloliveira 10y ago

dudul 10y ago
"Another popular left-wing idea is a universal basic income" UBI is not only supported by left-wingers.
- brogrammer90 10y ago
  As someone who actually owns rentals in poor black neighborhoods, UBI is the most retarded ivory tower idea I've seen gain traction. All the black families on my street have section 8 vouchers, so they basically have no debt service. What do they do with all this free time? Deal drugs, look for marks to mug, break into vacant apartments, wake up at 2 pm, etc. Drive through my street around noon and count the number of able bodied men doing absolutely nothing productive and you'll lose count. They're hopeless.
  - charlesdm 10y ago
    What's the avg. yield on those properties? There obviously must be an incentive to invest there, if there's low income potential + lots of potential hassle with tenants etc
    - brogrammer90 10y ago
      The higher the crime rate the higher the cap rate. You could outsource to a property management company but you get raped of your profits via collusion with contractors. If you can replace rotted subfloors, toilet wax rings, broken windows, and can shoot 3 inch groups at 10 yards then you might be successful.
  - dragonwriter 10y ago
    Section 8 vouchers are a means-tested benefit program where the net benefit decreases with outside income, and, as such, create a disincentive (especially since people qualified for them also, nearly invariably, are on other means-tested benefit programs whose benefits also decline with additional income -- sometimes, in aggregate, leading to a greater than 1:1 decline in benefits compared to increased income) to productive activity. This is precisely one of the problems with means-tested benefit programs, especially with an uncoordinated collection of such programs, that UBI, with its unconditional nature, is designed to solve. I don't see how that description of the effect of Section 8 vouchers (even if it is assumed to be both accurate, and generalizable) illustrates that UBI is a "retarded ivory tower idea".
    - brogrammer90 10y ago
      UBI will only increase the amount of syringes I have to pick up in my backyards.
      - dragonwriter 10y ago
        There is a significant difference between asserting something and providing other people a reason to believe it.
    - grahamburger 10y ago
      This is the thing I really don't get about UBI. It really, really doesn't remove means testing. Your tax burden is still means based, and that determines whether your ubi is net positive or net negative. So again, your net benefit decreases with increased outside income, because you're paying more in taxes.
      - ThrustVectoring 10y ago
        It's not means testing that's the problem. The problem is that a linear combination of benefit programs with a below-unity benefit-to-income slope has an above-unity slope, which means that making an additional dollar disqualifies you from more money than the dollar gives you. The benefit programs as a whole aren't designed holistically to avoid this (and other) traps, so any welfare overhaul that consolidates multiple independent programs into a systematic whole should solve these problems.
        dllthomas 10y ago
        And even before unity-in-dollars, it can be way below unity-in-utility for opportunities available.
      - imtringued 10y ago
        With any kind of percentage based tax you're paying more taxes with more income. That's by design and it would still apply if we didn't have any kind of welfare system.
  - sremani 10y ago
    There is a wonderful article about effects of poverty in nautilus about Eastern Cherokee Indians post-casino prosperity and how their health and academic performance improved.I do not know of UBI will yield that, but effectively these native americans were getting checks for no work in exchange. When there is no hope, there is no plan esp. long term plan, life becomes day to day exercise of attaining happiness now!!!
  - placeybordeaux 10y ago
    To make that argument you also need to make the argument that UBI is roughly equivalent to section 8 vouchers.
  - zanny 10y ago
    And they are hopeless because they are section 8 vouchers. There is rampant evidence welfare systems in place stratify society in the exact same way that literal walls built decades ago to segregate neighborhoods worked. If you are on welfare, you are operating in entirely different socioeconomic circles from people with access to capital and thus upward mobility. If you grow up surrounded by people who subsist on poverty-wage welfare checks and you are literally isolated to that community because you parents are a part of it, how in the universe are you ever meant to obtain aspiration or escape it? There is no special snowflake effect here, people are the product of their circumstances (another important sociological observation the last two decades of post-cold-war-propaganda has presented ample evidence towards) and if you have a society built on a foundation of traditional racism and segregate people on that basis you should not be surprised when the members of that group lack strong work ethic or an attitude of improvement. They are put in a cultural cell with iron bars on the windows and while you can with effort escape it you are in a prison with all your friends, family, and everyone you have ever met, so when even given the option to escape, you often do not. It is why prison recidivism is so high with long-term incarcerated, and why particularly ostracized minority groups show less economic mobility.
  - thescriptkiddie 10y ago
    Unconditional Basic Income is unconditional, not means-tested like Section 8. Section 8 creates a strong disincentive to work (legally) because you will lose your benefits if you make too much. Section 8 is not a program designed to help the poor, it is a program designed to subsidize landlords.
  - smilingtom 10y ago
    This is basically exactly what I would expect someone who has gotten rich from exploiting poor people to say. We need fewer people like you in the world.
- antnisp 10y ago
  I think it was a "eurolibertarian" response to the European welfare state.
- dang 10y ago
  Indeed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11837459 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11837459 begins with Milton Friedman.
  - cb18 10y ago
    And I found Charles Murray's recent explication of the topic rather compelling. http://www.wsj.com/articles/a-guaranteed-income-for-every-american-1464969586 http://www.wsj.com/articles/a-guaranteed-income-for-every-am...
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
- hx87 10y ago
  Being a take-my-money-and-leave-me-alone libertarian who values time and mental effort much more than money, I would love to replace the existing hodgepodge of a welfare system in the US with UBI + single payer health insurance.
  - benbenolson 10y ago
    I'm the same as you, except that I'm still not convinced yet. The more that I see this idea being pushed, the more I'm convinced that people are going to want to add this to the list of the many government handouts, not replace them.
    - eanzenberg 10y ago
      That's the case of many UBI supporters including ones in the Hacker News community.
    - hx87 10y ago
      I'm okay with that, as long as the proportion of welfare distributed through UBI, as opposed to traditional welfare programs, goes up over time.
  - twblalock 10y ago
    That's not what would happen. Such a simple, elegant system would never make it through congress. It's frankly naive to believe that UBI would be implemented the way libertarians envision it. There are many reasons to believe that we would end up with UBI in addition to most of the programs we currently have. They are the same reasons we have the programs we have now, and those reasons will continue to operate in politics and society. This is the best-written take on the subject I've seen so far: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/11/what-are-some-of-the-biggest-problems-with-a-guaranteed-annual-income.html http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/11/wha... I would be all for UBI if I thought it was possible to implement it in a simple and effective way, but that can't happen in a democracy, especially not ours.
    - 10y ago
th0waway 10y ago
sounds like this is really prejudiced against poor people. Why is a poor neighborhood inherently more stressful than a rich neighborhood? What's the root cause? Not enough XBox's per capita?
dang 10y ago
This looks like a pretty substantive article with an unfortunately infantilized presentation. Let's try to stick to the important content if we can.
- adamsea 10y ago
  Asa non-infant, I actually appreciated the graphics.
- capote 10y ago
  I liked the presentation the most out of every aspect of the article. I don't think it's infantile. If anything, I see the author's tone, bias, and perspective as problematic, but I suppose this is also just as subjective, and isn't a reason to not share an article.
- ovt 10y ago
  I didn't get very far in the article. Having so many cartoons is like having a commercial break every 20 seconds.
  - cjarrett 10y ago
    I wouldn't mind if the cartoons were on the side. The chunking in this presentation is absolutely horrible. No ability to continue reading
- minimaxir 10y ago
  Compared to the quirky and random XD reaction GIFs and image macros that populate modern thought pieces for no constructive purpose whatsoever, the images in the article are fine and provide a relevant visual aid.
  - fchollet 10y ago
    > the quirky and random XD reaction GIFs and image macros that populate modern thought pieces I'm just glad that we don't read the same "thought pieces"
PoorBloke123 10y ago
This article is the biggest bunch of rubbish that I have read in months. It takes bias to whole new levels. People are starting to realize that "studies" are almost always biased in the first place and should not be trusted. Secondly, look at some of the examples used: A comparison is made between: > 25% of black kids had parents who grew up in the bottom two levels* and moved up at least one. and > 59% of white kids moved up Notice any difference here? The whole article is like this. Comparing completely separate things. This is laughable. I feel embarrassed by the bias and sorry for those who read this article with a straight face.
- protomyth 10y ago
  This is the problem with quoting studies and not understanding what the stats actually mean with their relation to each other. It happens a lot with the studies themselves, also, but is pretty prevalent in pundit style presentations. I'll give an interesting example from my twitter feed: "State records show that [Mr. X](1) claimed that his combined income in 1978 and 1979 was negative $3.8 million, allowing him to pay no taxes. A few years earlier, he had told the NYT he was worth more than $200 million." This is combining two factual statements with the intent to link them when the linkage is actually not there. People pay taxes on income not net worth(2). You spotted a stat that is closer, but actually still not directly comparable without further information and fixing the wording to indicate the same action in the same way. This doesn't even add the cases where studies have different basic facts about the observed and people trying to tie them together in problematic ways. Their starting wall example is also pretty foolish given the actual destruction of vibrant black neighborhoods in urban renewal projects starting with 1949 and the Housing Act. Why build a wall when you can take the land? 1) yeah yeah, we all know who the quote is about, but I have no wish to argue with BOTH sides again. 1800 here we come. 2) well, ok, there are some specific stuff, but its not really relevant to the setup. Also, yes, the graphics are horrible to the point of having a minecraft / 8-bit fetish is getting in the way of actually indicating what the information is.
  - srtjstjsj 10y ago
    Please with draw your incorrect aspersions. Your example is not the same as the OP article, that faithfully reproduces the source data at: http://www.pewtrusts.org/~/media/legacy/uploadedfiles/wwwpewtrustsorg/reports/economic_mobility/pewsharkeyv12pdf.pdf http://www.pewtrusts.org/~/media/legacy/uploadedfiles/wwwpew...
mc32 10y ago
I can dig it. Living in a bad neighborhood exposes you to an in-ideal living atmosphere. The people you are around influence you in many ways and one of those ways is the wrong way --not because people in the neighborhood want bad things for their brethren --but because their way of life and expectations impinge on the growth of the new young people in the neighborhood with respect to the wider society. Also, it's worth noting that widening inequality is a global phenomenon but not only between people but amongst nations. The inequality between let's say Mexico and Finland was different back in 1910 and what it is now. The inequality between poor and rich in the US was also less in the US back in the early 1900s.
- Snargorf 10y ago
  Actually, wealth inequality in the West was higher before World War One. They called it the 'gilded age' for a reason. It only got a lot more equal because WW1, the Depression, and WW2 combined destroyed most of the stuff the rich people had. Only recently has wealth inequality re-approached pre-WW1 levels. Source: Piketty.
  - mc32 10y ago
    You're right. I had conflated GDP with disparity. GDP in the 1910s was more or less on par in Mexico, Finland, Portugal, Norway and Italy. That parity has dissolved and become disparity in the intervening years. On the other hand, in the age of the robber barons, you had the lower class and the wealthy, with little in between, so those not at the top were not as unequal as they are today. It's my impression it was more stratified (into two lobes). And given most people were rural and there were few in the professional class, I think it makes sense.
  - btilly 10y ago
    It only got a lot more equal because WW1, the Depression, and WW2 combined destroyed most of the stuff the rich people had. Don't forget 92% marginal tax rates on income over $1 million/year. That was slashed to 72% under JFK. But regional inequality only took took off after it was slashed to 50% then to 28% by Reagan. Today the rich have lower tax rates than average Americans.
aab0 10y ago
A highly one-sided presentation. Let me point out some issues: it makes major hay of Moving to Opportunity, but MTO is a notorious failure - it increased crime rates in targeted areas, and showed no improvements on anything until the cited Chetty paper managed to torture out of the data, just recently, improvements in only 1 subgroup on only a handful of metrics (which, aside from Vox misstating the Chetty results by implying it was all MTO participants, rather than one post hoc subgroup, contradicts the later experiment: the claimed effects do not remotely overlap); non-randomized moves are heavily confounded by upward mobility and human capital; many other studies like Swedish lottery studies and the land lottery natural experiment show that exogenous shocks of wealth do not produce meaningful improvements in things like health anywhere remotely close to the observed correlations of wealth/health; genetically informed family designs which account for heritability by looking at siblings differentially exposed or by looking at relatives tend to find that most 'poor neighborhood' effects are driven by genetic confounds; specific versions of the 'poor neighborhood' hypothesis tend to go down in flames when rigorously tested (most recently, the claim that schizophrenia is caused by bad neighborhoods, which everyone was sure about; polygenic scores for schizophrenia show that it is the other way around - schizophrenics and those vulnerable to schizophrenia drift to poor neighborhoods); in genetics studies, the correlation between wealthy parents and one's own SES turns out to be entirely genetically mediated; the parent/child IQ thing is differential regression to the mean; and so on. Many of the claims made in OP are naively causal and are guaranteed to be overestimated based simply on not including genetic relatedness. These are just the recent contrary studies I happen to remember offhand. When you look at especially the recent genetic studies using polygenic scores from the GWASes to test environmental claims (eg Mendelian randomization), it's becoming increasingly clear: the slate is not blank and the sociology emperor has no clothes. I don't even know... what can be done about sociology? It is 2016 and every time I see a newspaper article or editorial invoking sociological results, it's totally wrong, and the sociologists quoted seem 100% committed to ignoring all the contrary evidence that not all differences are 100% due to environments. I mean... can you imagine seeing Vox cite a recent paper like "The Genetics of Success: How Single-Nucleotide Polymorphisms Associated With Educational Attainment Relate to Life-Course Development" http://pss.sagepub.com/content/early/2016/05/26/0956797616643070.abstract http://pss.sagepub.com/content/early/2016/05/26/095679761664... or a newspaper article on it (which didn't quote some scientists arguing that genetics research should be defunded or that the research is irrelevant)? That would be nice - society needs to come to grips with the confirmation of behavioral genetics. But it doesn't seem like it will happen anytime soon. It's all terribly frustrating. Anyway, I didn't mean to rant or try to write an in depth carefully cited rebuttal, but I just wanted to say: it is not as simple as 'poor people are poor and unhealthy because of racism and poverty', and there is lots of high-quality evidence of this which tends to go undiscussed in liberal media outlets, so pieces like this are closer to advocacy than research popularization.
randyrand 10y ago
This just in - being surrounded by good influences is good for you. And vis-versa. This isn't rocket science, of course. We've know about the important of cultural influence for a long time. There was a reason my parents cared about where I grew up, and who I hung out with. If you grow up in a culture where people don't care about academics, where welfare and child support are acceptable forms of provision, where machismo and crime are glorified, where you are told that discrimination will prevent you from otherwise succeeding, and that your failures can be blamed on racism - no, I don't think that culture will have a good influence on you.
- placeybordeaux 10y ago
  while the surrounding culture does matter a lot, it's more than that. There are also more mundane things such as poor access to quality food, education and secure places to relax. Malnurishment, poor education and constant stress all have negative effects on people.
deleted 10y ago
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ashwinaj 10y ago
One of the comments I get people who visit India (I'm Indian) is that how is there a slum next to a swanky high rise or classy residential/commercial areas (at least in most big cities). I don't really have an explanation for this (lack of space, cheap labor etc.), but the more I read about economic segregation in the US the more I'm convinced that the inadvertent mixed income neighborhoods in India could be a solution. If you don't live around people who are less fortunate than you, how can you understand their plight and their point of view? Handing out a few bucks to a homeless guy or cutting a check to a non-profit doesn't create any substantial understanding of the issue. Obviously there will be opposition to this in the US since people want to live with other people in the same socio-economic strata as themselves. Other reasons: 1) I don't want my property price to depreciate 2) I don't want to live next to "da hood" etc. Until people have a drastic change in attitude this will be ongoing. The article touches on this a bit (section 8 vouchers) but why can't we have neighborhoods with multiple levels of housing options encouraging people with mixed incomes to be around each other.
- Swizec 10y ago
  > why can't we have neighborhoods with multiple levels of housing options encouraging people with mixed incomes to be around each other Because americans have spent the last 60+ years working to "solve" that problem. May I present to you, the White Flight: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight
  - ashwinaj 10y ago
    Yes, I'm aware of white flight. It's 2016 and the claim is that America has supposedly moved on, but it surely doesn't look like it. Or no one wants to talk about it since it's embarrassing.
    - dmoy 10y ago
      Who claims that America has moved on from white flight? That seems like a far-fetched claim...
    - 10y ago
mjevans 10y ago
While the data might show these correlations I disagree on the premise that is reached as a result. It is not just economic stratification, but cultural differences. Those who have great wealth, and are not celebrity, tend to respect education, or at least attending 'upper tier academic institutions' for their upper society connections. Among this group of people knowledge /is/ power and it is respected. In economically down-trodden situations it is as if the population has been conditioned that they are beyond redemption, that there is no hope in enlightenment bringing them a better future. Maybe they are correct in that respect as greed is a major driving factor in politics. I suggest that the culture must change to enshrine knowledge and intellect as well as society rewarding normal productive labor for a real solution to these issues.
- ASpring 10y ago
  > I suggest that the culture must change to enshrine knowledge and intellect How do you suggest to do this?
  - mjevans 10y ago
    I too am still only human; within my many flaws are gaps in my knowledge, experience, and ability that limit my capacity for solving this issue to a personal level. That is, I try to set a good example and help those closest to me when I am able. Maybe you or someone else has a solution that scales better?
cb18 10y ago
Doesn't all this seem somewhat backward. There's this victimization mentality that acts like poverty is this absolute thing that is meted out like a cursed rock, outside the control and agency of whom it's been placed upon. Why don't we have more discussion about the causes that lead to the effect of poverty. It's really more productive to see poverty as being an effect, or outcome of other causes or actions. Change the input and get a different outcome. And at a certain point it becomes a personal responsibility. If you want to help someone else, great, but the two of you have to be pushing in the same direction. And likewise, external conditions do have effects, if it comes to light that someone appears to be needlessly and negatively imposed upon there's clearly a place in society for discussing how best we can optimize everyone's external conditions. Everyone faces obstacles, but placing blame wholly outside oneself is always going to be a losing battle. >On top of it all, if a murder occurred in a child's neighborhood — in an area of about six to 10 square blocks — their score fell by 7 to 8 points. This is so ridiculous that people can make a pronouncement like that, thinking it's a reasonable analysis, or indeed the only analysis. We know that intelligence is a highly stable trait. Meaning for intelligence to be significantly diminished[0] requires something pretty drastic, like a serious brain injury or some kind of long term deprivation. There is no reason to think someone being killed within a particular distance of someone would have any kind of effect. Do all soldiers come home as dunces? Something seems to be missing from the kind of people that write these articles. Hard to say what it is exactly, a more holistic view, better analytical capabilities, less pre-conceived notions, intelligence? something... If they had whatever missing ingredient, then they might understand that an analysis that stands up to rigor is something more like, People tend to self-segregate along a whole host of traits[1], intelligence is a trait. The trait of intelligence is linked to a propensity for certain types of crimes. Murder among them, therefore it follows that the people that commit murder are statistically likely to have lower intelligence, as are the people around them. >Oh, another thing: Living in these poor neighborhoods makes you significantly less happy, less hopeful, and less healthy Oh, another thing: Any analytical mind of any worth can clearly see that the inverse has just as much going for it, if not more. It seems to clearly follow that people who are less happy, less hopeful, and less healthy would make their neighborhoods poorer. How a focus on improving happiness, hope, and health? Telling people their predicaments are caused by factors outside of their control is the last way to improve any of those things. [0]7 to 8 points is half a standard deviation, i.e. significant. [1]See Schelling's Macro Micro, for some of the mechanisms involved.
lacker 10y ago
Hmm, wait a moment. 59% of white kids moved up. 43% of white kids moved down. Even accounting for rounding, there's no way to get those numbers. It's even worse in other places: 25% of black kids had parents who grew up in the bottom two levels and moved up at least one. 78% of black kids had parents who grew up in the top three levels and moved down at least one. Those two groups should sum to less than 100%, certainly not 103%. Also, except for the "Moving to Opportunity" experiment, most of this seems to ignore the distinction between correlation and causation. This reminds me of the recent finding that 50% of papers in reputable psych journals reported mathematically impossible data. https://medium.com/@jamesheathers/the-grim-test-a-method-for-evaluating-published-research-9a4e5f05e870#.61n0pjt6s https://medium.com/@jamesheathers/the-grim-test-a-method-for... The more people start to dig in, the more the "social sciences" look unscientific.
- Terribledactyl 10y ago
  These numbers could be skewed from unequal number of children per parent in these different groups. Successful parents might have many more or fewer children.
  - archeopterix 10y ago
    But children are integers.
    - choosername 10y ago
      At least I'd hope for their integrity.
- squimmy 10y ago
  It could be an issue of imprecise wording. For instance, perhaps 59% of white parents had kids who moved up, while 43% of white parents had kids who moved down. This doesn't excuse the reporting, but it might explain it.
  - ddlatham 10y ago
ausjke 10y ago
Why blacks are not doing well? Because they were from Africa, but new immigrants from Africa came to US earn a pretty decent life quickly than those have been here centuries ago. Because they're minority, but other minorities such as the Jews and Asians are working hard and earning a decent life here. Because of less chance to get education, but you have affirmative action that you can get into decent college at a huge discount as far as scores go. Also so many financial support for economically disadvantaged families. Because of unfair tax system, election system... those seem not the key reason to me too. I might be missing something else. I think it's probably more of a culture thing, that favors education, hard working, loyal to family, etc. Without that, the civil rights law or various diversity initiatives can only help that much. The black community needs to address that gradually and it's the only way to fix the "poor neighborhood" for good. In where I live, the elected democratic officers decided to bridge the poor community with "rich" community by building government-sponsored condos right next to or in the middle of up-middle-class communities,the result is that people move out and the house price drops, does not look like a right fix to me.
- H0n3sty 10y ago
  ~11 million unauthorized immigrants as of 2014 (1) Black labor participation rate at ~60% (2) Black population in US at ~45M (3) 45M * (1 - 60%) = 18M (1): http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/11/19/5-facts-about-illegal-immigration-in-the-u-s/ http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/11/19/5-facts-abou... (2): http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2014/01/black-labor-force-participation-rate-under-obama-hits-rock-bottom-lowest-level-ever-recorded/ http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2014/01/black-labor-force-pa... (3): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_ethnicity_in_the_United_States#Black_Americans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_ethnicity_in_the_Unit...
- kentrado 10y ago
  I don't usually write responses and I don't have much time to write you a detailed explanation of history. But are you aware that there are living black people who still remember segregation and Jim Crow? It wasn't that long ago. The idea that just because recently you decided to treat niggers like human beings, they should instantly have the same level as people who were never treated as subhuman in this US of A, is simply unadulterated pure stupidity.
known 10y ago
Reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_mobility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_mobility and http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=433866 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=433866
batat 10y ago
Expected to see something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruitt–Igoe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruitt–Igoe story.
galfarragem 10y ago
Empirically (aka having grown up in a poor neighbourhood) I would say that during infancy it doesn't matter much, it mostly depends on your parents background: they are the largest influence on you. It really starts to hurt is during teenage years when kids get independent. Then one of two situations use to happen: the environment pushes them down or they remove themselves from it and grow lonely. None of the options is optimal. Law 10: Infection: avoid the unhappy and the unlucky. -- Robert Greene (48 laws of power) Law 18: Do not build fortresses to protect yourself – isolation is dangerous -- Robert Greene (48 laws of power)

136 points by micaeloliveira 10y ago

dudul 10y ago

"Another popular left-wing idea is a universal basic income" UBI is not only supported by left-wingers.

brogrammer90 10y ago
As someone who actually owns rentals in poor black neighborhoods, UBI is the most retarded ivory tower idea I've seen gain traction. All the black families on my street have section 8 vouchers, so they basically have no debt service. What do they do with all this free time? Deal drugs, look for marks to mug, break into vacant apartments, wake up at 2 pm, etc. Drive through my street around noon and count the number of able bodied men doing absolutely nothing productive and you'll lose count. They're hopeless.
- charlesdm 10y ago
  What's the avg. yield on those properties? There obviously must be an incentive to invest there, if there's low income potential + lots of potential hassle with tenants etc
  - brogrammer90 10y ago
    The higher the crime rate the higher the cap rate. You could outsource to a property management company but you get raped of your profits via collusion with contractors. If you can replace rotted subfloors, toilet wax rings, broken windows, and can shoot 3 inch groups at 10 yards then you might be successful.
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  Section 8 vouchers are a means-tested benefit program where the net benefit decreases with outside income, and, as such, create a disincentive (especially since people qualified for them also, nearly invariably, are on other means-tested benefit programs whose benefits also decline with additional income -- sometimes, in aggregate, leading to a greater than 1:1 decline in benefits compared to increased income) to productive activity. This is precisely one of the problems with means-tested benefit programs, especially with an uncoordinated collection of such programs, that UBI, with its unconditional nature, is designed to solve. I don't see how that description of the effect of Section 8 vouchers (even if it is assumed to be both accurate, and generalizable) illustrates that UBI is a "retarded ivory tower idea".
  - brogrammer90 10y ago
    UBI will only increase the amount of syringes I have to pick up in my backyards.
    - dragonwriter 10y ago
      There is a significant difference between asserting something and providing other people a reason to believe it.
  - grahamburger 10y ago
    This is the thing I really don't get about UBI. It really, really doesn't remove means testing. Your tax burden is still means based, and that determines whether your ubi is net positive or net negative. So again, your net benefit decreases with increased outside income, because you're paying more in taxes.
    - ThrustVectoring 10y ago
      It's not means testing that's the problem. The problem is that a linear combination of benefit programs with a below-unity benefit-to-income slope has an above-unity slope, which means that making an additional dollar disqualifies you from more money than the dollar gives you. The benefit programs as a whole aren't designed holistically to avoid this (and other) traps, so any welfare overhaul that consolidates multiple independent programs into a systematic whole should solve these problems.
      - dllthomas 10y ago
        And even before unity-in-dollars, it can be way below unity-in-utility for opportunities available.
    - imtringued 10y ago
      With any kind of percentage based tax you're paying more taxes with more income. That's by design and it would still apply if we didn't have any kind of welfare system.
- sremani 10y ago
  There is a wonderful article about effects of poverty in nautilus about Eastern Cherokee Indians post-casino prosperity and how their health and academic performance improved.I do not know of UBI will yield that, but effectively these native americans were getting checks for no work in exchange. When there is no hope, there is no plan esp. long term plan, life becomes day to day exercise of attaining happiness now!!!
- placeybordeaux 10y ago
  To make that argument you also need to make the argument that UBI is roughly equivalent to section 8 vouchers.
- zanny 10y ago
  And they are hopeless because they are section 8 vouchers. There is rampant evidence welfare systems in place stratify society in the exact same way that literal walls built decades ago to segregate neighborhoods worked. If you are on welfare, you are operating in entirely different socioeconomic circles from people with access to capital and thus upward mobility. If you grow up surrounded by people who subsist on poverty-wage welfare checks and you are literally isolated to that community because you parents are a part of it, how in the universe are you ever meant to obtain aspiration or escape it? There is no special snowflake effect here, people are the product of their circumstances (another important sociological observation the last two decades of post-cold-war-propaganda has presented ample evidence towards) and if you have a society built on a foundation of traditional racism and segregate people on that basis you should not be surprised when the members of that group lack strong work ethic or an attitude of improvement. They are put in a cultural cell with iron bars on the windows and while you can with effort escape it you are in a prison with all your friends, family, and everyone you have ever met, so when even given the option to escape, you often do not. It is why prison recidivism is so high with long-term incarcerated, and why particularly ostracized minority groups show less economic mobility.
- thescriptkiddie 10y ago
  Unconditional Basic Income is unconditional, not means-tested like Section 8. Section 8 creates a strong disincentive to work (legally) because you will lose your benefits if you make too much. Section 8 is not a program designed to help the poor, it is a program designed to subsidize landlords.
- smilingtom 10y ago
  This is basically exactly what I would expect someone who has gotten rich from exploiting poor people to say. We need fewer people like you in the world.
antnisp 10y ago
I think it was a "eurolibertarian" response to the European welfare state.
dang 10y ago
Indeed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11837459 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11837459 begins with Milton Friedman.
- cb18 10y ago
  And I found Charles Murray's recent explication of the topic rather compelling. http://www.wsj.com/articles/a-guaranteed-income-for-every-american-1464969586 http://www.wsj.com/articles/a-guaranteed-income-for-every-am...
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
hx87 10y ago
Being a take-my-money-and-leave-me-alone libertarian who values time and mental effort much more than money, I would love to replace the existing hodgepodge of a welfare system in the US with UBI + single payer health insurance.
- benbenolson 10y ago
  I'm the same as you, except that I'm still not convinced yet. The more that I see this idea being pushed, the more I'm convinced that people are going to want to add this to the list of the many government handouts, not replace them.
  - eanzenberg 10y ago
    That's the case of many UBI supporters including ones in the Hacker News community.
  - hx87 10y ago
    I'm okay with that, as long as the proportion of welfare distributed through UBI, as opposed to traditional welfare programs, goes up over time.
- twblalock 10y ago
  That's not what would happen. Such a simple, elegant system would never make it through congress. It's frankly naive to believe that UBI would be implemented the way libertarians envision it. There are many reasons to believe that we would end up with UBI in addition to most of the programs we currently have. They are the same reasons we have the programs we have now, and those reasons will continue to operate in politics and society. This is the best-written take on the subject I've seen so far: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/11/what-are-some-of-the-biggest-problems-with-a-guaranteed-annual-income.html http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/11/wha... I would be all for UBI if I thought it was possible to implement it in a simple and effective way, but that can't happen in a democracy, especially not ours.
  - 10y ago

th0waway 10y ago

sounds like this is really prejudiced against poor people. Why is a poor neighborhood inherently more stressful than a rich neighborhood? What's the root cause? Not enough XBox's per capita?

dang 10y ago

This looks like a pretty substantive article with an unfortunately infantilized presentation. Let's try to stick to the important content if we can.

adamsea 10y ago
Asa non-infant, I actually appreciated the graphics.
capote 10y ago
I liked the presentation the most out of every aspect of the article. I don't think it's infantile. If anything, I see the author's tone, bias, and perspective as problematic, but I suppose this is also just as subjective, and isn't a reason to not share an article.
ovt 10y ago
I didn't get very far in the article. Having so many cartoons is like having a commercial break every 20 seconds.
- cjarrett 10y ago
  I wouldn't mind if the cartoons were on the side. The chunking in this presentation is absolutely horrible. No ability to continue reading
minimaxir 10y ago
Compared to the quirky and random XD reaction GIFs and image macros that populate modern thought pieces for no constructive purpose whatsoever, the images in the article are fine and provide a relevant visual aid.
- fchollet 10y ago
  > the quirky and random XD reaction GIFs and image macros that populate modern thought pieces I'm just glad that we don't read the same "thought pieces"

PoorBloke123 10y ago

This article is the biggest bunch of rubbish that I have read in months. It takes bias to whole new levels. People are starting to realize that "studies" are almost always biased in the first place and should not be trusted. Secondly, look at some of the examples used: A comparison is made between: > 25% of black kids had parents who grew up in the bottom two levels* and moved up at least one. and > 59% of white kids moved up Notice any difference here? The whole article is like this. Comparing completely separate things. This is laughable. I feel embarrassed by the bias and sorry for those who read this article with a straight face.

protomyth 10y ago
This is the problem with quoting studies and not understanding what the stats actually mean with their relation to each other. It happens a lot with the studies themselves, also, but is pretty prevalent in pundit style presentations. I'll give an interesting example from my twitter feed: "State records show that [Mr. X](1) claimed that his combined income in 1978 and 1979 was negative $3.8 million, allowing him to pay no taxes. A few years earlier, he had told the NYT he was worth more than $200 million." This is combining two factual statements with the intent to link them when the linkage is actually not there. People pay taxes on income not net worth(2). You spotted a stat that is closer, but actually still not directly comparable without further information and fixing the wording to indicate the same action in the same way. This doesn't even add the cases where studies have different basic facts about the observed and people trying to tie them together in problematic ways. Their starting wall example is also pretty foolish given the actual destruction of vibrant black neighborhoods in urban renewal projects starting with 1949 and the Housing Act. Why build a wall when you can take the land? 1) yeah yeah, we all know who the quote is about, but I have no wish to argue with BOTH sides again. 1800 here we come. 2) well, ok, there are some specific stuff, but its not really relevant to the setup. Also, yes, the graphics are horrible to the point of having a minecraft / 8-bit fetish is getting in the way of actually indicating what the information is.
- srtjstjsj 10y ago
  Please with draw your incorrect aspersions. Your example is not the same as the OP article, that faithfully reproduces the source data at: http://www.pewtrusts.org/~/media/legacy/uploadedfiles/wwwpewtrustsorg/reports/economic_mobility/pewsharkeyv12pdf.pdf http://www.pewtrusts.org/~/media/legacy/uploadedfiles/wwwpew...

mc32 10y ago

I can dig it. Living in a bad neighborhood exposes you to an in-ideal living atmosphere. The people you are around influence you in many ways and one of those ways is the wrong way --not because people in the neighborhood want bad things for their brethren --but because their way of life and expectations impinge on the growth of the new young people in the neighborhood with respect to the wider society. Also, it's worth noting that widening inequality is a global phenomenon but not only between people but amongst nations. The inequality between let's say Mexico and Finland was different back in 1910 and what it is now. The inequality between poor and rich in the US was also less in the US back in the early 1900s.

Snargorf 10y ago
Actually, wealth inequality in the West was higher before World War One. They called it the 'gilded age' for a reason. It only got a lot more equal because WW1, the Depression, and WW2 combined destroyed most of the stuff the rich people had. Only recently has wealth inequality re-approached pre-WW1 levels. Source: Piketty.
- mc32 10y ago
  You're right. I had conflated GDP with disparity. GDP in the 1910s was more or less on par in Mexico, Finland, Portugal, Norway and Italy. That parity has dissolved and become disparity in the intervening years. On the other hand, in the age of the robber barons, you had the lower class and the wealthy, with little in between, so those not at the top were not as unequal as they are today. It's my impression it was more stratified (into two lobes). And given most people were rural and there were few in the professional class, I think it makes sense.
- btilly 10y ago
  It only got a lot more equal because WW1, the Depression, and WW2 combined destroyed most of the stuff the rich people had. Don't forget 92% marginal tax rates on income over $1 million/year. That was slashed to 72% under JFK. But regional inequality only took took off after it was slashed to 50% then to 28% by Reagan. Today the rich have lower tax rates than average Americans.

aab0 10y ago

A highly one-sided presentation. Let me point out some issues: it makes major hay of Moving to Opportunity, but MTO is a notorious failure - it increased crime rates in targeted areas, and showed no improvements on anything until the cited Chetty paper managed to torture out of the data, just recently, improvements in only 1 subgroup on only a handful of metrics (which, aside from Vox misstating the Chetty results by implying it was all MTO participants, rather than one post hoc subgroup, contradicts the later experiment: the claimed effects do not remotely overlap); non-randomized moves are heavily confounded by upward mobility and human capital; many other studies like Swedish lottery studies and the land lottery natural experiment show that exogenous shocks of wealth do not produce meaningful improvements in things like health anywhere remotely close to the observed correlations of wealth/health; genetically informed family designs which account for heritability by looking at siblings differentially exposed or by looking at relatives tend to find that most 'poor neighborhood' effects are driven by genetic confounds; specific versions of the 'poor neighborhood' hypothesis tend to go down in flames when rigorously tested (most recently, the claim that schizophrenia is caused by bad neighborhoods, which everyone was sure about; polygenic scores for schizophrenia show that it is the other way around - schizophrenics and those vulnerable to schizophrenia drift to poor neighborhoods); in genetics studies, the correlation between wealthy parents and one's own SES turns out to be entirely genetically mediated; the parent/child IQ thing is differential regression to the mean; and so on. Many of the claims made in OP are naively causal and are guaranteed to be overestimated based simply on not including genetic relatedness. These are just the recent contrary studies I happen to remember offhand. When you look at especially the recent genetic studies using polygenic scores from the GWASes to test environmental claims (eg Mendelian randomization), it's becoming increasingly clear: the slate is not blank and the sociology emperor has no clothes. I don't even know... what can be done about sociology? It is 2016 and every time I see a newspaper article or editorial invoking sociological results, it's totally wrong, and the sociologists quoted seem 100% committed to ignoring all the contrary evidence that not all differences are 100% due to environments. I mean... can you imagine seeing Vox cite a recent paper like "The Genetics of Success: How Single-Nucleotide Polymorphisms Associated With Educational Attainment Relate to Life-Course Development" http://pss.sagepub.com/content/early/2016/05/26/0956797616643070.abstract http://pss.sagepub.com/content/early/2016/05/26/095679761664... or a newspaper article on it (which didn't quote some scientists arguing that genetics research should be defunded or that the research is irrelevant)? That would be nice - society needs to come to grips with the confirmation of behavioral genetics. But it doesn't seem like it will happen anytime soon. It's all terribly frustrating. Anyway, I didn't mean to rant or try to write an in depth carefully cited rebuttal, but I just wanted to say: it is not as simple as 'poor people are poor and unhealthy because of racism and poverty', and there is lots of high-quality evidence of this which tends to go undiscussed in liberal media outlets, so pieces like this are closer to advocacy than research popularization.

randyrand 10y ago

This just in - being surrounded by good influences is good for you. And vis-versa. This isn't rocket science, of course. We've know about the important of cultural influence for a long time. There was a reason my parents cared about where I grew up, and who I hung out with. If you grow up in a culture where people don't care about academics, where welfare and child support are acceptable forms of provision, where machismo and crime are glorified, where you are told that discrimination will prevent you from otherwise succeeding, and that your failures can be blamed on racism - no, I don't think that culture will have a good influence on you.

placeybordeaux 10y ago
while the surrounding culture does matter a lot, it's more than that. There are also more mundane things such as poor access to quality food, education and secure places to relax. Malnurishment, poor education and constant stress all have negative effects on people.

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ashwinaj 10y ago

One of the comments I get people who visit India (I'm Indian) is that how is there a slum next to a swanky high rise or classy residential/commercial areas (at least in most big cities). I don't really have an explanation for this (lack of space, cheap labor etc.), but the more I read about economic segregation in the US the more I'm convinced that the inadvertent mixed income neighborhoods in India could be a solution. If you don't live around people who are less fortunate than you, how can you understand their plight and their point of view? Handing out a few bucks to a homeless guy or cutting a check to a non-profit doesn't create any substantial understanding of the issue. Obviously there will be opposition to this in the US since people want to live with other people in the same socio-economic strata as themselves. Other reasons: 1) I don't want my property price to depreciate 2) I don't want to live next to "da hood" etc. Until people have a drastic change in attitude this will be ongoing. The article touches on this a bit (section 8 vouchers) but why can't we have neighborhoods with multiple levels of housing options encouraging people with mixed incomes to be around each other.

Swizec 10y ago
> why can't we have neighborhoods with multiple levels of housing options encouraging people with mixed incomes to be around each other Because americans have spent the last 60+ years working to "solve" that problem. May I present to you, the White Flight: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight
- ashwinaj 10y ago
  Yes, I'm aware of white flight. It's 2016 and the claim is that America has supposedly moved on, but it surely doesn't look like it. Or no one wants to talk about it since it's embarrassing.
  - dmoy 10y ago
    Who claims that America has moved on from white flight? That seems like a far-fetched claim...
  - 10y ago

mjevans 10y ago

While the data might show these correlations I disagree on the premise that is reached as a result. It is not just economic stratification, but cultural differences. Those who have great wealth, and are not celebrity, tend to respect education, or at least attending 'upper tier academic institutions' for their upper society connections. Among this group of people knowledge /is/ power and it is respected. In economically down-trodden situations it is as if the population has been conditioned that they are beyond redemption, that there is no hope in enlightenment bringing them a better future. Maybe they are correct in that respect as greed is a major driving factor in politics. I suggest that the culture must change to enshrine knowledge and intellect as well as society rewarding normal productive labor for a real solution to these issues.

ASpring 10y ago
> I suggest that the culture must change to enshrine knowledge and intellect How do you suggest to do this?
- mjevans 10y ago
  I too am still only human; within my many flaws are gaps in my knowledge, experience, and ability that limit my capacity for solving this issue to a personal level. That is, I try to set a good example and help those closest to me when I am able. Maybe you or someone else has a solution that scales better?

cb18 10y ago

Doesn't all this seem somewhat backward. There's this victimization mentality that acts like poverty is this absolute thing that is meted out like a cursed rock, outside the control and agency of whom it's been placed upon. Why don't we have more discussion about the causes that lead to the effect of poverty. It's really more productive to see poverty as being an effect, or outcome of other causes or actions. Change the input and get a different outcome. And at a certain point it becomes a personal responsibility. If you want to help someone else, great, but the two of you have to be pushing in the same direction. And likewise, external conditions do have effects, if it comes to light that someone appears to be needlessly and negatively imposed upon there's clearly a place in society for discussing how best we can optimize everyone's external conditions. Everyone faces obstacles, but placing blame wholly outside oneself is always going to be a losing battle. >On top of it all, if a murder occurred in a child's neighborhood — in an area of about six to 10 square blocks — their score fell by 7 to 8 points. This is so ridiculous that people can make a pronouncement like that, thinking it's a reasonable analysis, or indeed the only analysis. We know that intelligence is a highly stable trait. Meaning for intelligence to be significantly diminished[0] requires something pretty drastic, like a serious brain injury or some kind of long term deprivation. There is no reason to think someone being killed within a particular distance of someone would have any kind of effect. Do all soldiers come home as dunces? Something seems to be missing from the kind of people that write these articles. Hard to say what it is exactly, a more holistic view, better analytical capabilities, less pre-conceived notions, intelligence? something... If they had whatever missing ingredient, then they might understand that an analysis that stands up to rigor is something more like, People tend to self-segregate along a whole host of traits[1], intelligence is a trait. The trait of intelligence is linked to a propensity for certain types of crimes. Murder among them, therefore it follows that the people that commit murder are statistically likely to have lower intelligence, as are the people around them. >Oh, another thing: Living in these poor neighborhoods makes you significantly less happy, less hopeful, and less healthy Oh, another thing: Any analytical mind of any worth can clearly see that the inverse has just as much going for it, if not more. It seems to clearly follow that people who are less happy, less hopeful, and less healthy would make their neighborhoods poorer. How a focus on improving happiness, hope, and health? Telling people their predicaments are caused by factors outside of their control is the last way to improve any of those things. [0]7 to 8 points is half a standard deviation, i.e. significant. [1]See Schelling's Macro Micro, for some of the mechanisms involved.

lacker 10y ago

Hmm, wait a moment. 59% of white kids moved up. 43% of white kids moved down. Even accounting for rounding, there's no way to get those numbers. It's even worse in other places: 25% of black kids had parents who grew up in the bottom two levels and moved up at least one. 78% of black kids had parents who grew up in the top three levels and moved down at least one. Those two groups should sum to less than 100%, certainly not 103%. Also, except for the "Moving to Opportunity" experiment, most of this seems to ignore the distinction between correlation and causation. This reminds me of the recent finding that 50% of papers in reputable psych journals reported mathematically impossible data. https://medium.com/@jamesheathers/the-grim-test-a-method-for-evaluating-published-research-9a4e5f05e870#.61n0pjt6s https://medium.com/@jamesheathers/the-grim-test-a-method-for... The more people start to dig in, the more the "social sciences" look unscientific.

Terribledactyl 10y ago
These numbers could be skewed from unequal number of children per parent in these different groups. Successful parents might have many more or fewer children.
- archeopterix 10y ago
  But children are integers.
  - choosername 10y ago
    At least I'd hope for their integrity.
squimmy 10y ago
It could be an issue of imprecise wording. For instance, perhaps 59% of white parents had kids who moved up, while 43% of white parents had kids who moved down. This doesn't excuse the reporting, but it might explain it.
- ddlatham 10y ago

ausjke 10y ago

Why blacks are not doing well? Because they were from Africa, but new immigrants from Africa came to US earn a pretty decent life quickly than those have been here centuries ago. Because they're minority, but other minorities such as the Jews and Asians are working hard and earning a decent life here. Because of less chance to get education, but you have affirmative action that you can get into decent college at a huge discount as far as scores go. Also so many financial support for economically disadvantaged families. Because of unfair tax system, election system... those seem not the key reason to me too. I might be missing something else. I think it's probably more of a culture thing, that favors education, hard working, loyal to family, etc. Without that, the civil rights law or various diversity initiatives can only help that much. The black community needs to address that gradually and it's the only way to fix the "poor neighborhood" for good. In where I live, the elected democratic officers decided to bridge the poor community with "rich" community by building government-sponsored condos right next to or in the middle of up-middle-class communities,the result is that people move out and the house price drops, does not look like a right fix to me.

H0n3sty 10y ago
~11 million unauthorized immigrants as of 2014 (1) Black labor participation rate at ~60% (2) Black population in US at ~45M (3) 45M * (1 - 60%) = 18M (1): http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/11/19/5-facts-about-illegal-immigration-in-the-u-s/ http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/11/19/5-facts-abou... (2): http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2014/01/black-labor-force-participation-rate-under-obama-hits-rock-bottom-lowest-level-ever-recorded/ http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2014/01/black-labor-force-pa... (3): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_ethnicity_in_the_United_States#Black_Americans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_ethnicity_in_the_Unit...
kentrado 10y ago
I don't usually write responses and I don't have much time to write you a detailed explanation of history. But are you aware that there are living black people who still remember segregation and Jim Crow? It wasn't that long ago. The idea that just because recently you decided to treat niggers like human beings, they should instantly have the same level as people who were never treated as subhuman in this US of A, is simply unadulterated pure stupidity.

known 10y ago

Reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_mobility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_mobility and http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=433866 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=433866

batat 10y ago

Expected to see something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruitt–Igoe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruitt–Igoe story.

galfarragem 10y ago

Empirically (aka having grown up in a poor neighbourhood) I would say that during infancy it doesn't matter much, it mostly depends on your parents background: they are the largest influence on you. It really starts to hurt is during teenage years when kids get independent. Then one of two situations use to happen: the environment pushes them down or they remove themselves from it and grow lonely. None of the options is optimal. Law 10: Infection: avoid the unhappy and the unlucky. -- Robert Greene (48 laws of power) Law 18: Do not build fortresses to protect yourself – isolation is dangerous -- Robert Greene (48 laws of power)