13 ms·
California has the USA’s highest poverty rate, when factoring in cost-of-living
- danjoc 10y ago$30,000 a year "poverty" https://www.dosomething.org/us/facts/11-facts-about-global-poverty https://www.dosomething.org/us/facts/11-facts-about-global-p... "more than 3 billion people — live on less than $2.50 a day."
- xienze 10y agoAs with everything in life, context matters.
- danjoc 10y agoContext, yes. They can tell me about how they are struggling to make ends meet because of their two car payments and interest only mortgage. That's totally the same as having your kids die from diarrhea, because they get their drinking water straight out of a dirty river and you don't have access to simple medications.
- eitally 10y agoThe problem is that in countries where you can survive on $2/day, you can also largely squat where you want and scrounge crude shelter whilst begging for food. You can't do any of that in California, in any reliable way... and in many parts of the state, $30k/yr just isn't enough to rent an apartment and cover the basics (food, transport, medical care). So yes, the poor in the US are both better and worse off than poor in the developing world.
- throwaway198743 10y agoActually, $2/day is actually completely manageable in rural India. I mean you won't be eating fancy stuff, but you'd be nowhere as miserable as being alone/homeless in the US.
- seanmcdirmid 10y agoYa, the bottom in the developed world, and especially in California, is much higher. In china you can find a moldy room in an apartment building basement (no window!), or even sleep in the restaurant you are working in (many people live in their shops in Beijing, and I don't mean above them in something like an apartment!). For food, there are plenty of places that cut corners to keep costs down, you'll live but you might get cancer later. Pre-Katrina New Orleans was popular because survival was similarly cheap, not for the same quality of survival, but the bottom possible was lower.
- vacri 10y agoYou've got a pretty stereotypical view of the developing world. Nevertheless, SF actually has pretty good services for the homeless. That's why there's a lot of homeless people there. Given also that the median black household income in California is $35k, it sounds like you can actually survive of $30k in Cali without your kids dying of dysentery. Alternatively, if you want to 'scrounge crude shelter', there's 11 million square miles of public land in California. In short, my eyes just about goggled out of my head when the response to "kids die from drinking dirty water" is "yeah, but they can live wherever they want".
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- danjoc 10y ago>in many parts of the state, $30k/yr just isn't enough to rent an apartment and cover the basics Oh no, I can't afford beach front property or a mansion in Beverly Hills on $30K a year? Poverty! http://www.apartmentcities.com/Los-Angeles-Apartments/Los-Angeles/Price-500/ http://www.apartmentcities.com/Los-Angeles-Apartments/Los-An... 15 pages under $500 in Los Angeles. >and worse off than poor in the developing world. So you won't mind moving there and living on a local salary, eh?
- dikdik 10y agoSo all the improvements the US us made in standards of living was completely pointless? We just need to be better than dying from diarrhea from our drinking water, then fuck it we've accomplished everything! No reason to improve anymore. Comparing the US to India is fucking stupid.
- dang 10y agoPlease don't post flamewar comments to HN. "That's totally the same as having your kids die from diarrhea" is exactly the kind of argument we don't need.
- psyc 10y agoMaybe try restating your point in units of food and shelter. Dollars have no intrinsic value.
- megous 10y agoSo perhaps move those poor americans to the third world. They'll feel like top 1% with those dollars.
- yummyfajitas 10y agoPlease don't - here in India we don't need a bunch of people too lazy to make their way in America.
- ars 10y agoYou could probably use their money though, no?
- hkmurakami 10y agoDefinitely saw similar things discussed in an East Asia -> SE Asia context and I had conflicting feelings about it as well.
- naveen99 10y agoWhy not? as long as they spend their money, it would be good for India.
- TheGirondin 10y agoSays the person who wants them to all come to the US. "I agree with that [immigration is a net benefit to nearly everyone] and support more or less open borders" - yummyfajitas
- yummyfajitas 10y agoI should have caveated that statement with the fact that immigrants must be good people who sell labor to willing buyers and don't victimize innocents. I thought I made that clear by mentioning comparative advantage. Unfortunately most poor Americans refuse to work, commit disability fraud and otherwise exploit the taxpayer, and commit disproportionate amounts of crime. (Far more than Indians - I've never felt unsafe in any slum here, unlike in the US). You don't get any comparative advantage from people who refuse to trade and merely take things from you.
- mrb 10y agoIt's comparable, I guess? $30k for a family of 4 is $20 per person per day. That's 8 times more than $2.50, but the cost of living in CA is (probably?) approximately 8x the cost of living of Africa, rural India, China, etc (where these 3 billion people live.)
- patio11 10y agoA challenge with poverty rates in the US is that they often essentially proxy for "what proportion of the population recently immigrated from low-wage countries"; immigration from e.g. Mexico to the US often causes the poverty rate in both countries to rise and every actual human to be better off. California has ~10 million immigrants; many of them arrived rather recently. (I think this is a variation on Simpson's paradox.)
- xienze 10y ago> immigration from e.g. Mexico to the US often causes the poverty rate in both countries to rise Both countries? How's that work if it's poor Mexicans coming here?
- patio11 10y agoFun fact: most immigrants from Mexico are not poor-relative-to-Mexico.
- xienze 10y agoAre we talking about immigrants or "immigrants"? I seriously doubt the immigrants of the illegal -- excuse me, "undocumented" -- variety are anything but poor. That's the reason the Mexican government is so eager to keep the whole thing going -- they get to simultaneously foist their poor upon the US while said poor send back billions in remittances. It's a major industry for Mexico, believe it or not.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- laurencerowe 10y agoNet illegal immigration from Mexico has been negative since 2009. http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/03/02/what-we-know-about-illegal-immigration-from-mexico/ http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/03/02/what-we-know...
- yummyfajitas 10y agoThere is something very important missing - the SPM poverty measure is relative poverty, not absolute. All this means is that CA has many rich people.
- HarryHirsch 10y agoAnd all the the pretty money you earn as a software engineer in SF is sufficient only for a kommunalka: http://venturebeat.com/2017/03/10/tech-workers-live-40-to-a-house-in-high-rent-san-francisco/ http://venturebeat.com/2017/03/10/tech-workers-live-40-to-a-... We had one in town when I was a student. The thing had a name. It was called Schweinebunker.
- Epenthesis 10y agoSo, living in places like that and paying that much is definitely not normal. For 1900 $/mo, you can get a bedroom in a really nice 2 or 3BR place in the desirable neighborhoods or a studio/1BR in the undesirable neighborhoods (sunset/richmond). I don't understand why the people in that article are living like that (Poor credit? Desperation to find a place fast? Ignorance of the existence of Craigslist?), but they're very, very far from being representative of SF real estate.
- jon-wood 10y agoI think you making that an example of a great deal just shows how skewed the SF housing market is. I'm in the south of the UK, just within commuting distance of London, and for $800/mth less than that rent a 3 bedroom house with a garden in a well connected area, and that's a bit expensive for the area because its well located. The housing market in London is just as ridiculous at the moment and I'm so glad to have got out.
- ptaipale 10y agoThat could be true, but the poverty rate doesn't really tell anything about it. A purchasing power metric (that includes cost of housing) would indicate that.
- 10y ago
- danjoc 10y agoAmericans waste enough food to end world hunger http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/35884-on-the-news-with-thom-hartmann-americans-waste-enough-food-to-end-world-hunger-and-more http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/35884-on-the-news-with-th...
- deelowe 10y agoThis is a meaningless metric. Food can't be magically shipped to the regions that need it. A better measurement would be waste per capita or farm land utilization.
- estsauver 10y agoThe other thing of course to remember is just shipping food out of the US and into the developing world is how you break local farming economies. Who wants to buy food from the local farmer when there's ample free food from relief programs. Development is hard.
- danjoc 10y agoMost of the food wasted is "ugly" food. It's not putting farmers out of business. It could keep starving people alive though.
- deelowe 10y agoWhich completely misses the point. To summarize what the parent is suggesting: "Teach a man to fish..."
- andromeda__ 10y ago>Development is hard. It really is. That's what Lothrop Stoddard called 'The Burden Of Civilization'. Essentially, this is to say that, in as much as civilization can be a good thing, it is also very difficult to attain and sustain; some people are willing to push themselves as hard as they can to do this and some people just aren't equipped to handle civilization.
- HillaryBriss 10y agoWhen I look around at approaches for reducing poverty in CA, almost everything I see is proposals for additional government subsidy programs. What I don't see is proposals for increasing the supply of the things that make COL so high in the first place. How do you make things like housing, health care, and education more abundant, cheaper, more competitive in CA? No one seems to know.
- YokoZar 10y agoFixing Housing supply is relatively easy: we just need to legalize construction. And maybe density too, such as the missing middle: http://missingmiddlehousing.com/ http://missingmiddlehousing.com/ There's a reason the poor have been migrating out into the sub-suburbs: that's where houses can actually get built.
- emojiofficer 10y agoThey're called exurbs
- imjustsaying 10y ago>No one seems to know. Everyone knows. Get the cancer known as the state out of the business of picking winners and losers.
- rpmcmurphy 10y agoThe problem with the way poverty is measured in the US is it measures relative income. Being poor relative to other people sucks, but consider the following. You can be poor in the US, and have: - Clean running water - Electricity - Heat - Phone, now plus internet access - Paved roads - Access to basic health care (for now, thanks Obama!) Disclosure: I went through bankruptcy and foreclosure, so I know exactly how much not having money sucks in this country, but I would take being broke in the US over being broke almost anywhere else, with one important caveat, if you have a long term physical or mental disability and do not have family to support you, then you are truly fucked (but that would be true anywhere outside of northern Europe or Canada as well).
- dikdik 10y agoEverything you state is true, but are we really supposed to use third world countries as our baseline? If Michael Phelps used Terry Schiavo as his competition, I doubt he would be as good as he is. In the US we should be comparing ourselves to the best countries with the least amount of poverty, the highest socioeconomic mobility, and the healthiest populions. We can't and won't improve if we always look for the lowest denominator then pat ourselves on the back because we are better than that.
- vanjoe 10y agoAlways comparing,never evaluating against an outside standard. We'll never break the n log(n) barrier
- adventured 10y agoShould we be comparing the US of 330 million people versus tiny nations that have artificial advantages due to their small size and homogeneous culture? Which pushes further into how you compare such dramatically different examples in the first place. Consider Finland. Five million people, 82% white, extremely anti-immigration, and they don't have to defend themselves for the most part. The US military shield has mostly taken care of that for them (thus their 1.3% of GDP military spending despite having a frequently hostile Russia on their doorstep). So you want to compare their outcome, to the US? Comparing a wildly diverse nation of 330 million against Sweden, Norway or Finland type nations, is absurd. Those are the absolute elite outcomes of the world and Europe in particular. Compare Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Minnesota, Virginia, New Jersey, Vermont, Washington, etc. to those nations. They all have median incomes equal to or higher than Switzerland (and that's before adjusting for the better cost of living in those states vs a Switzerland type nation) and are much closer on a population basis. Those are the elite outcomes of the US collection of states. Or would you rather compare various of the bottom 25 US states to the relatively impoverished half of Europe nobody ever wants to talk about? Bulgaria, Belarus, Russia, Moldova, Hungary, Ukraine, Greece, Portugal, Spain, Latvia, Lithuania, Serbia, Croatia, Macedonia, etc. The fact is, most developed nations struggle to match the median incomes of the poorest US states. Japan as one example has a median income 20% below Mississippi and Louisiana (and it's likely to continue losing ground to those states). Germany is about on par with Kentucky.
- gojiberry 10y agoOh my my. Makes me want to leave everything and move to Alabama. Does it?
- Apocryphon 10y agoHuntsville has a strong tech presence due to aerospace and defense, or so I've heard.
- dang 10y agoWe've banned this account for repeatedly violating the site guidelines.
- bagacrap 10y agoNot a surprise to me given that LA has the least affordable rent in the country (a measure of average percent of income spent on rent --- not absolute rent). But in both cases, my intuition is that this just means California is a very desirable place to live. If Dallas has lots of jobs and relatively affordable housing but you choose to live in California despite the financial burden, it must be because you think it has greater intrinsic value (weather, culture, community, etc).
- NTDF9 10y ago>> affordable housing but you choose to live in California despite the financial burden, it must be because you think it has greater intrinsic value (weather, culture, community, etc). Agreed. In addition, migration and re-establishing a new life in a new place is stressful and not cheap.
- dragonwriter 10y ago> If Dallas has lots of jobs and relatively affordable housing but you choose to live in California despite the financial burden, it must be because you think it has greater intrinsic value Or because you were born here and can't afford to leave; the share of California's population that is native born Californian has been growing for the last decade or so.
- massysett 10y agoFor many people, having family nearby saves so much money that a much lower cost of living elsewhere won't offset it. Having to pay for childcare (vs. having Grandma do it) alone is enough to wipe out the savings of moving to Dallas.
- danjoc 10y agohttp://www.apartmentcities.com/Los-Angeles-Apartments/Los-Angeles/Price-500/ http://www.apartmentcities.com/Los-Angeles-Apartments/Los-An... Here's a 15 page list of apartments under $500 in LA.
- dmode 10y agoThis headline gets repeated a lot, but it is extremely misleading. Due to it's huge size, California has communities and cost of living that are vastly different. I don't understand how you can assign a single cost of living measure to the entire state. A cost of living adjustment that is true for coastal California will be wildly off base for people living on Mojave desert. A better study will reflect supplemental poverty rate broken down by their cohort regions.
- yellowapple 10y agoEven a per-county breakdown would be accurate enough to be useful on at least a basic level.
- mariojv 10y agoI definitely agree in the case of California. In the case of smaller states (Rhode Island, Massachusetts except Boston to an extent), I would imagine that state-level info is more useful.
- username223 10y agoAbsolutely. California is wildly divided into places you want to live but can't afford (SF), and places you can afford but don't want to live (Barstow). $100k in SF is $33k in Barstow ( http://www.bestplaces.net/cost-of-living/san-francisco-ca/barstow-ca/100000 http://www.bestplaces.net/cost-of-living/san-francisco-ca/ba... )
- laughfactory 10y agoExcept they all face the same tax burden which, as a California resident until recently, is quite high: sales tax, property tax, income tax...they tax everything there, and there are few exemptions. Even at $60K the taxes in CA will eat you alive. Great weather (in SoCal), but the sunshine tax, it seemed to us, was perhaps as much as 50%!
- pm90 10y agoTo be fair though, its not like the tax money is going into the pockets of corrupt politicians (well maybe not all of it). California is the most progressive state and spends that money on its residents via education, healthcare, scientific research etc. I would be willing to pay more taxes if the State made good use of what I pay them.
- NumberSix 10y agoUrban areas in California, where most of the people live, such as the Silicon Valley have extremely high home ownership and apartment rental costs. The article notes this briefly and somewhat obliquely, but it is worth emphasizing. The median home price in San Jose, CA is about $850,000 at present (March 12, 2017) according to Zillow. The average rent for a one bedroom apartment in San Jose is about $2473 per month (https://www.rentjungle.com/average-rent-in-san-jose-rent-trends/ https://www.rentjungle.com/average-rent-in-san-jose-rent-tre...) The US Census lists a median home price for the United States as a whole of $221,800 in 2010 (https://www.census.gov/const/uspriceann.pdf https://www.census.gov/const/uspriceann.pdf) Median monthly gross residential rent in the United States was $934 in 2014 according to the Census ACS survey. (http://www.deptofnumbers.com/rent/us/ http://www.deptofnumbers.com/rent/us/) Other living expenses are often 10-25 percent higher in the major urban areas in California where most people live than other parts of the United States. (personal experience) It is housing and rental costs that dominate the disparity with much of the country however.
- ricw 10y agoThe direct negative effect on the quality of life of high housing costs is astonishing. Yet there's no real public uproar. When the price of gas goes up, seemingly everyone is up in arms. But housing?! People complain, but no where near as much as they should. In areas with high housing costs, this should be the primary political issue. I guess nepotism just wins the argument...
- fullshark 10y agoWell a lot of people own houses and are happy about it. There is plenty of uproar about it from renters. Mountain View just passed a rent control measure for example.
- matt_wulfeck 10y agoThere is an uproar, but there's an equal and greater uproar in the opposite direction whenever there's a new housing attempted to be built. Existing homeowners and establishment rally against it and they're quite organized. Couple this with the fact that California is entrenched in bureaucratic red tape, and you can see why nothing ever gets done about it.
- xg15 10y agoAfter reading many mental gymnastics excercises of varying creativity in this thread that try to explain why the supplemental poverty measure is irrelevant and/or misleading, I'd like to know, how would you define a measure for poverty that's both objective and gives a realistic account of the quality of life in the measured area?
- mdpopescu 10y agoFollowing Julian Simon, I'd use "how much X can you buy with an hour's worth of work", where X can be food, a basket of goods [1], precious metals or whatever seems more appropriate. I think the official basket of goods can be taken as a good first approximation. [1] http://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/basket_of_goods.asp http://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/basket_of_goods.asp
- nameisu 10y agokarma automotive told me only 10% cost of living increase from michigan. i told them to fuck off
- rayiner 10y agoIs California a good place to live for your typical person? It has an enviable economy with Silicon Valley and whatnot. Places all over the country are trying to recreate that. But it doesn't appear to have particularly good schools, infrastructure, or public services to show for it. Does the vaunted economic engine really translate into prosperity for the middle 50% of Californians?
- tathougies 10y agoNot surprising as california also has one of the lowest minimum wages in real terms. For all this talk about progressive politics and a 15/hr minimum wage, 'backwards' states in the south have real minimum wages well above 15 CA USD/hr. Some even surpass 20/hr. Mean while California wages would be the equivalent of around $3.50/he in their terms. So much for progressive politics