4 ms·

Important frame to consider, here in the comments: we're all reacting to an article that's reviewing a book. A long work of sociology. So the article isn't the

Important frame to consider, here in the comments: we're all reacting to an article that's reviewing a book. A long work of sociology. So the article isn't the ground truth; it's a tiny digest, plus a reaction by the article's author. The book itself is a project of research, which also isn't ground truth. But they bring up provocative points that most people haven't considered. And in some cases, won't consider. If your mental model for how the economy works somehow doesn't allow the situations described in the book or article, I'd hazard to say it's your mental model that's in error.

williamtrask 10y ago
standing ovation
rayiner 10y ago
> If your mental model for how the economy works somehow doesn't allow the situations described in the book or article, I'd hazard to say it's your mental model that's in error. What situations? People being evicted? People paying rent for trailers? What economic insight are you supposed to take away from those things? I would say that if your mental model of how society works does not include those things, yeah, it should. If everyone realized what was happening, maybe there would be more support for basic income, Section 8 vouchers, etc. That's my view--raise taxes and give more money to poor people so their lives are better. But that's an entirely different point, and not one that the article is making. The article is an archetypal example of what I call "well intentioned but economically ignorant liberalism." The folks who campaigned to make tenements illegal were not conservatives. They were liberals genuinely concerned about the living conditions of those residents. However, they were also ignorant about how economics works. So they tried to address the problem simply by making tenements illegal (i.e. taking an option away from poor people).[1] Calls to regulate check cashing places and payday lenders out of existence (or articles that demonize landlords who rent to poor people, like this one) fall into that same bucket. Reading the article, what kind of solution do you think the article is leading you to? Maybe making it harder for landlords to evict tenants, or limiting the rents that trailer parks can charge tenants. What does that do? Cause landlords to be less willing to rent to poor people, or less likely to invest in a new trailer park. I.e. it takes options away from poor people, and ironically reduces competition and raises prices in the markets that cater to poor people. Making some poor people better off (e.g. the ones that get the trailer park before the rent controls kicked in), but making poor people as a whole worse off. [1] https://fee.org/articles/the-hidden-war-on-affordable-housing/ https://fee.org/articles/the-hidden-war-on-affordable-housin...
- therpe1 10y ago
  This comment itself is pretty ignorant. At some point, everybody needs to understand that there are no simple solutions. Every proposed solution has pros and cons. Just giving more money to poor people could, under certain conditions (like the kind of tight housing market you see in most cities) lead to a kind of rent and asset inflation. Before dismissing solutions as "economically ignorant liberalism" you might carefully weigh the theoretical pros and cons. The next step is to not stop at theory and look at the actual facts on the ground. This relies on looking at the data. People love to rail against the minimum wage because everybody knows "in theory" that higher wages lead to less unemployment and higher prices... but in fact, careful review of the actual data shows this not to be the case. Similarly, people who rail against rent control and stronger tenant protections seem to have little to no actual understanding of how highly competitive markets like the real-estate US/North Eastern markets actually work. Rent control and rent stabilization in Manhattan, for example, has been well studied and demonstrated to have several positive network effects (by keeping families in place) and negative effects (by keeping families in place). It's never cut and dry. The reality is "theoretical arguments" are worthless because they often rely on simplistic models that have nothing to do with reality.
- ryandamm 10y ago
  I don't think there's an easy answer. Therefore, we should not expect obvious policy prescriptions from the article, book, research project. (I do hear your objection about the title; I see HN's title is updated to be less click-baity, and more reflective of the book's content.) I think the point of the book is to try to understand the situation as lived by poor people, and (if I recall the longer-form radio review correctly) the role eviction specifically plays in the cycle of poverty. To the extent there's a policy prescription here, it's to focus poverty-relief efforts on housing security. To the extent there's an economic prescription here, it's perhaps just the realization that the rental market, as it currently exists, is playing a role in that cycle of poverty (leaving aside exactly how "free" the market is in the first place). Seeing the work in isolation, though, and looking for answers... I think that misses the point. Personally, I see this as another insight into how expensive it is to be poor: whether it's banking, housing, educational opportunities, etc, the poor are dealing with a different set of challenges and tradeoffs than I experience. (Hence, the utility of the book.)
Bartweiss 10y ago
This is a really, really good comment. Book reviews are sometimes so deep and thoughtful that they are themselves worth reacting to, but they're never equivalent to the work reviewed. The presence of a positive-and-stupid book review does not invalidate the actual book (and conversely, a positive review does not guarantee a thoughtful book).
mathoff 10y ago
One step closer: this is the summary by the author http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/02/08/forced-out http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/02/08/forced-out
jasode 10y ago
>If your mental model for how the economy works somehow doesn't allow the situations My mental model certainly allows for the situations such as evictions and landlords making money because that much is obvious just by looking around. However, my mental model will not accept the journalist's headline claiming that "the Problem of poverty is that it's Profitable". That makes no sense. To test the journalist's assertion, just flip the words around: "the Solution to poverty is to make it Money-Losing!" This means that to "solve poverty", the landlord charges less than the cost of maintenance / property taxes / interest on loans / etc. Eventually, the landlord's bank account leaks away until the landlord herself is in poverty. And who then steps up to lose money to "solve" the landlord's poverty? The city accepts less property tax payments than it costs to maintain roads, schools, and salaries of the government staff? The grocery store accepts less payment than the cost of milk and bread? And who solves the poverty of the workers of the city government and grocery store that were laid off? How do we keep this chain of everybody losing money going so poverty is solved?
- jaggednad 10y ago
  I don't think anyone's saying that the solution to poverty is for landlords et al to start losing money. That's a ridiculous straw-man. The article points out that many people profit by keeping others in a powerless state and exploiting them. It doesn't posit a specific solution
  - jasode 10y ago
    >I don't think anyone's saying that the solution to poverty is for landlords et al to start losing money. And I'm not claiming anyone is saying that or pushing it as a realistic policy. Instead, I'm asking readers to think about it as a thought experiment to test the economic validity of what the journalist is saying. >It doesn't posit a specific solution Can you explain from a logical standpoint why taking the opposite of what the journalist said is not an _implied_ solution that's worth testing?
    - Bartweiss 10y ago
      That's not a valid thought experiment, though. First, because the truth of (A -> B) doesn't determine the truth of (!A -> !B), which is what your title inversion did. And second, because (A -> B) does imply (!B -> !A), but you haven't established (A -> B). If something causes a problem, that doesn't imply that inverting the thing will solve the problem. "Poverty is widespread because people profit from it" does not imply "poverty would disappear if people lost money when it happened". So you haven't actually said anything about the headline by mocking its inverse.
throwaway928372 10y ago
Thanks for this, I think it's really important. I wouldn't usually post, but I'm not sure if this is a shared experience for most HN people so here goes. My hometown in Alaska didn't have a road out. The the market price of the least expensive apartments was approximately %100 of the full time minimum wage net income. People my age who couldn't live with their parents or be students often crowded secretly into small apartments, and sometimes lived in cars or squatted in the woods, all of which is uncertain, illegal, and a barrier to self improvement and long term planning. People who couldn't afford to live there also couldn't afford the plane ticket to Seattle, so they would get stuck. There was no CS program at the tiny local university, so I moved "down south" to work, wait for residency, and become a student. I saw a lot of the same problems with a varying, but still impossible (rent):(minimum wage) ratio. I eventually decided that trying to work your way through school while paying rent is a dumb idea and I was later fortunate enough to find another way. Meanwhile I had, and saw, a lot of these kind of problems. When you can't pay for normal housing, it's illegal to reduce your consumption. Leases have occupancy limits and loitering and squatting are illegal. When you live in a spare room, closet, tent, or car you can get kicked out, arrested, ticketed, or impounded. As far as I could figure out, public assistance was not given to young, able, single men. So you choose between consuming more housing than you can afford, or breaking the law. The cheaper you live the more risky or illegal it is, so people kind of end up doing both. You do unsustainable things to pay rent like borrowing from family or credit cards. You avoid landlords and maintenance staff because you aren't on the lease, can't afford the rent hike for increased occupancy, can't pass the credit check, can't pay the deposit. Your car gets impounded because it's not registered. There's no bus to the suburbs. A cab costs most of your wage. You get fired for being late when you wake up in the morning and your car isn't there. I saw this kind of thing first hand and I feel fortunate to have got out of it with out any long term consequences, except in my mind. My partner gives me a hard time because it still makes me a little nervous that I can't fit all my stuff in the car and be ready to leave town. I'm not saying that I thought I had a right to live somewhere I couldn't afford. I just wished that people wouldn't judge me so harshly, or trivialize my problems. I tried moving to a lot of different places. Sometimes I couldn't get full time job. Sometimes I got fired. Sometimes I couldn't get a wage paying job, and had to settle for commissioned piece work. Sometimes I did day labor. Sometimes I couldn't find anything at all. There are lots of ways to fail to earn enough for rent. As an able young man, I found people extremely unsympathetic to my inability to prosper, or afford "normal" things. I sometimes find myself listening politely while people say very unkind things about the poor, apparently without a clue that I take it personally. Of course they don't call them poor; they call them "tenants" or "unemployed" or "welfare cheats". I have even heard it remarked that _real_ poverty doesn't exists in the U.S. because we give them welfare and free food, so no one should complain. Can a person be happy without autonomy and mobility to chose their place and manner of earning a living? Is starvation the only legitimate hardship exists? I like having labor and housing standards, but we need to acknowledge that there are people that are priced out of the regulated housing market. Their existence is effectively criminalized. I felt like the state wouldn't help me and wouldn't let me help myself. I think market failures or structural problems are sometimes willfully overlooked in America in sort of the same way that the poverty couldn't exist in communist states. I'm really not sure what to do about this, but it would be nice to start by admitting the possibility of some problem other than a lack of individual moral virtue.
chiefalchemist 10y ago
I've read Evicted. It was so disheartening that I almost couldn't finish. My biggest complaint was the end was a lot of stats and such. I thought he should have started there. Else, I could imagine most people never made it to the best part. On the positive, the bit about how a single eviction can disrupt an entire neighborhood was mind blowing. I'm not doing it justice, but you'll know what I mean once you read the book.

williamtrask 10y ago

standing ovation

rayiner 10y ago

> If your mental model for how the economy works somehow doesn't allow the situations described in the book or article, I'd hazard to say it's your mental model that's in error. What situations? People being evicted? People paying rent for trailers? What economic insight are you supposed to take away from those things? I would say that if your mental model of how society works does not include those things, yeah, it should. If everyone realized what was happening, maybe there would be more support for basic income, Section 8 vouchers, etc. That's my view--raise taxes and give more money to poor people so their lives are better. But that's an entirely different point, and not one that the article is making. The article is an archetypal example of what I call "well intentioned but economically ignorant liberalism." The folks who campaigned to make tenements illegal were not conservatives. They were liberals genuinely concerned about the living conditions of those residents. However, they were also ignorant about how economics works. So they tried to address the problem simply by making tenements illegal (i.e. taking an option away from poor people).[1] Calls to regulate check cashing places and payday lenders out of existence (or articles that demonize landlords who rent to poor people, like this one) fall into that same bucket. Reading the article, what kind of solution do you think the article is leading you to? Maybe making it harder for landlords to evict tenants, or limiting the rents that trailer parks can charge tenants. What does that do? Cause landlords to be less willing to rent to poor people, or less likely to invest in a new trailer park. I.e. it takes options away from poor people, and ironically reduces competition and raises prices in the markets that cater to poor people. Making some poor people better off (e.g. the ones that get the trailer park before the rent controls kicked in), but making poor people as a whole worse off. [1] https://fee.org/articles/the-hidden-war-on-affordable-housing/ https://fee.org/articles/the-hidden-war-on-affordable-housin...

therpe1 10y ago
This comment itself is pretty ignorant. At some point, everybody needs to understand that there are no simple solutions. Every proposed solution has pros and cons. Just giving more money to poor people could, under certain conditions (like the kind of tight housing market you see in most cities) lead to a kind of rent and asset inflation. Before dismissing solutions as "economically ignorant liberalism" you might carefully weigh the theoretical pros and cons. The next step is to not stop at theory and look at the actual facts on the ground. This relies on looking at the data. People love to rail against the minimum wage because everybody knows "in theory" that higher wages lead to less unemployment and higher prices... but in fact, careful review of the actual data shows this not to be the case. Similarly, people who rail against rent control and stronger tenant protections seem to have little to no actual understanding of how highly competitive markets like the real-estate US/North Eastern markets actually work. Rent control and rent stabilization in Manhattan, for example, has been well studied and demonstrated to have several positive network effects (by keeping families in place) and negative effects (by keeping families in place). It's never cut and dry. The reality is "theoretical arguments" are worthless because they often rely on simplistic models that have nothing to do with reality.
ryandamm 10y ago
I don't think there's an easy answer. Therefore, we should not expect obvious policy prescriptions from the article, book, research project. (I do hear your objection about the title; I see HN's title is updated to be less click-baity, and more reflective of the book's content.) I think the point of the book is to try to understand the situation as lived by poor people, and (if I recall the longer-form radio review correctly) the role eviction specifically plays in the cycle of poverty. To the extent there's a policy prescription here, it's to focus poverty-relief efforts on housing security. To the extent there's an economic prescription here, it's perhaps just the realization that the rental market, as it currently exists, is playing a role in that cycle of poverty (leaving aside exactly how "free" the market is in the first place). Seeing the work in isolation, though, and looking for answers... I think that misses the point. Personally, I see this as another insight into how expensive it is to be poor: whether it's banking, housing, educational opportunities, etc, the poor are dealing with a different set of challenges and tradeoffs than I experience. (Hence, the utility of the book.)

Bartweiss 10y ago

This is a really, really good comment. Book reviews are sometimes so deep and thoughtful that they are themselves worth reacting to, but they're never equivalent to the work reviewed. The presence of a positive-and-stupid book review does not invalidate the actual book (and conversely, a positive review does not guarantee a thoughtful book).

mathoff 10y ago

One step closer: this is the summary by the author http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/02/08/forced-out http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/02/08/forced-out

jasode 10y ago

>If your mental model for how the economy works somehow doesn't allow the situations My mental model certainly allows for the situations such as evictions and landlords making money because that much is obvious just by looking around. However, my mental model will not accept the journalist's headline claiming that "the Problem of poverty is that it's Profitable". That makes no sense. To test the journalist's assertion, just flip the words around: "the Solution to poverty is to make it Money-Losing!" This means that to "solve poverty", the landlord charges less than the cost of maintenance / property taxes / interest on loans / etc. Eventually, the landlord's bank account leaks away until the landlord herself is in poverty. And who then steps up to lose money to "solve" the landlord's poverty? The city accepts less property tax payments than it costs to maintain roads, schools, and salaries of the government staff? The grocery store accepts less payment than the cost of milk and bread? And who solves the poverty of the workers of the city government and grocery store that were laid off? How do we keep this chain of everybody losing money going so poverty is solved?

jaggednad 10y ago
I don't think anyone's saying that the solution to poverty is for landlords et al to start losing money. That's a ridiculous straw-man. The article points out that many people profit by keeping others in a powerless state and exploiting them. It doesn't posit a specific solution
- jasode 10y ago
  >I don't think anyone's saying that the solution to poverty is for landlords et al to start losing money. And I'm not claiming anyone is saying that or pushing it as a realistic policy. Instead, I'm asking readers to think about it as a thought experiment to test the economic validity of what the journalist is saying. >It doesn't posit a specific solution Can you explain from a logical standpoint why taking the opposite of what the journalist said is not an _implied_ solution that's worth testing?
  - Bartweiss 10y ago
    That's not a valid thought experiment, though. First, because the truth of (A -> B) doesn't determine the truth of (!A -> !B), which is what your title inversion did. And second, because (A -> B) does imply (!B -> !A), but you haven't established (A -> B). If something causes a problem, that doesn't imply that inverting the thing will solve the problem. "Poverty is widespread because people profit from it" does not imply "poverty would disappear if people lost money when it happened". So you haven't actually said anything about the headline by mocking its inverse.

throwaway928372 10y ago

Thanks for this, I think it's really important. I wouldn't usually post, but I'm not sure if this is a shared experience for most HN people so here goes. My hometown in Alaska didn't have a road out. The the market price of the least expensive apartments was approximately %100 of the full time minimum wage net income. People my age who couldn't live with their parents or be students often crowded secretly into small apartments, and sometimes lived in cars or squatted in the woods, all of which is uncertain, illegal, and a barrier to self improvement and long term planning. People who couldn't afford to live there also couldn't afford the plane ticket to Seattle, so they would get stuck. There was no CS program at the tiny local university, so I moved "down south" to work, wait for residency, and become a student. I saw a lot of the same problems with a varying, but still impossible (rent):(minimum wage) ratio. I eventually decided that trying to work your way through school while paying rent is a dumb idea and I was later fortunate enough to find another way. Meanwhile I had, and saw, a lot of these kind of problems. When you can't pay for normal housing, it's illegal to reduce your consumption. Leases have occupancy limits and loitering and squatting are illegal. When you live in a spare room, closet, tent, or car you can get kicked out, arrested, ticketed, or impounded. As far as I could figure out, public assistance was not given to young, able, single men. So you choose between consuming more housing than you can afford, or breaking the law. The cheaper you live the more risky or illegal it is, so people kind of end up doing both. You do unsustainable things to pay rent like borrowing from family or credit cards. You avoid landlords and maintenance staff because you aren't on the lease, can't afford the rent hike for increased occupancy, can't pass the credit check, can't pay the deposit. Your car gets impounded because it's not registered. There's no bus to the suburbs. A cab costs most of your wage. You get fired for being late when you wake up in the morning and your car isn't there. I saw this kind of thing first hand and I feel fortunate to have got out of it with out any long term consequences, except in my mind. My partner gives me a hard time because it still makes me a little nervous that I can't fit all my stuff in the car and be ready to leave town. I'm not saying that I thought I had a right to live somewhere I couldn't afford. I just wished that people wouldn't judge me so harshly, or trivialize my problems. I tried moving to a lot of different places. Sometimes I couldn't get full time job. Sometimes I got fired. Sometimes I couldn't get a wage paying job, and had to settle for commissioned piece work. Sometimes I did day labor. Sometimes I couldn't find anything at all. There are lots of ways to fail to earn enough for rent. As an able young man, I found people extremely unsympathetic to my inability to prosper, or afford "normal" things. I sometimes find myself listening politely while people say very unkind things about the poor, apparently without a clue that I take it personally. Of course they don't call them poor; they call them "tenants" or "unemployed" or "welfare cheats". I have even heard it remarked that _real_ poverty doesn't exists in the U.S. because we give them welfare and free food, so no one should complain. Can a person be happy without autonomy and mobility to chose their place and manner of earning a living? Is starvation the only legitimate hardship exists? I like having labor and housing standards, but we need to acknowledge that there are people that are priced out of the regulated housing market. Their existence is effectively criminalized. I felt like the state wouldn't help me and wouldn't let me help myself. I think market failures or structural problems are sometimes willfully overlooked in America in sort of the same way that the poverty couldn't exist in communist states. I'm really not sure what to do about this, but it would be nice to start by admitting the possibility of some problem other than a lack of individual moral virtue.

chiefalchemist 10y ago

I've read Evicted. It was so disheartening that I almost couldn't finish. My biggest complaint was the end was a lot of stats and such. I thought he should have started there. Else, I could imagine most people never made it to the best part. On the positive, the bit about how a single eviction can disrupt an entire neighborhood was mind blowing. I'm not doing it justice, but you'll know what I mean once you read the book.