8 ms·

I don’t think there’s necessarily a conflict between having empathy for people unconditionally while still asking questions like: if times were at one point goo

I don’t think there’s necessarily a conflict between having empathy for people unconditionally while still asking questions like: if times were at one point good or OK but you’ve fallen into hard times now, why did you not have savings? People ask these questions because being miserly to save is hard and unpleasant, and then when others seemingly haven’t saved, it’s emotionally difficult helping them. I see people using benefits cards buying food at grocery stores that I would never allow myself to buy. It’s not something that fosters empathy within me. My family came to this country with absolutely _nothing_ and my parents saved and saved and saved to accumulate a safety net. The point of saving is so that when you lose our job you don’t face imminent castrophe. If you lose your job and you’ve saved you can migrate and find a job elsewhere. But millions of Americans don’t do this. It’s hard to feel bad for them when you put so much hard work and deny yourself so much just to save. But I’m not saying anything new: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ant_and_the_Grasshopper https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ant_and_the_Grasshopper

nitwit005 9y ago
It's a fairly common phenomenon to see immigrant households doing better than the American-born population, despite the obvious hurdles of no savings and not speaking English. Every time the census data gets published, you tend to see a few articles pop up about it: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/01/nyregion/01census.html http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/01/nyregion/01census.html
kraig911 9y ago
When you say they had nothing they had nothing or did they have nothing and were also in 'debt'? In my families historical situation the big issue is you're poor because of debts. You can't move because you're stuck in a mortgage or farm loan. You can't go to college because you owe money. You can't better yourself without help from the outside essentially. Imagine owing 2k+ a month but only making 1800 for a few years that will drain your savings.. imagine then it gets worse and worse and eventually you get laid off. Being upside down causes the blood to go to your brain and like the article implies makes some people continue to make bad decisions. Say you get out of being upside down for just a small time you then rationalize spending over what you were like before because you think your ship finally came in... but in today's society that can change in a heartbeat.
- qaq 9y ago
  I can see both points for immigrants it's hard to understand because generally people who immigrate are more enterprising risk taking and willing to find creative ways to change their circumstances.
  - linkmotif 9y ago
    This makes sense generally. In our case, though, my family was facing ethnic persecution. We came to the United States as United Nations refugees. We were not seeking economic opportunities.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
nicoburns 9y ago
If you live somewhere with a social safety net (I'm from the UK) then there isn't the same social imperative to save: saving becomes a luxury for those who are not the poorest in society (which in reality it is anyway) This works because we end up sharing the disproportionate costs which sometimes fall on those who are unfortunate (they lose their job, they get sick, etc). It's much more efficient than everyone having to have individual savings.
- brooklyn_ashey 9y ago
  And it sure is difficult for folks to save when they are working their butts off to pay crazy rent/mortgage and sky high medical/dental so they can stay healthy to work...plus college and grad school loans that got them the low paying job in the first place (although they went to school to have an actual profession which would have covered these expenses but doesn't come close anymore) all in a city where there are some jobs but no affordable housing. If you can't afford your monthly bills, you can't save and you go deeper into the hole. This is the case for many with graduate degrees in the US.
  - linkmotif 9y ago
    No one forced anyone into taking loans or living in places with expensive rent. Just because someone—erm, our whole culture—lied to you and you took the bait, doesn’t mean you’re off the hook. That’s how freedom works. It requires individuals to know, to teach their kids not to take loans from creeps (aka basically all loans), not to believe nonsense mantras like the value of higher education. Just because Barack Obama made some pretty speech about going to college doesn’t mean he’s right. It means he’s getting votes by making people feel good. Just because you feel like you “worked your butt off” doesn’t mean you actually did anything or that anyone owes you anything.
    - brooklyn_ashey 9y ago
      Gosh. I didn't expect anyone here to be this unable to imagine/relate that many of our circumstances are not in our control. I know how hard it is to hear that innocent, strong, intelligent, accomplished people could be suffering, even after great accomplishment. It reminds us that we are all vulnerable to being crushed under the same weight ourselves. It's painful to watch if we have a shred of empathy in us, and I believe many do. One thing our culture is terrible at is teaching empathy, and that's because it doesn't offer any- not a shred. It's got this tough-guy cowboy tone that echoes, empty and false when you ask yourself how truly tough one has to be to kill and steal...to enslave... destroy natural resources. It would have been "tougher"to work together to embrace- to empathize -to aim to preserve irreplaceable resources of value, but we do create false narratives to cover for our most horrible mistakes and shames. Our society here in the US evolved from slavery making development possible and affordable - I assume you realize that. This same narrative forms a constantly evolving and deepening culture of abuse that permeates everything we do- how we educate, how we employ, how we treat our family and friends, neighbors and visitors.. and even fellow "hackers" who contribute to a conversation here. It is important we remember this. I'm responding to you so that someone reading your comment who is already feeling without hope knows that there isn't agreement on your perspective. Sometimes, hope in a place like this one is very important. When a people are abused and in turn become abusers themselves, as that is the natural tendency without conscious opposing effort, they eventually think that vulnerability means weakness and militarism means strength-a kind of tank-like war procession of knowing invincibility. This is the kind of thinking that totalitarianism happily thrives in-- and it surely is the opposite of freedom. (since you wanted to get into how freedom works) This kind of thing actually makes you vulnerable to control. Your attitudes are looking for or resonating from an unkind master- they accept abuse as the cost of doing business and that makes sense here in this culture,sadly. Don't you think it would be better to aim to be strong enough to listen, to seek understanding, to collaborate,to empathize,and to care about rather than this false "strong" enough to crush and dominate? That truly is a weapon that is easily turned against its own shooter in a second. When people are talked to in this way over and over, our most vulnerable-- are killed off in spirit by this , or they are killed off literally by the societal force of poverty or sadly, more literally by someone who was too vulnerable and could not bear another second of this kind of lack of empathy and smug cruelty in the face of their crying out to their community to be heard. Your people are in desperate need of help, even in the form of empathy on a forum for those who should be able to empathize with their plight. If that is you, man, I feel you and we will change things, and if it isn't,please give some thought to kindness perhaps especially because it clearly was not offered to you often enough.
runako 9y ago
All of this modulo American healthcare means a lot of people who follow this script still end up with nothing. This is especially the case for entry-level jobs and other careers that are more available to the newly arrived. If you work in a median-income job and are miserly for a long time and save up a year's income, you will have around $60k in the bank. Since you don't have a pension, materially all of this will be in mutual funds or the like if retirement is in your plans. But great, you have savings! Now let anything happen that requires you to visit a hospital unexpectedly. Let's say your appendix bursts, so you couldn't meaningfully have avoided this calamity. The average cost for an appendectomy in the US is $33k[1]. That's just the surgery, so assume you'll be out $40k or more. Now let your boss be a miser (like yourself) who decides to fire you because you can't come in. Depending on how quickly you find another job, how much it pays, and your ability to avoid another unexpected disaster (car trouble, sick kid, etc.) you could quite easily burn through the entire $60k of your savings from this one incident. So the very next time this happens, you're no better off than the folks who saved nothing. But wait, it gets worse! Since your $60k was primarily in retirement savings, you will likely end up paying penalties and taxes for early withdrawal. So you will end up spending thousands of dollars to access your money. The rules are designed to kick you while you're down in this respect. And now you have no retirement savings, so people can talk about what a freeloader you are in your dotage. (The probabilities get worse as you get older. For an example of how bad, check pricing for long-term care coverage or long-term disability coverage. Basically -- you can't reliably out-grasshopper biology.) Our healthcare system in general makes the grasshopper approach more about luck than is apparent at first glance. 1 - Obviously, insurance currently will pay a large portion of the $33k, as the ACA mandates that health insurers sell a useful product. But this has not been the case except for the last 7ish years, and may not be the case again in the near future. It would be foolish to expect health insurance to function as "health insurance" in America for any extended period of time.
- hueving 9y ago
  >But this has not been the case except for the last 7ish years, Useful health insurance existed before the ACA.
  - 9y ago
MisterBastahrd 9y ago
Why do you assume someone can HAVE savings? I live in a Texas city. Rent here for a 2 bedroom apartment is over $1K a month. If you're a single mother of 2, you can expect $500 a month for EBT if you make $9 an hour. So after you get through paying your taxes, social security, medicare, etc... you're stuck with pocket change (that still has to go to electricity, gas for the car / maintenance) and use EBT to pay for your food. Please spare the empathy bit. When you're working odd shifts, you KNOW the kids will eat the pizza rolls, so you buy the damned pizza rolls. But let's say single mom gets a $4 raise. Guess what happens? EBT evaporates. Completely. Not only that, but she starts getting charged $160+ a month for the daycare that she sends her kids to so that she can work those odd hours. $3 more bucks? Her daycare subsidy evaporates. She's making $16 an hour, but now she can't afford to pay her bills. Yeah, please lecture us again on why they can't save money.
- Simon_says 9y ago
  I think, but I'm not sure, that at her income level, the Earned Income Tax Credit will let her get a net refund from the federal government? And Texas doesn't tax income. Savings have to come from the biggest choices in your life. You've already assumed a bunch of poor choices in your model of this hypothetical person. You didn't mention your city, but I found $400-500 2 bedroom apartments on a quick Craigslist search on the outskirts of Houston. Why is this person living in a (presumably expensive) city? The main reason to move to the city is better jobs, but if she's making $9-16/hour, she may as well live somewhere less expensive. A lot of people in that income bracket live with parents or other family. Why does she need 2 bedrooms? My wife grew up sharing a single bedroom apartment with 3 other people and until she moved to the USA, it never occurred to her that it was the slightest bit unusual. Kids adapt; they'll be fine in one room. Why is she a single mom? Where's dad? Is he dead? Shouldn't the life insurance payout cover this stuff? If he's alive, shouldn't he be kicking in support? Maybe don't choose to have kids when you're making $9/hour or have a chaotic domestic life?
  - dizzystar 9y ago
    But also, she will have to work a second job because no one gives full time work at that pay level. That's the brutal cost of ACA.
Viliam1234 9y ago
> if times were at one point good or OK but you’ve fallen into hard times now, why did you not have savings? The size of income is not the only difference between people. People can have different families, get different informal education at home, etc. If you are poor but smart, and so is your family, and you love and help each other... there is a chance you will sooner or later get out of poverty somehow; as long as one succeeds, they can provide help and advice to others, etc. It is a completely different situation if e.g. someone in your poor family is crazy. Crazy people can create all kinds of difficulties, whether interpersonal or financial, which can consume all your energy and savings. I know people who have decent income, but can't save any of it, because they have relatives who regularly get themselves in all kinds of financial trouble, knowing that they can always ask Joe to save them. For example, they don't pay their bills, and then call Joe for help when a collector comes and wants the money back with some extra interest. And Joe doesn't know how to tell them "no" and just watch them lose the roofs above their heads. Therefore, no matter how many years of decent income will Joe have, he will never have savings. I know people who spend a lot of their attention mitigating various problems that their crazy relatives with too much free time created. The amount of energy someone else spends on building a startup, they spend solving artificially created problems which wouldn't exist if their crazy relatives wouldn't make up things, or if the rest of the family wouldn't believe them. I guess what I am trying to say is that people are connected; and some of them start connected to decent people, and others start connected to huge heaps of shit. Social capital is also a form of capital, and it can be negative.
- hycaria 9y ago
  If Joe rather has relatives no matter how crazy and draining on his own financial and mental wealth, than to just cut bridges, protect himself and let people assume their shitty decisions, then be it, he made his choice.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- linkmotif 9y ago
  Yes, thank you for this. I think I did overlook this. I can see how this must be very prevalent.
pvaldes 9y ago
The ant and the grasshopper is a just a gross simplification. Both are strategies that can be valid and work in different sceneries. When you spend some money you create a social net, maybe you have more friends or hang with more people that could help you in troubled times. For the "ant" people, the colony (family) is all. Can't trust anybody out of that circle, so saving the money is the correct and only option. For solitary "grasshopper" people, without strong family bonds, spending money and being generous with their money can pay more in the future if they make wise choices about whom to spend the money. Safety net can be made with money or with social bonds. Both can fail and no one is more virtuous than the other. The best is probably having a mix of both.

nitwit005 9y ago

It's a fairly common phenomenon to see immigrant households doing better than the American-born population, despite the obvious hurdles of no savings and not speaking English. Every time the census data gets published, you tend to see a few articles pop up about it: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/01/nyregion/01census.html http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/01/nyregion/01census.html

kraig911 9y ago

When you say they had nothing they had nothing or did they have nothing and were also in 'debt'? In my families historical situation the big issue is you're poor because of debts. You can't move because you're stuck in a mortgage or farm loan. You can't go to college because you owe money. You can't better yourself without help from the outside essentially. Imagine owing 2k+ a month but only making 1800 for a few years that will drain your savings.. imagine then it gets worse and worse and eventually you get laid off. Being upside down causes the blood to go to your brain and like the article implies makes some people continue to make bad decisions. Say you get out of being upside down for just a small time you then rationalize spending over what you were like before because you think your ship finally came in... but in today's society that can change in a heartbeat.

qaq 9y ago
I can see both points for immigrants it's hard to understand because generally people who immigrate are more enterprising risk taking and willing to find creative ways to change their circumstances.
- linkmotif 9y ago
  This makes sense generally. In our case, though, my family was facing ethnic persecution. We came to the United States as United Nations refugees. We were not seeking economic opportunities.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

nicoburns 9y ago

If you live somewhere with a social safety net (I'm from the UK) then there isn't the same social imperative to save: saving becomes a luxury for those who are not the poorest in society (which in reality it is anyway) This works because we end up sharing the disproportionate costs which sometimes fall on those who are unfortunate (they lose their job, they get sick, etc). It's much more efficient than everyone having to have individual savings.

brooklyn_ashey 9y ago
And it sure is difficult for folks to save when they are working their butts off to pay crazy rent/mortgage and sky high medical/dental so they can stay healthy to work...plus college and grad school loans that got them the low paying job in the first place (although they went to school to have an actual profession which would have covered these expenses but doesn't come close anymore) all in a city where there are some jobs but no affordable housing. If you can't afford your monthly bills, you can't save and you go deeper into the hole. This is the case for many with graduate degrees in the US.
- linkmotif 9y ago
  No one forced anyone into taking loans or living in places with expensive rent. Just because someone—erm, our whole culture—lied to you and you took the bait, doesn’t mean you’re off the hook. That’s how freedom works. It requires individuals to know, to teach their kids not to take loans from creeps (aka basically all loans), not to believe nonsense mantras like the value of higher education. Just because Barack Obama made some pretty speech about going to college doesn’t mean he’s right. It means he’s getting votes by making people feel good. Just because you feel like you “worked your butt off” doesn’t mean you actually did anything or that anyone owes you anything.
  - brooklyn_ashey 9y ago
    Gosh. I didn't expect anyone here to be this unable to imagine/relate that many of our circumstances are not in our control. I know how hard it is to hear that innocent, strong, intelligent, accomplished people could be suffering, even after great accomplishment. It reminds us that we are all vulnerable to being crushed under the same weight ourselves. It's painful to watch if we have a shred of empathy in us, and I believe many do. One thing our culture is terrible at is teaching empathy, and that's because it doesn't offer any- not a shred. It's got this tough-guy cowboy tone that echoes, empty and false when you ask yourself how truly tough one has to be to kill and steal...to enslave... destroy natural resources. It would have been "tougher"to work together to embrace- to empathize -to aim to preserve irreplaceable resources of value, but we do create false narratives to cover for our most horrible mistakes and shames. Our society here in the US evolved from slavery making development possible and affordable - I assume you realize that. This same narrative forms a constantly evolving and deepening culture of abuse that permeates everything we do- how we educate, how we employ, how we treat our family and friends, neighbors and visitors.. and even fellow "hackers" who contribute to a conversation here. It is important we remember this. I'm responding to you so that someone reading your comment who is already feeling without hope knows that there isn't agreement on your perspective. Sometimes, hope in a place like this one is very important. When a people are abused and in turn become abusers themselves, as that is the natural tendency without conscious opposing effort, they eventually think that vulnerability means weakness and militarism means strength-a kind of tank-like war procession of knowing invincibility. This is the kind of thinking that totalitarianism happily thrives in-- and it surely is the opposite of freedom. (since you wanted to get into how freedom works) This kind of thing actually makes you vulnerable to control. Your attitudes are looking for or resonating from an unkind master- they accept abuse as the cost of doing business and that makes sense here in this culture,sadly. Don't you think it would be better to aim to be strong enough to listen, to seek understanding, to collaborate,to empathize,and to care about rather than this false "strong" enough to crush and dominate? That truly is a weapon that is easily turned against its own shooter in a second. When people are talked to in this way over and over, our most vulnerable-- are killed off in spirit by this , or they are killed off literally by the societal force of poverty or sadly, more literally by someone who was too vulnerable and could not bear another second of this kind of lack of empathy and smug cruelty in the face of their crying out to their community to be heard. Your people are in desperate need of help, even in the form of empathy on a forum for those who should be able to empathize with their plight. If that is you, man, I feel you and we will change things, and if it isn't,please give some thought to kindness perhaps especially because it clearly was not offered to you often enough.

runako 9y ago

All of this modulo American healthcare means a lot of people who follow this script still end up with nothing. This is especially the case for entry-level jobs and other careers that are more available to the newly arrived. If you work in a median-income job and are miserly for a long time and save up a year's income, you will have around $60k in the bank. Since you don't have a pension, materially all of this will be in mutual funds or the like if retirement is in your plans. But great, you have savings! Now let anything happen that requires you to visit a hospital unexpectedly. Let's say your appendix bursts, so you couldn't meaningfully have avoided this calamity. The average cost for an appendectomy in the US is $33k[1]. That's just the surgery, so assume you'll be out $40k or more. Now let your boss be a miser (like yourself) who decides to fire you because you can't come in. Depending on how quickly you find another job, how much it pays, and your ability to avoid another unexpected disaster (car trouble, sick kid, etc.) you could quite easily burn through the entire $60k of your savings from this one incident. So the very next time this happens, you're no better off than the folks who saved nothing. But wait, it gets worse! Since your $60k was primarily in retirement savings, you will likely end up paying penalties and taxes for early withdrawal. So you will end up spending thousands of dollars to access your money. The rules are designed to kick you while you're down in this respect. And now you have no retirement savings, so people can talk about what a freeloader you are in your dotage. (The probabilities get worse as you get older. For an example of how bad, check pricing for long-term care coverage or long-term disability coverage. Basically -- you can't reliably out-grasshopper biology.) Our healthcare system in general makes the grasshopper approach more about luck than is apparent at first glance. 1 - Obviously, insurance currently will pay a large portion of the $33k, as the ACA mandates that health insurers sell a useful product. But this has not been the case except for the last 7ish years, and may not be the case again in the near future. It would be foolish to expect health insurance to function as "health insurance" in America for any extended period of time.

hueving 9y ago
>But this has not been the case except for the last 7ish years, Useful health insurance existed before the ACA.
- 9y ago

MisterBastahrd 9y ago

Why do you assume someone can HAVE savings? I live in a Texas city. Rent here for a 2 bedroom apartment is over $1K a month. If you're a single mother of 2, you can expect $500 a month for EBT if you make $9 an hour. So after you get through paying your taxes, social security, medicare, etc... you're stuck with pocket change (that still has to go to electricity, gas for the car / maintenance) and use EBT to pay for your food. Please spare the empathy bit. When you're working odd shifts, you KNOW the kids will eat the pizza rolls, so you buy the damned pizza rolls. But let's say single mom gets a $4 raise. Guess what happens? EBT evaporates. Completely. Not only that, but she starts getting charged $160+ a month for the daycare that she sends her kids to so that she can work those odd hours. $3 more bucks? Her daycare subsidy evaporates. She's making $16 an hour, but now she can't afford to pay her bills. Yeah, please lecture us again on why they can't save money.

Simon_says 9y ago
I think, but I'm not sure, that at her income level, the Earned Income Tax Credit will let her get a net refund from the federal government? And Texas doesn't tax income. Savings have to come from the biggest choices in your life. You've already assumed a bunch of poor choices in your model of this hypothetical person. You didn't mention your city, but I found $400-500 2 bedroom apartments on a quick Craigslist search on the outskirts of Houston. Why is this person living in a (presumably expensive) city? The main reason to move to the city is better jobs, but if she's making $9-16/hour, she may as well live somewhere less expensive. A lot of people in that income bracket live with parents or other family. Why does she need 2 bedrooms? My wife grew up sharing a single bedroom apartment with 3 other people and until she moved to the USA, it never occurred to her that it was the slightest bit unusual. Kids adapt; they'll be fine in one room. Why is she a single mom? Where's dad? Is he dead? Shouldn't the life insurance payout cover this stuff? If he's alive, shouldn't he be kicking in support? Maybe don't choose to have kids when you're making $9/hour or have a chaotic domestic life?
- dizzystar 9y ago
  But also, she will have to work a second job because no one gives full time work at that pay level. That's the brutal cost of ACA.

Viliam1234 9y ago

> if times were at one point good or OK but you’ve fallen into hard times now, why did you not have savings? The size of income is not the only difference between people. People can have different families, get different informal education at home, etc. If you are poor but smart, and so is your family, and you love and help each other... there is a chance you will sooner or later get out of poverty somehow; as long as one succeeds, they can provide help and advice to others, etc. It is a completely different situation if e.g. someone in your poor family is crazy. Crazy people can create all kinds of difficulties, whether interpersonal or financial, which can consume all your energy and savings. I know people who have decent income, but can't save any of it, because they have relatives who regularly get themselves in all kinds of financial trouble, knowing that they can always ask Joe to save them. For example, they don't pay their bills, and then call Joe for help when a collector comes and wants the money back with some extra interest. And Joe doesn't know how to tell them "no" and just watch them lose the roofs above their heads. Therefore, no matter how many years of decent income will Joe have, he will never have savings. I know people who spend a lot of their attention mitigating various problems that their crazy relatives with too much free time created. The amount of energy someone else spends on building a startup, they spend solving artificially created problems which wouldn't exist if their crazy relatives wouldn't make up things, or if the rest of the family wouldn't believe them. I guess what I am trying to say is that people are connected; and some of them start connected to decent people, and others start connected to huge heaps of shit. Social capital is also a form of capital, and it can be negative.

hycaria 9y ago
If Joe rather has relatives no matter how crazy and draining on his own financial and mental wealth, than to just cut bridges, protect himself and let people assume their shitty decisions, then be it, he made his choice.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
linkmotif 9y ago
Yes, thank you for this. I think I did overlook this. I can see how this must be very prevalent.

pvaldes 9y ago

The ant and the grasshopper is a just a gross simplification. Both are strategies that can be valid and work in different sceneries. When you spend some money you create a social net, maybe you have more friends or hang with more people that could help you in troubled times. For the "ant" people, the colony (family) is all. Can't trust anybody out of that circle, so saving the money is the correct and only option. For solitary "grasshopper" people, without strong family bonds, spending money and being generous with their money can pay more in the future if they make wise choices about whom to spend the money. Safety net can be made with money or with social bonds. Both can fail and no one is more virtuous than the other. The best is probably having a mix of both.