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Poverty hurts children in ways we're beginning to understand
- empath75 7y agoOn some level you almost want to say "duh.", but having grown up in a very lower-middle class household and being on the high side of middle class now, the difference in how I was raised and how my kids are being raised is fairly vast. I'm sometimes jealous of how easy my kids have it compared to me, to be honest. I can only imagine where i'd be now if I had parents who were able to provide the resources that I can give to my kids, in terms of connections and education.
- wonderwonder 7y agoabsolutely, same boat. I have to think that my kids just not having to listen to their parents constantly fight about money like I did has to go a long way. Going to the store with friends and your parents have to pay with food stamps carries a certain stigma. I had good parents who always worked hard (not necessarily smart) and did the best they could for us, so I have no other complaints but I was definitely very aware of being poor.
- tropo 7y agoFighting over money is because of personality and disagreement, not the amount of money. You can fight at any level of wealth. For the rich, spouses can fight over the choice between buying a pro sports team and buying a private island, or between buying a customized 747-8 and buying a made-to-order yacht with helipad. For the poor, spouses can be in full agreement that dinner is soup made with ketchup packets, slugs, and dandelions.
- wonderwonder 7y agoIf you think that a couple arguing over which sports team to buy is the same as arguing in frustration over how to make rent is the same, you are incorrect. Stress leads to arguments and people not being at their best; there are few things more stressful than not having the funds for basic necessities. The solution is not for the poor to eat slugs...
- lopmotr 7y agoWhy were they fighting if they were good parents? My parents were poor but didn't fight. They just didn't buy much and they both accepted that and tried hard to improve things.
- ben_w 7y ago“Fighting” can cover a large range of actions, from arguing to violence. If it’s the former, I can understand — e.g. frustration from a personality difference where one of them wanted to spend money on something nice so that life wasn’t just an endless pointless slog of dull grey, while the other wanted to save the money for an emergency.
- wonderwonder 7y agoIs your comment really that because my parents argued about money they were bad parents?
- ohyeshedid 7y agoYour parents likely fought more than you'd be aware of, in the argumentative sense. Unless you're trying to claim you were raised in the first household in history with absolutely no conflict? Your binary viewpoints belie the superiority you're projecting.
- mc32 7y agoI agree with you but it’s more complicated. Not all kids want to grow up and be something. There used to be an avenue (future) for those kids. I don’t think that exists much any more. What I mean is a blue collar family could provide enough to produce another content blue collar worker. If you graduated high school today to be a content blue collar worker your options are kind of limited. I think some of this structural reality results in the appeal of Bernie to many young voters.
- Mikeb85 7y agoYup. Both Bernie and Trump came up because of a dissatisfaction with the status quo amongst blue collar workers (Trump's slogan definitely conjures up images of a time when blue collar workers had relatively comfortable lives).
- rb808 7y agoI see so many kids with high school grades are completely useless as at life. I wonder which is worse.
- altacc 7y agoIn discussions about low income families I often see somebody comment along the lines of blaming the parents for making bad choices and choosing to have children they couldn't afford/care for/want. This is used as a reason not to provide any social support to those families as they see it as rewarding bad behaviour. But these children didn't make those choices and they now exist in their circumstances through no fault of their own. We're consistently condemning the children for the sins of their parents to appease this view and severely reducing these children's potential, and in doing so reducing the potential of the country. As this article shows, the cost to a country's society and economy of poverty and low standards of living is very large and over a long time span. Our governments should be doing more to tackle child poverty as whilst it's not as bad as it used to be, we can certainly do better.
- wonderwonder 7y agoThese are generally the same people who protest so vehemently against abortion. I have always been amazed that I live in the richest country in the world and at night tens of thousands of kids go hungry or fall asleep in a car.
- nomel 7y ago> for making bad choices and choosing to have children they couldn't afford/care for/want Also, this belittles the cases where one parent was making a great choice, by leaving the other.
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- rdlecler1 7y agoHousing is an enormous tax, and rent seeking just transfers money from the poor to the rich. Rather than giving everyone money, I would prefer to see a market solution where we greatly lower the costs for things at the bottom of Maslow’s pyramid.
- tomnipotent 7y agoThis. I grew up on welfare, and I can't tell you how often my mom would talk about section 8 housing and how that would change everything. Having to move was my parents greatest nightmare - they would barely afford day-to-day things, nonetheless first/last/deposit.
- ben_w 7y agoAs a landlord [0], I totally agree that housing is overpriced and society can and should make it affordable for all. [0] not American, so I had to Google “section 8 housing”
- rb808 7y ago> section 8 housing and how that would change everything Sorry can you clarify - do you mean she wanted to be eligible? Or was eligible but couldn't find a suitable place. I've always wondered if buying a property to rent to section 8 tenants is a good idea or not. (investment wise or charity wise)
- tomnipotent 7y agoSection 8 has a years-long waiting list, and it's basically a lottery for the vouchers when I was growing up.
- opportune 7y agoRelative did this and found it was not a good move. Usually the types of places that rent to section 8 tenants have very high cap ratios assuming you collect rent every month... just think for a bit why other investors leave those on the table considering how financially advantageous that would be. Ok I’ll spoil it a bit: first, you still have to do maintenance on these places like fixing the roof, plumbing, etc. and it doesn’t matter if you bought it for pennies, it still has to be livable to rent. Second, section 8 doesn’t cover everything (at least for some) so your tenants will often not make rent: the decision whether to continually take losses on renting or to evict a family (possibly making them homeless) is up to you. And among poor people you will have higher rates of things like hoarding or drugs so your likelihood of dealing with that is high (approaching near certainty as number of properties grows). He ended up selling off his real estate “empire” in less than 5 years after being threatened with a gun, evicting a family, and having one house get entirely gutted one night (including wires and toilets)
- mynameishere 7y agothat are more efficient at reducing poverty...an unconditional cash allowance for households with children. The opposite--a cash allowance for poor people who agree to be sterilized--would also reduce poverty, and a single generation of such payments would have a lot of staying power. Now, I wouldn't expect the author of the article to desire such a policy, but it would work if all they are trying to do is reduce poverty. (Of course, paying poor people to have kids would, in fact, greatly expand poverty forever and ever, but that's another matter. The authors, of course, are in no way actually interested in improving society.)
- lazyasciiart 7y agoWhat you say is (a) not backed by evidence and (b) given the correlation between race and poverty in the US, would have an incredibly racist outcome.
- Eylandos 7y agoExplain to me how sterilizing someone would reduce poverty? The children of said sterilized person is still living in abysmal conditions and has minute chance of climbing out of it. Do we continue to sterilize or do we educated and push for better social programs for these people? This also doesn't help the population decline we are facing and so it is complete nonsense.
- ssully 7y agoThis is possibly the worst thing I have ever read on HN.
- yters 7y agoWhat does poverty mean in our world? I would think the poorest person in any western nation has more money and access to more resources than pretty much anyone in prior history. Also goes for many developing nations, too. Is there something else going on with poverty besides only amount of money on hand?
- zozbot234 7y agoRelative poverty is really a proxy for social exclusion/marginalization. You don't solve "poverty" by giving people more money, you solve it by strenghtening local communities, building solid institutions and enhancing social capital. This is the best foundation for solid middle-class values, which in turn are the catalyst for self-sustaining growth in incomes. (Of course meaning "poverty" in this relative sense, as opposed to the very real material deprivation that's common in least-developed countries, which often is addressed to a surprising extent simply by providing more financial capital.)
- asdff 7y agoWhat does this mean in practice? In Los Angeles, local communities are some of the strongest in the world. No one would say that poverty is solved, this city is known as the city of the working poor.
- imtringued 7y agoIt may sound obvious but why not build a second Los Angeles?
- yters 7y agoDo they have stable, two parent families? That seems to be one of the most significant pillars of functioning society.
- asdff 7y agoWell, there are about 60,000 people in LA county who can answer that question for you, and probably another half a million who are a couple hundred dollars or less away from reckoning with the harsh truths about that question.
- aty268 7y agoMy dad was a very blue collar banker without a college degree at Bear Stearns, and we went bankrupt when 08 bubble burst. We moved from our multi million dollar house to live in a trailer park where I slept in a bed with my brother and ate shitty food throughout middle and high school. I would be really interested to have someone study the long term effects of it on me, because I think it's actually made me extremely ambitious and a little crazy. I'm the only person who made it out of that shithole, and I have very high standards for myself now. I just never stopped fighting, and probably will never stop. I'm 22 and my blood pressure is off the charts, but I guess that's the price you pay! I guess I wonder how situational poverty (rich -> poor) affects you differently than just normal poverty. I've never met another person in a similar situation. Can anyone else relate?
- dijit 7y agoI can relate, somewhat. My ambition is (was) borne out of my absolute drive to never be in the same situation I was when I was younger. Also allowed me to dig myself unapologetically into my work and it was a way of escaping when I was younger too. But I’m 30 now, my ambition is waning. And a lot of what I learned during my “hot passion” years is already sort of old and nothing is truly fundamental in my area (devops/SRE/sysadmin). If I had one bit of advice, it would be to try pacing yourself and think long term, I wish I’d done university and bitten the bullet of it. I recently failed a google interview for instance because I didn’t think about something foundational in sorting. And that really struck me hard. If I’d gone to university and actually focused on studying I would have been much better. But I’m so risk averse that I would never risk taking time off working to study. I think eventually you’ll settle. Based on my single data point. I’d prepare for that.
- aty268 7y agoThat's good advice, interesting you didn't finish college. I'm working full time as a Software Engineer now, I just kind of "worked" my way out of school. I would bet this is pretty common among people who grew up poor.
- tasty_freeze 7y agoI just listened to an episode of the Hidden Brain podcast from last May: https://www.npr.org/2019/05/09/721733303/whats-not-on-the-test-the-overlooked-factors-that-determine-success https://www.npr.org/2019/05/09/721733303/whats-not-on-the-te... The subject being interviewed is a Nobel Prize winning economist, James Heckman. The starting point was noting that people who get a GED (on average) score just as well on IQ tests as those getting an ordinary HS diploma. However, their life outcomes tend to be much worse than those who got a HS diploma the ordinary way. Why? The economist said that 150 years ago schools taught reading, writing, and arithmetic, but spent as much time on "character building" lessons: diligence, persistence, working well with others, etc, but that mostly was removed by the mid 20th century for a couple of reasons. One was that the character building exercises were cast in terms of Protestantism, and as the US became more diverse, there was a push against it. Second, psychology was in the thrall of things that could be machine scored like IQ tests and looked down on squishy character traits. Anyway, although the GED students did as well on IQ tests, they did substantially worse than normal HS graduates when scored on those other personality skills (not traits, the economist said, since those things can be taught to a large degree). In the mid 60s a controlled experiment was run where a preschool for impoverished kids were split into the treatment group and the control group. The treatment group's teachers did non-standard stuff, eg, simply exposing the kids to the larger world by taking them on field trips to parts of the city they would never otherwise experience. They were read stories with those character building traits about fairness, persistence, etc. The teachers built relationships with the parents and emphasized how important the parent-child relationship was and not to expect that learning is simply the teacher's job. They provided child care for single/working mothers. This intervention lasted two years of preschool, so basically ages 3-5. The kids were tested at age 10 and everyone was disappointed that there was no difference. But the economist (and others) revisited the test subjects decades later and found there was a profound difference in outcomes. The treatment group attained higher levels of education, had better incomes, better health, and lower crime involvement. The children of the treatment group were substantially better off in those regards than those of the control group.
- emj 7y agoSounds like a lot of variables to say that any one thing was what made that experiment a success. Similarly I've heard that focus in preschool years can have a very good pay back later on which supports what you say in a general way.
- aaron695 7y agoPoor people need more money. There is nothing else to this article other than this tautology.
- mam2 7y ago"Being rich is nice". No kidding.
- saf5345throw 7y agoI never understood the hate on people becoming parents before they are financially ready. There is a reason why the demographic shift is happening. I was born when my mom was in her late 30s. My grandmother died in her 80s before I even hit 18. How exactly are we supposed to maintain a stable population in these circumstances? Having children suddenly became unreasonably expensive but yet we pretend as if the parents are the ones who did something wrong if they have children before their 40s. The situation is basically a reverse tragedy of the commons. The individual is bearing the entire cost of having children but then gets blamed despite the fact that the public benefits from a stable population.
- clawedjird 7y agoIn the US, conversations about poverty frequently appear to depict poverty as a choice, i.e. people bear moral responsibility for their poverty because their decisions ostensibly produced it. In this thread, multiple comments take this assumption for granted and embrace the goal of reducing poverty primarily for the sake of impoverished children - who bear no responsibility for their position. This approach seems incredibly primitive to me for a number of reasons. First of all, show me an adult that wants to live in poverty. Secondly, where do we draw the line between childhood and adulthood? Does an impoverished 17 year old assume responsibility for their poverty on their 18th birthday? What about their 20th? 25th? At what age can we expect their lifetime of accumulated knowledge, experience, habits, etc. to deliver them from poverty? Is it simply the age when they decide that they no longer want to be poor and, thus, take the requisite actions to ensure their escape from poverty? Instead of basing our (American) assumptions about moral responsibility, as it relates to poverty, on our religious heritage (i.e. the atavistic Protestant ethic), why don’t we abandon our assumptions altogether and simply consult the data (as the author of the linked book excerpt suggests)? Emergent fields of research such as neuroscience, evolutionary psychology, behavioral economics, and so forth offer a far different perspective than the simplistic view I alluded to above. It’s understandable that some might prefer a worldview that justifies the status quo and assuages the cognitive dissonance associated with life in a highly stratified society, but that’s no longer an empirically-defensible position. We should all work to make that fact known, as is the OP’s source.
- mekane8 7y agoI would love to see a universal basic income for families with children. My only question is how to change the incentives so kids don't just become a paycheck?