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> Poverty is not a lack of character – it’s a lack of cash. No. Poverty is a lack of education and, more importantly, mentorship. I am battling this right now

by umvi 7y ago

> Poverty is not a lack of character – it’s a lack of cash. No. Poverty is a lack of education and, more importantly, mentorship. I am battling this right now with my next door neighbors, who use HOC, a Maryland social service that basically puts poor people in middle class neighborhoods by subsidizing rent. My neighbors have money. They spend it extremely poorly. It's a single mom with 2 kids. Both kids have iPhones, iPads, PS4s, cable TV, you name it. I'm constantly cleaning up scratch-offs and cigarette butts from the shared sidewalk. Yet they are also on food stamps (SNAP) and near the end of the month the 11 year old boy inevitably starts coming over to our house for snacks because they are out of food. Just recently he boasted that his mom is going to buy him a brand new $1500 gaming rig. I remarked that seemed quite expensive and wondered where the money would come from. "tax return" he replied non-chalantly. He also said once they got their tax return they would be going to Disneyland. I see this 11 year old boy on a trajectory for poverty. I've tried to help him with his math homework and with reading, but he is at a level far below his grade and seems to be constantly skipping school. He hates reading because his reading comprehension is low which means it will never improve because there are no adults in his life (other than me) trying to get him to read books. It's a viscious cycle. He has virtually no adult supervision or guidance (other than what I can offer when he occasionally comes over) because his single mom is always absent or in the hospital or sleeping or working or with boyfriend. It would require an insane amount of cash to make it so the single mom didn't have to work, and even then, she is uneducated, can't help her kids with their homework, doesn't see the value in school having not used it herself, doesn't know how to be a good parent, not having had them herself, etc. These kids need mentors more than they need cash. They need adults they can emulate who can help them break free from the viscious cycle.

wufufufu 7y ago
I agree, but I also think there's social cost to not spending your money on status symbols. You will be ostracized by the rich and educated groups for not fitting in, and then how will you acclimate to a higher social sphere? Example[1] [1] https://gizmodo.com/im-buying-an-iphone-because-im-ashamed-of-my-green-bubb-1787965756 https://gizmodo.com/im-buying-an-iphone-because-im-ashamed-o... edit: Ok this obviously isn't black and white, but I'm saying this should be considered among other things.
- karatestomp 7y ago
  Depending on which class you're trying to signal as, buying the latest iPhone could do the opposite of what's intended. For the most part class signaling on the easier end (looks, mostly) has more to do with choices than outright spending. It's why a relatively poor college professor on the East coast can still look "upper middle". Their clothes may be a bit worn, some hand-me-downs, some thrifted, but they're the right clothes. Swapping the legible t-shirt & hoodie for a cotton button-up and wool cardigan or a blazer and the $100-150 sneakers for $100-150 (clearance, seconds, or used) leather loafers will do a lot more to signal higher class than an iPhone, and none of those clothes need look new—making the mistake of spending money on stuff like electronics or boldly-branded expensive clothes while getting other things very wrong is a class marker, but not one most would intentionally choose to display if they understood it. [EDIT] in short, always having new phones and video game consoles and such only signals wealth & higher status to poor people—absent other markers of higher class they'll actual read as low class to everyone else.
  - BrandoElFollito 7y ago
    This is an excellent point. Teachers in my children's schools make a point to widen their verbal culture in addition to what they teach. Also (if not mostly) so that they send the right signals (which in France is among others your general culture)
- lazyjones 7y ago
  > You will be ostracized by the rich and educated groups for not fitting in, and then how will you acclimate to a higher social sphere? What's so interesting in the rich (and supposedly educated, I'll take your word for it...) groups that you have to buy into them with expensive junk? Do you have any idea how many uneducated rich fools there are nowadays and how they spend their wealth in just as stupid ways as the poor, the only difference being that their capital income often actually sustains that foolishness? LVMH's success is a good hint.
  - dragonwriter 7y ago
lazyjones 7y ago
> These kids need mentors more than they need cash. They need adults they can emulate who can help them break free from the viscious cycle. A father, perhaps?
- metalliqaz 7y ago
  those kids should have had the good sense to be born of a father that sticks around /s
  - daenz 7y ago
    Future mothers and fathers should exercise common sense to have a child only with a good partner. That's who that message is for, not the child.
    - awb 7y ago
      If love was rational but it's filled with emotion. There are also plenty of partners above the poverty line that leave their families. I'm not sure we'll ever get to a point where people don't make mistakes with important decisions.
    - moralestapia 7y ago
      This point comes out from time to time, I do not agree with it at all. If history has showed us something, is that great people come from all sorts of backgrounds and situations, and that includes all sorts of families of course!
      - homonculus1 7y ago
        You can't generalize heuristics by looking only at outliers.
    - metalliqaz 7y ago
      lol, good luck with that. Even if a person made that decision, "nature uh uh finds a way".
daenz 7y ago
Let's not forget how advertising plays into this mentality. Advertising's sole purpose is to make you feel inferior/incomplete/inadequate without shiny new X. It's blasting at us constantly from every direction. Who is the most susceptible to it, those who are not struggling, or those who are? So they buy shiny new X, which is a bad financial decision.
- throwaway713 7y ago
  > Advertising's sole purpose is to make you feel inferior/incomplete/inadequate without shiny new X I disagree with this. I’ve never felt "inadequate" because of an ad.
- trappist 7y ago
  Advertising doesn't have a sole purpose. One purpose is to make you aware of the existence of a good or service. Another is to persuade you that you would be better off with that good or service than without it. One way of doing that, for some people maybe, is to instill a sense of inadequacy that only the good or service being advertised can cure, but this seems to me to be a small and rather ineffective minority of ads.
Reedx 7y ago
Even if it was an insane amount of cash, it'd quickly disappear and end up in the same position or worse. Look at the outcomes of lottery winners and others who come into a sudden windfall. Even when it's not sudden, you have clogs to clogs in 3 generations. I think one of the biggest impacts we could make is to teach financial literacy in school, to everyone. Form and reinforce good habits early on. Demonstrate the danger of credit card interest. Demonstrate the power of compounding all throughout 1st to 12th grade. Taken seriously, it could have a huge effect on outcomes. It'd also make something like the Freedom Dividend (UBI) more effective when/if it happens.
- rbrtl 7y ago
  This is the only lesson I really took away from Robert Kiyosaki's "Rich Dad, Poor Dad." People will say what they will about the man, and his kin, that he's a peddler and just another business man out for himself. I'm sure much of that is true, and personally I can't reconcile the fact that he is personal friends with DJT... However his strongest point throughout that book is that it is essential that people who want to 'make money' rather than taking it, need to be educated on the subject. He juxtaposes this with his view of the situation present: that people are only educated to become good workers, and to depend on one institution or another for their income. I am still trying to internalise a lot of the sentiment from that book and my financial self-education will continue (I hope) for many more years.
  - Der_Einzige 7y ago
    This book is hot garbage. His analysis of real estate (apperently not an asset) is so bad that I cannot imagine that anyone who read this book made money. Even if the author wasn't shady I'd throw it away
    - robocat 7y ago
      Here’s a summary of the book: “”” The Five Big Ideas The poor and the middle-class work for money. The rich have money work for them. It’s not how much money you make that matters. It’s how much money you keep. Rich people acquire assets. The poor and middle class acquire liabilities that they think are assets. Financial aptitude is what you do with money once you make it, how you keep people from taking it from you, how to keep it longer, and how you make money work hard for you. The single most powerful asset we all have is our mind. “”” Some of the book might be “garbage”, but some of the central concepts most certainly are not, and popularising the above is worthwhile IMHO. Not saying you are wrong, but I do believe it is wrong to so strongly denounce the book without recalling its virtues. The summary above is from the 1st link I looked at: https://www.samuelthomasdavies.com/book-summaries/business/rich-dad-poor-dad/ https://www.samuelthomasdavies.com/book-summaries/business/r...
pbhjpbhj 7y ago
What you're describing isn't poverty though. It's a bad financial situation, but not poverty. There doesn't seem to be any accountability for such spending - why is that? I don't know your neighbours situation, but in general you can learn to be a good parent without having had one yourself.
imesh 7y ago
Agreed. I grew up in a poor neighborhood. The reason I'm not poor while most of my childhood friends still are is my parents gave better advice.
axaxs 7y ago
This pretty much mirrors my experience. The following may seem coldhearted, evil, or misguided, but it's the truth. After high school I wasn't making a ton of money, so moved back to near where I grew up, which was a very cheap place to live. After 2 years, I'd had it. I told my wife "I...I just hate poor people, I can't take it anymore." Maybe hate is too strong a word, but it was a feeling of constant frustration. People constantly fighting, littering, driving drunk into mailboxes, etc. When I first moved in, I felt sorry for a few of the folks, including my neighbors. But for the squalor they lived in, they made sure to sit outside blasting shitty music off their new model iphones. By the time I moved out, I had a very different view of the world, and a 'you reap what you sow' attitude.
whack 7y ago
The article has referenced very robust empirical evidence demonstrating that cash infusions can significantly increase IQ, lower mental health problems, and lower rates of crime. Your kid-next-door story is great, but doesn't refute any of the above. There are many ways of tackling poverty. Education and mentorship are certainly very valid ways. And so too is expanding the social safety net. I don't know about you, but I would love to live in a society where everyone is smarter, less violent, and less prone to acting out.
- Der_Einzige 7y ago
  And the study you posted doesn't refute his anecdote. If we always listened to depersonalized studies rather than using the context of a situation, than we will make extremely poor choices of how to handle bad situations like this The OP gives strong analysis for why giving this family money directly doesn't solve any other structural problems
  - bluGill 7y ago
    Indeed the OP and the article on not in conflict. For families that are functional but poor money can help, and a broad study will show this even if some students are not helped because of the other factors. We need more detail.
  - whack 7y ago
    > And the study you posted doesn't refute his anecdote Sure. Just like all the studies on climate change don't refute my anecdote of "it was really really cold last weekend in my hometown". If OP is simply giving an anecdote with no strings attached, that's great. Unfortunately, OP's anecdote carries the implication that giving families money, in general, does not solve any problems. Despite robust studies showing otherwise.
    - tartoran 7y ago
      I think giving money works for some and it's a waste for others. There are countless of poor people who would do better if they had the chance to break the cycle and there are the poors who wouldn't be able to plan the monthly expenses and they'd be hungry at the end of the month no matter how much money you throw at them. The second category needs a different type of help (maybe along with financial). The first category are simply in a never-ending spiral and sometimes it is not even their fault. Tell me how a single mom can afford to raise a child with a minimum wage salary or how a nuclear family can afford the same when one of the bread earners falls prey to a disability and so on.
ip26 7y ago
It sounds like HOC has found this kid a possible mentor. Without it, the kid would never have met someone like you. As I understand, this is pretty much exactly the goal of such programs, to surround poor families stuck in the cycle with middle class knowledge/experience/wisdom.
- umvi 7y ago
  Very true, and I'm happy to help where I can. However, it wasn't something we knew about when we moved in, and living in close proximity to them has put other strains on us that make us want to move (for example, since we share a wall, our house stinks like marijuana every weekend due to them hot boxing; also they've completely trashed their unit and you can tell from the outside - the blinds are all mangled and one of the windows is missing which I imagine might make it harder to sell our own home). I agree it's a probably a net gain overall though.
moralestapia 7y ago
>No. Poverty is a lack of education and, more importantly, mentorship. Privilege is invisible, or so they say. This is an extremely short-sighted approach to trying to find an explanation to poverty. It is also a lazy excuse to avoid thinking more, because it leads to a conclusion like "... hence why they're poor. That's it." I hope one day you have the (mis?)fortune of living under precarious conditions, then you could judge by yourself if your preconceived notions are actually in agreement with what you will experience. And then we will see how long it takes you to "stop being poor", it shouldn't be long right?, as you, presumably, already know how to avoid making the kind of "poor decisions" that makes people stay in that situation. Edit: Check out this comic and see if it opens up your mind a bit. https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/the-wireless/373065/the-pencilsword-on-a-plate https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/the-wireless/373065/the-pencilswo...
- deleted 7y ago
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dragonwriter 7y ago
> > Poverty is not a lack of character – it’s a lack of cash. > No. Poverty is a lack of education and, more importantly, mentorship. No, poverty is a lack of material wealth. A lack of education (of which mentorship is a component) may contribute to the durability of poverty, but it is far from the only factor which does so; active class discrimination in distribution of opportunity by the non-poor, both personally and through institutional, including public, policy, is also a factor.
deleted 7y ago
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wnevets 7y ago
No, as someone who grew up quite poor I (my parents) needed cash.
exabrial 7y ago
> No. Poverty is a lack of education and, more importantly, mentorship. Mentorship is absolutely true. Kids need someone to invest and grow them. In the specific example you gave: on average kids that grow up in two parent households excel in every metric: graduation rates from high school / college, employment, total lifetime earnings, and incarceration rates. For kids that grow up in single parent homes, their success on the same metric comes down to mentorship; having involvement from a successful person in their life and repeating their steps to success. Whatever happens with your neighbor, keep at it as long as you're invited, and keep asking the tough questions. You will undoubtedly are a turning point in his life even if you don't see immediate results.
treyfitty 7y ago
The idea is that they’ll find mentors in a middle class neighborhood. Attacking the character of suboptimal decision makers isn’t fair. They have lives and they have every right to decide how they live it. At the same time, they’re beholden to the economic forces that govern everyday life. Thinking back at my childhood, my parents gave me a computer, a $300 baseball glove, an N64...etc despite not being able to afford it and I’m grateful for that. It allowed me to not be seen as the poor kid, ostracized by my peers, and provided me with countless hours of entertainment. When my friends went to summer camps, I played counter strike and Mario Kart at my house with the other kids who couldn’t afford camps while my parents worked. Sure, summer camp and a nanny could’ve provided me with a more meaningful experience, but let’s be real. Without friends, and families of friends, I wouldn’t be where I am today. They’ve fed me countless dinners, driven me to school, and even took me on vacations. The parents most definitely knew my economic situation, but my peers didn’t. Don’t judge the kid. Don’t even try to understand. Just be there if you want. If not, then that’s fine too, just don’t be so patronizing about how his mom should optimize her life. I’m thankful for it all.
- theandrewbailey 7y ago
  > Attacking the character of suboptimal decision makers isn’t fair. It is fair when a family routinely buys big ticket electronic items or vacations every month, but still runs out of food every month, despite being on food stamps.
- axaxs 7y ago
  Like everything else in life, this isn't fair. In my early 20s, they started moving these people into my father's neighborhood, which I couldn't afford so led a worse quality of life. Why should people who contribute nothing be given more consideration than those who are trying? This program is wreckless and just leads to whatever the modern day version of white flight is in the end. Please don't argue this point, I watched upscale areas of town turn to little more than ghettos under an extreme version of this idea. It's one of the biggest reasons I left. To be clear, I absolutely agree with your point, just not the method of attempting to achieve it.
didibus 7y ago
I agree and disagree at the same time. I agree in that, education and mentorship is definitely helpful and part of the equation. I disagree that cash is not relevant to that same equation though. I think any reductionist argument will be flawed one way or the other, cash is not all they need, but education is not all they need either. And I'm sure there's even more variables at play. I also want to say, having an iPad or two, a PS4 and cable TV, that's not really a good indicator of wealth. People's top expenses are generally housing, transportation, utilities and food, possibly healthcare if you need it. In your example, rent is subsidized, that means the top expense is minimized and a lot of savings comes from that. That said, I don't think its logical to say that the savings from holding off from buying two iPhones, an iPad and a PS4 can match that. Rent average price for a 2-bedroom is 1200$. That means in 2 or 3 months of rent, you've already purchased 2 iPhones, an iPad and a PS4. So no one can pay their rent by simply not buying these things. So I'm challenging your quote saying: "My neighbors have money". Do they really?
- umvi 7y ago
  > So I'm challenging your quote saying: "My neighbors have money". Do they really? Obviously I can only see my tiny slice in the form of an 11 year old coming over to my house asking for snacks bringing along his toys. I don't know how much income the mom has. But what I do know, is that they seem to run out of food near the end of each month, despite SNAP subsidizing food. So while abstaining from buying iPhones, iPads, and cable TV and other toys will not pay the rent, buying mid/low-tier Android instead of premium Apple, cutting cable, scratch offs, cigarettes, and other toys from the annual budget could easily relieve other stressors of poverty, for example by stocking shelves with nutritious food that lasts through the whole month.
danans 7y ago
> My neighbors have money. They spend it extremely poorly. It's a single mom with 2 kids. Both kids have iPhones, iPads, PS4s, cable TV, you name it. iPhones and video games are very cheap compared to good schools and safe and mentally stimulating childcare. A poor person's children having an iPhone and PlayStation is no more an indication of their having money than my kids not having those things is an indication that I'm poor. If anything the correlation is slightly on the opposite direction: I can afford better (expensive) activities for my kids (i.e. horseback riding camp, after school enrichment classes), which cost me tens of thousands per year. Poor people routinely occupy their children with an iPhone with Candy Crush, which is cheap by comparison. Those things create the temporary illusion of prosperity, both for those in poverty, and for observers like you. > Just recently he boasted that his mom is going to buy him a brand new $1500 gaming rig. I remarked that seemed quite expensive and wondered where the money would come from. "tax return" he replied non-chalantly. He also said once they got their tax return they would be going to Disneyland. You shouldn't necessarily believe everything that a child in need says about what their family is purchasing. People (children and adults) do a lot of wishful thinking out loud. Some of it is to assuage themselves, and to feel normalized among their more privileged peers. > These kids need mentors more than they need cash. Families need cash to reduce financial stress levels. Being a single mother on govt benefits isn't the cakewalk you make it out to be. And absolutely, kids need mentors, but good mentors also don't come cheap, and they usually aren't willing to work with kids who has behavioral issues originating in financial stress and cheap entertainment distractions. Volunteer mentors want to work with the "diamonds in the rough" kids, because the reward for mentorship is feeling like a super hero who "made a difference in one child's life". That approach doesn't scale. The mentorship program that scales is the one right on front of us: financially stable parents and community, who have an inherent interest in the child's development.
- bluGill 7y ago
  Those things are cheap only if the kids have enough food to eat. I buy a few nice things, but I don't have that much even though it is safe to assume I have 4 times the income (including welfare). My family eats good food, and my kid does well in school. I'm not against the poor having nice toys, but the priority is not toys. Yet I see the poor spending a lot of toys that are often discarded in a short time.
jdkee 7y ago
And where is the father?
andrepd 7y ago
Why do I keep seeing these sorts of arguments. >No. Poverty is a lack of education and, more importantly, mentorship. This is because [insert story about "neighbor"] To put it very bluntly: I don't give two shits about your neighbour. This is the kind of thinking that justifies racism and other types of discrimination. I have a gypsy neighbour who collects welfare and does not work while he sells drugs in his neighbour |= therefore gypsies are leeches and criminals. You see the problem? For every story of yours I can tell you a story about a guy who had caring and hardworking parents, a nurturing environment, was he himself very hardworking, but simply had not enough money to make it in this world (not enough money to attend good schools, do extracurricular activities, had to care for his siblings or work after school himself, etc.). What does that tell me about this problem? I don't care for anecdotes about your neighbour (because everybody has "a neighbour", or his cousin's wife has a friend from work who knows a guy who...), I don't care for "common sense opinions". I care for research, data, in short: meaningful facts about large-scale trends rather than individual cases, of which you can find every sort.
tristor 7y ago
Unfortunately, your anecdote and also what I have seen and experienced in my own life is that it often is a lack of character. Saying that is controversial, because it seems to be saying those who are in poverty are less than, but that's not what I mean. What I mean is that character includes a lot of things about a person, including their world view and what things they think are important in life. The truly sad thing I've observed is that poverty is generational because children form so much of their world view and their own character from that of their parents, and it is the parent's lack of character that leads to and keeps them in poverty more than anything. Poverty is a vicious cycle, and it has different causative factors and outcomes for different people. Inner city poverty and rural poverty share many common things, but are very different situations. I've seen both. I have been broke, but I've never been poor, and the difference largely had to do with my upbringing and my own personal character. To a large degree, my very belief that I could overcome being broke and didn't need to become poor is a component of that very upbringing. People in poverty feel defeated, that there is nothing that they can do which will resolve their situation. They exist in a concentric sphere of negative feedback loops, where the only dopamine hit they can find to make them feel "okay" even for a little bit is found in illicit substances, meaningless sex, or conspicuous consumption that earns them the adoration of their peers. These are the high points of their life, and yet none of them help to break the cycle, they just reinforce it. It's not enough to throw money at the problem. Poverty must be arrested, like the putting on of brakes. At a certain point in life... people are basically unsavable themselves and too set in their ways, but they can be convinced to save their children. The only effective program I've ever seen to actually combat the cycle of poverty was based on providing pre-teens and young adults in poverty with funds, education, and resources that their parents could not take advantage of or interfere with. Something as simple as providing thorough financial literacy education and a place where pre-teens could bank and their parents couldn't steal from them was very effective, especially when combined with no-cost after school programs which kept them off the streets and out of abusive and dangerous home situations for further education and mentorship. Unfortunately programs like this are contentious and very very expensive to operate and hard to scale. The program I observed had 40 kids in one neighborhood and took nearly 200 volunteers to pull off and 10 paid staff, plus facilities. When I look at the situation as a whole, it's obvious to me that one of the single biggest factors in why this has become such a serious issue in the Western world is due to the breakdown of the nuclear family. Single-parent homes aren't in the financial position to spend time focused on their children's mentorship and education in the way that a two working parent home is, simply put. And educational outcomes, life outcomes really, are heavily tied to having parents which value education and good financial literacy and ensure that their children value those things as well, regardless of how many dollars are in their bank account or stuffed in the mattress. EDIT: To a large degree, how you think about the poverty problem comes back down to the classical philosophical question of nature vs nurture. The reality has always been that life is a little bit of both. But when it comes to poverty, enough time in those circumstances can effectively destroy someone's mental health and make them incapable of escaping. They become effectively addicted to escapist dopamine rushes and impulses, without any ability to plan for the long term. It has real, serious, negative mental consequences for adults and children both. But children can be saved, adults are often a lost cause. The best thing we can do is focus on breaking the cycle so the next generation of adults is better off than the current generation.
tsimionescu 7y ago
> No. Poverty is a lack of education and, more importantly, mentorship. This is beyond insulting, at least in the way it is worded. Your example of the single mom who squanders charity money on expensive toys sounds exactly like right-wing propaganda, even if I am absolutely certain it does happen. The reality is that the vast majority of poor people just don't have the money to squander. Sure, some of them may squander the money even if they had them, but the reality is that only a minuscule percentage do. Financial education would help these people, and can't hurt. But minimum income of some kind (I'm not necessarily convinced UBI is a good idea) will help all poor people. A much more common story of poverty is families who can't afford to get their children through school, who live paycheck to paycheck and get forced into predatory lending when they hit financial difficulties (e.g. plumbing problems).
- zozbot234 7y ago
  'Education' is not limited to financial education, surely. Mentorship could be a good starting point for the social support that many poor folks seem to lack, and that might make it hard for them to earn money in the first place. Not sure what's 'insulting' about parent's claims, they seem quite sensible and supportive to me.
  - tsimionescu 7y ago
    Perhaps I read it badly, but to me GP's claims sounded like they believe people wouldn't be poor if only they were more educated, that with a little mentorship everyone could learn how to stop being poor. The example of the neighbor squandering her money and not educating her children seemed to reinforce this idea - she has the money not to be poor, she just doesn't know how to do it. This is probably true in her particular case, based on GP's recording, but it is insulting to generalize it to the vast majority of poor people who would know very well how to save 1500 dollars and not to spend it on same gaming system, if they only ever saw that amount of money all at one time.

by umvi 7y ago

wufufufu 7y ago

I agree, but I also think there's social cost to not spending your money on status symbols. You will be ostracized by the rich and educated groups for not fitting in, and then how will you acclimate to a higher social sphere? Example[1] [1] https://gizmodo.com/im-buying-an-iphone-because-im-ashamed-of-my-green-bubb-1787965756 https://gizmodo.com/im-buying-an-iphone-because-im-ashamed-o... edit: Ok this obviously isn't black and white, but I'm saying this should be considered among other things.

karatestomp 7y ago
Depending on which class you're trying to signal as, buying the latest iPhone could do the opposite of what's intended. For the most part class signaling on the easier end (looks, mostly) has more to do with choices than outright spending. It's why a relatively poor college professor on the East coast can still look "upper middle". Their clothes may be a bit worn, some hand-me-downs, some thrifted, but they're the right clothes. Swapping the legible t-shirt & hoodie for a cotton button-up and wool cardigan or a blazer and the $100-150 sneakers for $100-150 (clearance, seconds, or used) leather loafers will do a lot more to signal higher class than an iPhone, and none of those clothes need look new—making the mistake of spending money on stuff like electronics or boldly-branded expensive clothes while getting other things very wrong is a class marker, but not one most would intentionally choose to display if they understood it. [EDIT] in short, always having new phones and video game consoles and such only signals wealth & higher status to poor people—absent other markers of higher class they'll actual read as low class to everyone else.
- BrandoElFollito 7y ago
  This is an excellent point. Teachers in my children's schools make a point to widen their verbal culture in addition to what they teach. Also (if not mostly) so that they send the right signals (which in France is among others your general culture)
lazyjones 7y ago
> You will be ostracized by the rich and educated groups for not fitting in, and then how will you acclimate to a higher social sphere? What's so interesting in the rich (and supposedly educated, I'll take your word for it...) groups that you have to buy into them with expensive junk? Do you have any idea how many uneducated rich fools there are nowadays and how they spend their wealth in just as stupid ways as the poor, the only difference being that their capital income often actually sustains that foolishness? LVMH's success is a good hint.
- dragonwriter 7y ago

lazyjones 7y ago

> These kids need mentors more than they need cash. They need adults they can emulate who can help them break free from the viscious cycle. A father, perhaps?

metalliqaz 7y ago
those kids should have had the good sense to be born of a father that sticks around /s
- daenz 7y ago
  Future mothers and fathers should exercise common sense to have a child only with a good partner. That's who that message is for, not the child.
  - awb 7y ago
    If love was rational but it's filled with emotion. There are also plenty of partners above the poverty line that leave their families. I'm not sure we'll ever get to a point where people don't make mistakes with important decisions.
  - moralestapia 7y ago
    This point comes out from time to time, I do not agree with it at all. If history has showed us something, is that great people come from all sorts of backgrounds and situations, and that includes all sorts of families of course!
    - homonculus1 7y ago
      You can't generalize heuristics by looking only at outliers.
  - metalliqaz 7y ago
    lol, good luck with that. Even if a person made that decision, "nature uh uh finds a way".

daenz 7y ago

Let's not forget how advertising plays into this mentality. Advertising's sole purpose is to make you feel inferior/incomplete/inadequate without shiny new X. It's blasting at us constantly from every direction. Who is the most susceptible to it, those who are not struggling, or those who are? So they buy shiny new X, which is a bad financial decision.

throwaway713 7y ago
> Advertising's sole purpose is to make you feel inferior/incomplete/inadequate without shiny new X I disagree with this. I’ve never felt "inadequate" because of an ad.
trappist 7y ago
Advertising doesn't have a sole purpose. One purpose is to make you aware of the existence of a good or service. Another is to persuade you that you would be better off with that good or service than without it. One way of doing that, for some people maybe, is to instill a sense of inadequacy that only the good or service being advertised can cure, but this seems to me to be a small and rather ineffective minority of ads.

Reedx 7y ago

Even if it was an insane amount of cash, it'd quickly disappear and end up in the same position or worse. Look at the outcomes of lottery winners and others who come into a sudden windfall. Even when it's not sudden, you have clogs to clogs in 3 generations. I think one of the biggest impacts we could make is to teach financial literacy in school, to everyone. Form and reinforce good habits early on. Demonstrate the danger of credit card interest. Demonstrate the power of compounding all throughout 1st to 12th grade. Taken seriously, it could have a huge effect on outcomes. It'd also make something like the Freedom Dividend (UBI) more effective when/if it happens.

rbrtl 7y ago
This is the only lesson I really took away from Robert Kiyosaki's "Rich Dad, Poor Dad." People will say what they will about the man, and his kin, that he's a peddler and just another business man out for himself. I'm sure much of that is true, and personally I can't reconcile the fact that he is personal friends with DJT... However his strongest point throughout that book is that it is essential that people who want to 'make money' rather than taking it, need to be educated on the subject. He juxtaposes this with his view of the situation present: that people are only educated to become good workers, and to depend on one institution or another for their income. I am still trying to internalise a lot of the sentiment from that book and my financial self-education will continue (I hope) for many more years.
- Der_Einzige 7y ago
  This book is hot garbage. His analysis of real estate (apperently not an asset) is so bad that I cannot imagine that anyone who read this book made money. Even if the author wasn't shady I'd throw it away
  - robocat 7y ago
    Here’s a summary of the book: “”” The Five Big Ideas The poor and the middle-class work for money. The rich have money work for them. It’s not how much money you make that matters. It’s how much money you keep. Rich people acquire assets. The poor and middle class acquire liabilities that they think are assets. Financial aptitude is what you do with money once you make it, how you keep people from taking it from you, how to keep it longer, and how you make money work hard for you. The single most powerful asset we all have is our mind. “”” Some of the book might be “garbage”, but some of the central concepts most certainly are not, and popularising the above is worthwhile IMHO. Not saying you are wrong, but I do believe it is wrong to so strongly denounce the book without recalling its virtues. The summary above is from the 1st link I looked at: https://www.samuelthomasdavies.com/book-summaries/business/rich-dad-poor-dad/ https://www.samuelthomasdavies.com/book-summaries/business/r...

pbhjpbhj 7y ago

What you're describing isn't poverty though. It's a bad financial situation, but not poverty. There doesn't seem to be any accountability for such spending - why is that? I don't know your neighbours situation, but in general you can learn to be a good parent without having had one yourself.

imesh 7y ago

Agreed. I grew up in a poor neighborhood. The reason I'm not poor while most of my childhood friends still are is my parents gave better advice.

axaxs 7y ago

This pretty much mirrors my experience. The following may seem coldhearted, evil, or misguided, but it's the truth. After high school I wasn't making a ton of money, so moved back to near where I grew up, which was a very cheap place to live. After 2 years, I'd had it. I told my wife "I...I just hate poor people, I can't take it anymore." Maybe hate is too strong a word, but it was a feeling of constant frustration. People constantly fighting, littering, driving drunk into mailboxes, etc. When I first moved in, I felt sorry for a few of the folks, including my neighbors. But for the squalor they lived in, they made sure to sit outside blasting shitty music off their new model iphones. By the time I moved out, I had a very different view of the world, and a 'you reap what you sow' attitude.

whack 7y ago

The article has referenced very robust empirical evidence demonstrating that cash infusions can significantly increase IQ, lower mental health problems, and lower rates of crime. Your kid-next-door story is great, but doesn't refute any of the above. There are many ways of tackling poverty. Education and mentorship are certainly very valid ways. And so too is expanding the social safety net. I don't know about you, but I would love to live in a society where everyone is smarter, less violent, and less prone to acting out.

Der_Einzige 7y ago
And the study you posted doesn't refute his anecdote. If we always listened to depersonalized studies rather than using the context of a situation, than we will make extremely poor choices of how to handle bad situations like this The OP gives strong analysis for why giving this family money directly doesn't solve any other structural problems
- bluGill 7y ago
  Indeed the OP and the article on not in conflict. For families that are functional but poor money can help, and a broad study will show this even if some students are not helped because of the other factors. We need more detail.
- whack 7y ago
  > And the study you posted doesn't refute his anecdote Sure. Just like all the studies on climate change don't refute my anecdote of "it was really really cold last weekend in my hometown". If OP is simply giving an anecdote with no strings attached, that's great. Unfortunately, OP's anecdote carries the implication that giving families money, in general, does not solve any problems. Despite robust studies showing otherwise.
  - tartoran 7y ago
    I think giving money works for some and it's a waste for others. There are countless of poor people who would do better if they had the chance to break the cycle and there are the poors who wouldn't be able to plan the monthly expenses and they'd be hungry at the end of the month no matter how much money you throw at them. The second category needs a different type of help (maybe along with financial). The first category are simply in a never-ending spiral and sometimes it is not even their fault. Tell me how a single mom can afford to raise a child with a minimum wage salary or how a nuclear family can afford the same when one of the bread earners falls prey to a disability and so on.

ip26 7y ago

It sounds like HOC has found this kid a possible mentor. Without it, the kid would never have met someone like you. As I understand, this is pretty much exactly the goal of such programs, to surround poor families stuck in the cycle with middle class knowledge/experience/wisdom.

umvi 7y ago
Very true, and I'm happy to help where I can. However, it wasn't something we knew about when we moved in, and living in close proximity to them has put other strains on us that make us want to move (for example, since we share a wall, our house stinks like marijuana every weekend due to them hot boxing; also they've completely trashed their unit and you can tell from the outside - the blinds are all mangled and one of the windows is missing which I imagine might make it harder to sell our own home). I agree it's a probably a net gain overall though.

moralestapia 7y ago

>No. Poverty is a lack of education and, more importantly, mentorship. Privilege is invisible, or so they say. This is an extremely short-sighted approach to trying to find an explanation to poverty. It is also a lazy excuse to avoid thinking more, because it leads to a conclusion like "... hence why they're poor. That's it." I hope one day you have the (mis?)fortune of living under precarious conditions, then you could judge by yourself if your preconceived notions are actually in agreement with what you will experience. And then we will see how long it takes you to "stop being poor", it shouldn't be long right?, as you, presumably, already know how to avoid making the kind of "poor decisions" that makes people stay in that situation. Edit: Check out this comic and see if it opens up your mind a bit. https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/the-wireless/373065/the-pencilsword-on-a-plate https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/the-wireless/373065/the-pencilswo...

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dragonwriter 7y ago

> > Poverty is not a lack of character – it’s a lack of cash. > No. Poverty is a lack of education and, more importantly, mentorship. No, poverty is a lack of material wealth. A lack of education (of which mentorship is a component) may contribute to the durability of poverty, but it is far from the only factor which does so; active class discrimination in distribution of opportunity by the non-poor, both personally and through institutional, including public, policy, is also a factor.

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wnevets 7y ago

No, as someone who grew up quite poor I (my parents) needed cash.

exabrial 7y ago

> No. Poverty is a lack of education and, more importantly, mentorship. Mentorship is absolutely true. Kids need someone to invest and grow them. In the specific example you gave: on average kids that grow up in two parent households excel in every metric: graduation rates from high school / college, employment, total lifetime earnings, and incarceration rates. For kids that grow up in single parent homes, their success on the same metric comes down to mentorship; having involvement from a successful person in their life and repeating their steps to success. Whatever happens with your neighbor, keep at it as long as you're invited, and keep asking the tough questions. You will undoubtedly are a turning point in his life even if you don't see immediate results.

treyfitty 7y ago

The idea is that they’ll find mentors in a middle class neighborhood. Attacking the character of suboptimal decision makers isn’t fair. They have lives and they have every right to decide how they live it. At the same time, they’re beholden to the economic forces that govern everyday life. Thinking back at my childhood, my parents gave me a computer, a $300 baseball glove, an N64...etc despite not being able to afford it and I’m grateful for that. It allowed me to not be seen as the poor kid, ostracized by my peers, and provided me with countless hours of entertainment. When my friends went to summer camps, I played counter strike and Mario Kart at my house with the other kids who couldn’t afford camps while my parents worked. Sure, summer camp and a nanny could’ve provided me with a more meaningful experience, but let’s be real. Without friends, and families of friends, I wouldn’t be where I am today. They’ve fed me countless dinners, driven me to school, and even took me on vacations. The parents most definitely knew my economic situation, but my peers didn’t. Don’t judge the kid. Don’t even try to understand. Just be there if you want. If not, then that’s fine too, just don’t be so patronizing about how his mom should optimize her life. I’m thankful for it all.

theandrewbailey 7y ago
> Attacking the character of suboptimal decision makers isn’t fair. It is fair when a family routinely buys big ticket electronic items or vacations every month, but still runs out of food every month, despite being on food stamps.
axaxs 7y ago
Like everything else in life, this isn't fair. In my early 20s, they started moving these people into my father's neighborhood, which I couldn't afford so led a worse quality of life. Why should people who contribute nothing be given more consideration than those who are trying? This program is wreckless and just leads to whatever the modern day version of white flight is in the end. Please don't argue this point, I watched upscale areas of town turn to little more than ghettos under an extreme version of this idea. It's one of the biggest reasons I left. To be clear, I absolutely agree with your point, just not the method of attempting to achieve it.

didibus 7y ago

I agree and disagree at the same time. I agree in that, education and mentorship is definitely helpful and part of the equation. I disagree that cash is not relevant to that same equation though. I think any reductionist argument will be flawed one way or the other, cash is not all they need, but education is not all they need either. And I'm sure there's even more variables at play. I also want to say, having an iPad or two, a PS4 and cable TV, that's not really a good indicator of wealth. People's top expenses are generally housing, transportation, utilities and food, possibly healthcare if you need it. In your example, rent is subsidized, that means the top expense is minimized and a lot of savings comes from that. That said, I don't think its logical to say that the savings from holding off from buying two iPhones, an iPad and a PS4 can match that. Rent average price for a 2-bedroom is 1200$. That means in 2 or 3 months of rent, you've already purchased 2 iPhones, an iPad and a PS4. So no one can pay their rent by simply not buying these things. So I'm challenging your quote saying: "My neighbors have money". Do they really?

umvi 7y ago
> So I'm challenging your quote saying: "My neighbors have money". Do they really? Obviously I can only see my tiny slice in the form of an 11 year old coming over to my house asking for snacks bringing along his toys. I don't know how much income the mom has. But what I do know, is that they seem to run out of food near the end of each month, despite SNAP subsidizing food. So while abstaining from buying iPhones, iPads, and cable TV and other toys will not pay the rent, buying mid/low-tier Android instead of premium Apple, cutting cable, scratch offs, cigarettes, and other toys from the annual budget could easily relieve other stressors of poverty, for example by stocking shelves with nutritious food that lasts through the whole month.

danans 7y ago

> My neighbors have money. They spend it extremely poorly. It's a single mom with 2 kids. Both kids have iPhones, iPads, PS4s, cable TV, you name it. iPhones and video games are very cheap compared to good schools and safe and mentally stimulating childcare. A poor person's children having an iPhone and PlayStation is no more an indication of their having money than my kids not having those things is an indication that I'm poor. If anything the correlation is slightly on the opposite direction: I can afford better (expensive) activities for my kids (i.e. horseback riding camp, after school enrichment classes), which cost me tens of thousands per year. Poor people routinely occupy their children with an iPhone with Candy Crush, which is cheap by comparison. Those things create the temporary illusion of prosperity, both for those in poverty, and for observers like you. > Just recently he boasted that his mom is going to buy him a brand new $1500 gaming rig. I remarked that seemed quite expensive and wondered where the money would come from. "tax return" he replied non-chalantly. He also said once they got their tax return they would be going to Disneyland. You shouldn't necessarily believe everything that a child in need says about what their family is purchasing. People (children and adults) do a lot of wishful thinking out loud. Some of it is to assuage themselves, and to feel normalized among their more privileged peers. > These kids need mentors more than they need cash. Families need cash to reduce financial stress levels. Being a single mother on govt benefits isn't the cakewalk you make it out to be. And absolutely, kids need mentors, but good mentors also don't come cheap, and they usually aren't willing to work with kids who has behavioral issues originating in financial stress and cheap entertainment distractions. Volunteer mentors want to work with the "diamonds in the rough" kids, because the reward for mentorship is feeling like a super hero who "made a difference in one child's life". That approach doesn't scale. The mentorship program that scales is the one right on front of us: financially stable parents and community, who have an inherent interest in the child's development.

bluGill 7y ago
Those things are cheap only if the kids have enough food to eat. I buy a few nice things, but I don't have that much even though it is safe to assume I have 4 times the income (including welfare). My family eats good food, and my kid does well in school. I'm not against the poor having nice toys, but the priority is not toys. Yet I see the poor spending a lot of toys that are often discarded in a short time.

jdkee 7y ago

And where is the father?

andrepd 7y ago

Why do I keep seeing these sorts of arguments. >No. Poverty is a lack of education and, more importantly, mentorship. This is because [insert story about "neighbor"] To put it very bluntly: I don't give two shits about your neighbour. This is the kind of thinking that justifies racism and other types of discrimination. I have a gypsy neighbour who collects welfare and does not work while he sells drugs in his neighbour |= therefore gypsies are leeches and criminals. You see the problem? For every story of yours I can tell you a story about a guy who had caring and hardworking parents, a nurturing environment, was he himself very hardworking, but simply had not enough money to make it in this world (not enough money to attend good schools, do extracurricular activities, had to care for his siblings or work after school himself, etc.). What does that tell me about this problem? I don't care for anecdotes about your neighbour (because everybody has "a neighbour", or his cousin's wife has a friend from work who knows a guy who...), I don't care for "common sense opinions". I care for research, data, in short: meaningful facts about large-scale trends rather than individual cases, of which you can find every sort.

tristor 7y ago

Unfortunately, your anecdote and also what I have seen and experienced in my own life is that it often is a lack of character. Saying that is controversial, because it seems to be saying those who are in poverty are less than, but that's not what I mean. What I mean is that character includes a lot of things about a person, including their world view and what things they think are important in life. The truly sad thing I've observed is that poverty is generational because children form so much of their world view and their own character from that of their parents, and it is the parent's lack of character that leads to and keeps them in poverty more than anything. Poverty is a vicious cycle, and it has different causative factors and outcomes for different people. Inner city poverty and rural poverty share many common things, but are very different situations. I've seen both. I have been broke, but I've never been poor, and the difference largely had to do with my upbringing and my own personal character. To a large degree, my very belief that I could overcome being broke and didn't need to become poor is a component of that very upbringing. People in poverty feel defeated, that there is nothing that they can do which will resolve their situation. They exist in a concentric sphere of negative feedback loops, where the only dopamine hit they can find to make them feel "okay" even for a little bit is found in illicit substances, meaningless sex, or conspicuous consumption that earns them the adoration of their peers. These are the high points of their life, and yet none of them help to break the cycle, they just reinforce it. It's not enough to throw money at the problem. Poverty must be arrested, like the putting on of brakes. At a certain point in life... people are basically unsavable themselves and too set in their ways, but they can be convinced to save their children. The only effective program I've ever seen to actually combat the cycle of poverty was based on providing pre-teens and young adults in poverty with funds, education, and resources that their parents could not take advantage of or interfere with. Something as simple as providing thorough financial literacy education and a place where pre-teens could bank and their parents couldn't steal from them was very effective, especially when combined with no-cost after school programs which kept them off the streets and out of abusive and dangerous home situations for further education and mentorship. Unfortunately programs like this are contentious and very very expensive to operate and hard to scale. The program I observed had 40 kids in one neighborhood and took nearly 200 volunteers to pull off and 10 paid staff, plus facilities. When I look at the situation as a whole, it's obvious to me that one of the single biggest factors in why this has become such a serious issue in the Western world is due to the breakdown of the nuclear family. Single-parent homes aren't in the financial position to spend time focused on their children's mentorship and education in the way that a two working parent home is, simply put. And educational outcomes, life outcomes really, are heavily tied to having parents which value education and good financial literacy and ensure that their children value those things as well, regardless of how many dollars are in their bank account or stuffed in the mattress. EDIT: To a large degree, how you think about the poverty problem comes back down to the classical philosophical question of nature vs nurture. The reality has always been that life is a little bit of both. But when it comes to poverty, enough time in those circumstances can effectively destroy someone's mental health and make them incapable of escaping. They become effectively addicted to escapist dopamine rushes and impulses, without any ability to plan for the long term. It has real, serious, negative mental consequences for adults and children both. But children can be saved, adults are often a lost cause. The best thing we can do is focus on breaking the cycle so the next generation of adults is better off than the current generation.

tsimionescu 7y ago

> No. Poverty is a lack of education and, more importantly, mentorship. This is beyond insulting, at least in the way it is worded. Your example of the single mom who squanders charity money on expensive toys sounds exactly like right-wing propaganda, even if I am absolutely certain it does happen. The reality is that the vast majority of poor people just don't have the money to squander. Sure, some of them may squander the money even if they had them, but the reality is that only a minuscule percentage do. Financial education would help these people, and can't hurt. But minimum income of some kind (I'm not necessarily convinced UBI is a good idea) will help all poor people. A much more common story of poverty is families who can't afford to get their children through school, who live paycheck to paycheck and get forced into predatory lending when they hit financial difficulties (e.g. plumbing problems).

zozbot234 7y ago
'Education' is not limited to financial education, surely. Mentorship could be a good starting point for the social support that many poor folks seem to lack, and that might make it hard for them to earn money in the first place. Not sure what's 'insulting' about parent's claims, they seem quite sensible and supportive to me.
- tsimionescu 7y ago
  Perhaps I read it badly, but to me GP's claims sounded like they believe people wouldn't be poor if only they were more educated, that with a little mentorship everyone could learn how to stop being poor. The example of the neighbor squandering her money and not educating her children seemed to reinforce this idea - she has the money not to be poor, she just doesn't know how to do it. This is probably true in her particular case, based on GP's recording, but it is insulting to generalize it to the vast majority of poor people who would know very well how to save 1500 dollars and not to spend it on same gaming system, if they only ever saw that amount of money all at one time.