5 ms·

Problem is the lack of colloquial objective definition of "poor". The US "poverty line" is at 80th percentile of world incomes. The US's vast welfare/entitleme

Problem is the lack of colloquial objective definition of "poor". The US "poverty line" is at 80th percentile of world incomes. The US's vast welfare/entitlement system ensures few indeed net less than that line, shoring up their shortfall with trillions of $. What constitutes "poor" keeps shifting. There will always be a bottom 10%. There is ongoing increase to the standard of living, instilling a sense of "nobody should go without X" (when X didn't exist not long before, broadband internet being the latest). Affordable housing gets overrun by population growth & attracting mobile opportunity-seekers, living space naturally going to the highest bidder; property taxes being a thing, there is no recognized natural right to real estate. Health care relentlessly advances, new lifesaving care objectively costing a great deal ... vs a public sentiment of a right thereto. We need an objective redefinition of "poor", predicated on a baseline of nutrition, housing floorspace, basic tools (stove, disposal, etc), care (minimum optimistic odds of longevity), information access, etc and an understanding that the baseline cannot be shifted - that those doing better are not poor, that accessibility thereto is largely attainable (whatever the sociopolitical system), and acknowledgement that when/if all are above that line, poverty services are officially out of a job. As it stands, "poor" is a moving target for which a great number of people have a vested interest in covering a consistent, if not growing, population.

baddox 7y ago
Why would we not want the baseline to improve over time? I genuinely do not understand the attitude that we should establish some extremely low bar like “is not currently at risk of starvation” and then never move the bar, but merely congratulating ourselves when more people pass that bar.
- ctdonath 7y ago
  Because humans need an objective minimum to survive. Below that they face slow death. There's a difference between social norm vs existential need, and many people have a vested interest in conflating the two. There has to be a baseline standard, amounting to triage, above which "your core needs are met, and you have a path to thrive on - up to you to do you now." Maybe there's another moving standard of minimum standard of living, whereby people don't existentially need X but society at large agrees everyone should have X (or opportunity thereto).
  - baddox 7y ago
    > Because humans need an objective minimum to survive. I don’t even agree with this. Even for starvation there’s no clean dividing line. Malnutrition leads to reduced lifespans and health problems. I think that quality of life both can and should increase as society improves its technology and wealth.
    - ctdonath 7y ago
      You're bolstering my case. "Malnutrition" is, obviously, below the line I'm trying to draw. Meet the line, and you fundamentally want for nothing, no "reduced lifespan and health problems". Humans have a natural lifespan; what is the minimum necessary to support that (aside from externalities brought on by personal choice or random $#!^)?
      - baddox 7y ago
        I’m not being clear. I mean that as your nutrition gets worse, your expected lifespan decreases and you are at greater risk of health problems. Again there is no clean dividing line between malnutrition and good nutrition. In fact, in the future we might know so much more about nutrition that many common human diets in 2020 will seem like malnutrition.
        ctdonath 7y ago
        Then let's err in favor of what we can deem "good nutrition" now, and objectively adjust it later if appropriate. "You'll never meet my whimsical specification of sufficient, so your earnest objective suggestion is wrong" doesn't work.
  - diffeomorphism 7y ago
    The definition of "not poor" is not supposed to amount to "barely surviving" but to "living and being productive members of society". > many people have a vested interest in conflating the two. Just like you are conflating being poor and being a bad person: > your core needs are met, and you have a path to thrive on - up to you to do you now. This implicitly suggests that you are only poor because you were too lazy/stupid/<insult> to follow that path. Maybe there are people like that, but many people are poor because being poor is expensive.
- SuperFerret 7y ago
  And of course, no one talks about establishing an upper bar for those who have way more than they need.
Balgair 7y ago
> As it stands, "poor" is a moving target for which a great number of people have a vested interest in covering a consistent, if not growing, population. Nearly all Kings and Emperors were 'poorer' than most Westerners under the poverty line of today. They had no refrigeration, antibiotics, electricity, etc. But we still agree that there are 'poor' people today, and I think we're correct to say so. Yes, it is a moving target, and thank God that it is such. If 'progress' means that we have to drag the least lucky of us up to levels of decadence that Cesar could never have though of, I'm more than on board for that. Quibbling about the exact definition of poor for all of time is useless. Charge ahead, have the 'poor' of our grandchildren's time be the wealthy of today.
- idreyn 7y ago
  IMO, the big factor that explains why a minimum-wage worker with a smartphone is impoverished but a 16th century king is not, comes down the psychological burden of poverty. If you're poor in America you live with constant fear of minor financial catastrophes because they will further constrain your opportunity, perpetuating a downwards spiral. Integrated over time this background anxiety drastically reduces one's subjective quality of life, and also leads to physical health issues down the road. By contrast, if you're a monarch of a medieval European kingdom, you might be dying of syphilis at 43 but with the knowledge that everything possible is being done to save you, and you can call for a roast pheasant or the execution of your meddling cousin on your deathbed. It's completely subjective, and thus very easy to dismiss, but it contributes the "missing term" for me in thinking about this question.
- BlackCherry 7y ago
  I find this trope of Kings/Emperors being "poorer" than most people today, to be an extremely annoying trope. This trope is purely a rhetorical device used to justify inequalities, because "look you have a cell phone and infinite McDonald's deliveries on Seamless, you're richer than a King of old!" Meanwhile you're shackled to your job, shackled to your location, shackled to your apartment/mortgage, shackled to your debt, etc.
  - ctdonath 7y ago
frandroid 7y ago
People have studied the problem you talk about. Their statistical tool to address it is the GINI coefficient: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient
- ctdonath 7y ago
  Interesting (I'll study further), but still fixated on "inequality". I don't care that Elon Musk has billion$ and I don't, I care that I have a "tiny house" bare minimum of nutrition, environment (heat/cool/humidity), waste disposal, energy, mundane medical care, and living space - with which I can be reasonably expected to live an optimal lifespan (within a standard deviation), processing raw resources at minimal cost.
AnthonyMouse 7y ago
The simpler solution is to just impose a tax of a given rate and pay out all the money it generates as a UBI. As economic productivity increases over time, more revenue is generated and we can pay out a bigger UBI, which satisfies the intuition that minimum standard of living should increase as overall productivity improves. If that amount is below some standard of living we wouldn't wish on our worst enemies then we can worry about it (i.e. raise the tax rate). If it's somewhat more than that but nonetheless we have a reasonable tax rate, so what? If the economy is doing better in ten years and that allows someone living on a UBI to be able to afford broadband when they couldn't before, is that supposed to be a problem?
- ctdonath 7y ago
  The problem is UBI simply becomes the new $0 per supply-and-demand. If you didn't have to work for $UBI, and everybody has $UBI it has no value. Yes, the math is more complicated than that; upshot is a limited supply of essentials will be priced to take into account that EVERYBODY has $UBI. If I'm poor, limited housing means rent goes to $rent+UBI. If I'm sufficiently above poor, $UBI goes to $0 because I paid for $UBI (xN) in the first place, getting back some of what I paid in taxes. Someone who couldn't afford broadband before UBI wouldn't be able to afford broadband after (beyond a brief blip where the market sorts pricing out) because rent & broadband just increased price according to everyone now having UBI. If anything, more won't afford essentials and near-essentials precisely because overall prices will rise. It's the same reason why minimum wage really doesn't work: prices increased to match a baseline income for low productivity, coupled with an increased population unable to earn at all because they simply don't produce $minwage value (and are now marked "poor" and routed to get their needs provided by a bureaucracy).
  - AnthonyMouse 7y ago
    That would only be true in a world where supply of necessities is immutable. In practice when there is more demand for stuff we can generally make more stuff. It is possible to build additional housing rather than forcing everyone into a zero-sum auction over the existing supply.
heavyset_go 7y ago
> “A linen shirt is, strictly speaking, not a necessary of life. The Greeks and Romans lived, I suppose, very comfortably though they had no linen. But in the present times, through the greater part of Europe, a creditable day-labourer would be ashamed to appear in public without a linen shirt, the want of which would be supposed to denote that disgraceful degree of poverty which, it is presumed, nobody can well fall into without extreme bad conduct.” - Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations
- ctdonath 7y ago
  The aforementioned day-laborer's shirt took hundreds of hours to make. The aforementioned Greeks & Romans had to go hunt & kill & skin & dry a good-sized animal to make a shirt. You can buy an entirely respectable modern shirt for $5 today, 42 minutes of mundane commodity labor in a comfortable environment.

baddox 7y ago

Why would we not want the baseline to improve over time? I genuinely do not understand the attitude that we should establish some extremely low bar like “is not currently at risk of starvation” and then never move the bar, but merely congratulating ourselves when more people pass that bar.

ctdonath 7y ago
Because humans need an objective minimum to survive. Below that they face slow death. There's a difference between social norm vs existential need, and many people have a vested interest in conflating the two. There has to be a baseline standard, amounting to triage, above which "your core needs are met, and you have a path to thrive on - up to you to do you now." Maybe there's another moving standard of minimum standard of living, whereby people don't existentially need X but society at large agrees everyone should have X (or opportunity thereto).
- baddox 7y ago
  > Because humans need an objective minimum to survive. I don’t even agree with this. Even for starvation there’s no clean dividing line. Malnutrition leads to reduced lifespans and health problems. I think that quality of life both can and should increase as society improves its technology and wealth.
  - ctdonath 7y ago
    You're bolstering my case. "Malnutrition" is, obviously, below the line I'm trying to draw. Meet the line, and you fundamentally want for nothing, no "reduced lifespan and health problems". Humans have a natural lifespan; what is the minimum necessary to support that (aside from externalities brought on by personal choice or random $#!^)?
    - baddox 7y ago
      I’m not being clear. I mean that as your nutrition gets worse, your expected lifespan decreases and you are at greater risk of health problems. Again there is no clean dividing line between malnutrition and good nutrition. In fact, in the future we might know so much more about nutrition that many common human diets in 2020 will seem like malnutrition.
      - ctdonath 7y ago
        Then let's err in favor of what we can deem "good nutrition" now, and objectively adjust it later if appropriate. "You'll never meet my whimsical specification of sufficient, so your earnest objective suggestion is wrong" doesn't work.
- diffeomorphism 7y ago
  The definition of "not poor" is not supposed to amount to "barely surviving" but to "living and being productive members of society". > many people have a vested interest in conflating the two. Just like you are conflating being poor and being a bad person: > your core needs are met, and you have a path to thrive on - up to you to do you now. This implicitly suggests that you are only poor because you were too lazy/stupid/<insult> to follow that path. Maybe there are people like that, but many people are poor because being poor is expensive.
SuperFerret 7y ago
And of course, no one talks about establishing an upper bar for those who have way more than they need.

Balgair 7y ago

> As it stands, "poor" is a moving target for which a great number of people have a vested interest in covering a consistent, if not growing, population. Nearly all Kings and Emperors were 'poorer' than most Westerners under the poverty line of today. They had no refrigeration, antibiotics, electricity, etc. But we still agree that there are 'poor' people today, and I think we're correct to say so. Yes, it is a moving target, and thank God that it is such. If 'progress' means that we have to drag the least lucky of us up to levels of decadence that Cesar could never have though of, I'm more than on board for that. Quibbling about the exact definition of poor for all of time is useless. Charge ahead, have the 'poor' of our grandchildren's time be the wealthy of today.

idreyn 7y ago
IMO, the big factor that explains why a minimum-wage worker with a smartphone is impoverished but a 16th century king is not, comes down the psychological burden of poverty. If you're poor in America you live with constant fear of minor financial catastrophes because they will further constrain your opportunity, perpetuating a downwards spiral. Integrated over time this background anxiety drastically reduces one's subjective quality of life, and also leads to physical health issues down the road. By contrast, if you're a monarch of a medieval European kingdom, you might be dying of syphilis at 43 but with the knowledge that everything possible is being done to save you, and you can call for a roast pheasant or the execution of your meddling cousin on your deathbed. It's completely subjective, and thus very easy to dismiss, but it contributes the "missing term" for me in thinking about this question.
BlackCherry 7y ago
I find this trope of Kings/Emperors being "poorer" than most people today, to be an extremely annoying trope. This trope is purely a rhetorical device used to justify inequalities, because "look you have a cell phone and infinite McDonald's deliveries on Seamless, you're richer than a King of old!" Meanwhile you're shackled to your job, shackled to your location, shackled to your apartment/mortgage, shackled to your debt, etc.
- ctdonath 7y ago

frandroid 7y ago

People have studied the problem you talk about. Their statistical tool to address it is the GINI coefficient: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient

ctdonath 7y ago
Interesting (I'll study further), but still fixated on "inequality". I don't care that Elon Musk has billion$ and I don't, I care that I have a "tiny house" bare minimum of nutrition, environment (heat/cool/humidity), waste disposal, energy, mundane medical care, and living space - with which I can be reasonably expected to live an optimal lifespan (within a standard deviation), processing raw resources at minimal cost.

AnthonyMouse 7y ago

The simpler solution is to just impose a tax of a given rate and pay out all the money it generates as a UBI. As economic productivity increases over time, more revenue is generated and we can pay out a bigger UBI, which satisfies the intuition that minimum standard of living should increase as overall productivity improves. If that amount is below some standard of living we wouldn't wish on our worst enemies then we can worry about it (i.e. raise the tax rate). If it's somewhat more than that but nonetheless we have a reasonable tax rate, so what? If the economy is doing better in ten years and that allows someone living on a UBI to be able to afford broadband when they couldn't before, is that supposed to be a problem?

ctdonath 7y ago
The problem is UBI simply becomes the new $0 per supply-and-demand. If you didn't have to work for $UBI, and everybody has $UBI it has no value. Yes, the math is more complicated than that; upshot is a limited supply of essentials will be priced to take into account that EVERYBODY has $UBI. If I'm poor, limited housing means rent goes to $rent+UBI. If I'm sufficiently above poor, $UBI goes to $0 because I paid for $UBI (xN) in the first place, getting back some of what I paid in taxes. Someone who couldn't afford broadband before UBI wouldn't be able to afford broadband after (beyond a brief blip where the market sorts pricing out) because rent & broadband just increased price according to everyone now having UBI. If anything, more won't afford essentials and near-essentials precisely because overall prices will rise. It's the same reason why minimum wage really doesn't work: prices increased to match a baseline income for low productivity, coupled with an increased population unable to earn at all because they simply don't produce $minwage value (and are now marked "poor" and routed to get their needs provided by a bureaucracy).
- AnthonyMouse 7y ago
  That would only be true in a world where supply of necessities is immutable. In practice when there is more demand for stuff we can generally make more stuff. It is possible to build additional housing rather than forcing everyone into a zero-sum auction over the existing supply.

heavyset_go 7y ago

> “A linen shirt is, strictly speaking, not a necessary of life. The Greeks and Romans lived, I suppose, very comfortably though they had no linen. But in the present times, through the greater part of Europe, a creditable day-labourer would be ashamed to appear in public without a linen shirt, the want of which would be supposed to denote that disgraceful degree of poverty which, it is presumed, nobody can well fall into without extreme bad conduct.” - Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations

ctdonath 7y ago
The aforementioned day-laborer's shirt took hundreds of hours to make. The aforementioned Greeks & Romans had to go hunt & kill & skin & dry a good-sized animal to make a shirt. You can buy an entirely respectable modern shirt for $5 today, 42 minutes of mundane commodity labor in a comfortable environment.