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They finally hit on the real story halfway down: "“Generally, it is clear that things that make life less boring are a priority for the poor,” they write in th

They finally hit on the real story halfway down: "“Generally, it is clear that things that make life less boring are a priority for the poor,” they write in their new book." Yes, the poor spend their money unwisely when they have extra. That's the real reason. If a rich person finds themselves down on their luck, they knuckle down and work really hard to get into a situation where they can afford to buy luxuries. It isn't about lack of opportunity. It's about wise choices. I can't find the story now, but there was a fairly wealthy man who decided to give all that up and see if poor people could pull themselves up. He stowed his credit cards and cash and went to live on the street. He started at day-labor sites until his work ethic paid off and he got a steady job from someone. He had goals like an apartment, a car, etc, with a certain amount of cash in the bank. He gave himself 1 year. At 9 months, he had completed his goal, and a family member fell ill. He quite before the 1 year, but he had already completed his goals and was on his way to a good life. In other words, he spent his money wisely and was able to vastly improve his lifestyle in less than a year. But most poor people say it's impossible. Are they not trying? Are they trying, but making too many bad decisions?

elmindreda 15y ago
For one thing, it makes a lot of difference whether or not you have a safety net when you're on a tightrope.
- burgerbrain 15y ago
  I'm not sure that analogy holds. I'll accept that in the literal case it does, since I can easily see how being nervous would effect physical coordination while walking on a tightrope, but I don't see how being nervous of failure would render you unable to work hard unskilled labor jobs or save money. On the contrary, I expect it would help by providing real motivation.
  - elmindreda 15y ago
    I think what I meant was that being nervous about falling down most likely means you'll be walking a lot slower than the person with the safety net. If you only have what you need to survive, you're far less likely to take any chances with it. Working hard, despite much propaganda to the contrary, isn't a solution. I'm not even sure what it means in this context. Being poor is very hard work in and of itself, as taking care of the basic necessities of life takes a lot more time and effort when you can't use the expensive short cuts that middle-class people take for granted. When you're poor, everything takes longer, everything associated with money causes anxiety, the social stigma can prevent you from making useful connections, healthcare becomes more difficult to access, you have to spend time fixing or working around broken items, if you have a job you likely work longer and/or more uncomfortable hours, if you don't have a job there's the added stress and stigma from that, many government programs in reality become traps due to their desire to control poor people's lives, you cannot afford and/or do not have the time or energy left to make healthy food, etc. There are many, many other factors, many of which can be trivially seen to magnify other factors.
ssharp 15y ago
That story ignores so many of the issues related to growing up in poverty. If poverty is all you've ever been around, it's never as simple as just "working hard and making good decisions".
- tomjen3 15y ago
  Andrew Carnegie would disagree. He didn't start out rich, but he ended up (very) rich.
  - chromatic 15y ago
    Not everyone is Andrew Carnegie. Perhaps other mechanisms to reduce poverty will be more effective.
    - temphn 15y ago
      Capitalism reduced the poverty of Singapore, South Korea, Vietnam, Chile, and Estonia (to name a few). What country was built from foreign aid?
      - chromatic 15y ago
        Perhaps changing the subject from Andrew Carnegie will express my discomfort with the implicit syllogism more effectively. Cory Doctorow gives his books away for free. Cory Doctorow has achieved great financial and literary success. Therefore, everyone who gives books away for free will achieve great financial and literary success.
        tomjen3 15y ago
        I don't really buy that argument (you could take any property they shared, no matter how irrelevant, and make the same argument, i.e. they both had two feet): Cory Doctorow makes money because he has spent a large amount of time to create an audience, because he writes interesting books and because he is constantly on the lookout for new ways to monitize them. And yeah, most people who pull that of would properly experience success.
GrangalanJr 15y ago
Most very poor people are not young, athletic, with good physical and mental health, no dependents, and the background security of being able to leave their circumstances immediately any time they want. The book is "Scratch Beginnings" by Adam Shepard, btw.
- hammock 15y ago
  Most very poor people are not young, athletic, with good physical and mental health, no dependents, and the background security of being able to leave their circumstances immediately any time they want. Chicken and egg problem?
- Khroma 15y ago
  I agree. The book is a poor analogy of actually being poor. Let's put aside the money reserve for a moment. From wiki, it looks as if he put aside anything that would help him, such as his college education. Ok. But poor people also have things that weigh them down, things that hurt them, for example, dependents (children, family), addictions, debt, and what you mentioned.
zem 15y ago
here's the story: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scratch_Beginnings http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scratch_Beginnings
dodo53 15y ago
I think that's quite funny. If he really was poor, that unexpected family member becoming ill would probably have knocked him back financially / meant he had to take time off work to care for them whatever.
- burgerbrain 15y ago
  Sudden unforseen and expensive illness in the family isn't really all that common though. Furthermore, it is only really a problem in countries such as the US which don't have affordable healthcare for the poor. There certainly are many people in this world that are poor because of a series of very unfortunate incidences that put them at a disadvantage. However, I think it's pretty clear that despite how common that may be, it cannot begin to explain the majority of poverty in "1st world" societies.
  - Unseelie 15y ago
    No, sudden unforeseen and expensive illnesses aren't that common. Sudden costs are. Costs don't even need to be unforseen, they just have to be more than you can deal with on a timescale.
    - deleted 15y ago
      [deleted]
mkelly 15y ago
The fact that he could give up without consequence when his family member got ill is significant. If he was actually poor, caring for his family member could have put him back at square one again. [Edit: oops, someone else beat me to it]
repos 15y ago
"In other words, he spent his money wisely and was able to vastly improve his lifestyle in less than a year." He also had the privilege of a good education and good upbringing. You are making way too many assumptions to think that all it takes is wisdom and good decisions. What we can think and do is strongly shaped by our environment, and getting yourself out of poverty is harder than you think.
- pbhjpbhj 15y ago
  One year is nothing. From experience I'd say that being poor is not hard for a year. It's the 3rd, 4th, 7th year, ... when your clothes all have holes that you've no energy to repair, your home starts to fall in to disrepair, you've been wearing leaky shoes for over a year, there appears to be no hope of ending your situation ...
mcantelon 15y ago
>It isn't about lack of opportunity. It's about wise choices. ...and knowing wise choices exist. If you're brought up to just get by and the people all around you have the same mentality knowing that there's a superior mentality requires looking outside the box. This is where mentorship and real education (beyond education that conditions you to just show up on time) are valuable.
- Lost_BiomedE 15y ago
  Agree. Dow chemical had a program where they would employ people from welfare families. They had to explain to them telephones, teach them about being on time, teach them to file (sometimes the alphabet as well), etc. Most came in for a week and left. Working was such a foreign concept to them, their families, and community that it did not make any sense to them. It is similar to the fish in water analogy or a reverse of 'if you want to be self-made rich hang out with self-made rich people'
  - DenisM 15y ago
    Do you have a link or a keyword to look for? thanks.
    - Lost_BiomedE 15y ago
      Dow has changed a lot since then, and I am unsure if they have continued the program. This was at their Michigan plant in the 80s. Now it looks like they have moved more to diversity, cultural, disability, and gender issues: http://www.dow.com/diversity/beliefs/outreach.htm http://www.dow.com/diversity/beliefs/outreach.htm
todayiamme 15y ago
>>> Are they not trying? Are they trying, but making too many bad decisions? <<< I think that the answer is a combination of bad memes and human nature. I ask almost every auto-rickshaw driver whose vehicle I sit in about their income and how do they live. I then listen to them and offer them suggestions that might help them out. It turns out that things just aren't that simple. From the article; >>> Indeed, they may well be more driven by ideas, simply because they have less information about the world outside and, therefore, feel a greater need to use their collective imagination to fill the gaps in their knowledge <<< It's crucial to understand that these people haven't seen any examples to the contrary. They just don't have access to them. They live in societies that are highly stratified and tend to learn, quickly, to obey the hierarchy when it comes to outsiders, because if they "step out of bounds" the consequences can be ugly. So, they simply don't have access to people with good memes, and their minds are shaped by that narrow microcosm. Neither do they have the means to understand how to attain something better, because for them that's the only existence they know and it is what it is. This might be maddeningly annoying for you and me, but think about how your upbringing and the social circles you run in have shaped you to thrive in your environment. How can someone use those metrics and ideas to eke out success in the hierarchy of a remote african tribe? (I'm talking about concrete, implementable ideas not abstract ones)Well, you say that you'll learn them, but if no one is around and you don't have the means to teach yourself said memes how will you ever learn? Yes, you'll scrape on by, but you just won't thrive. They just don't know any better. Moreover, they don't even know that can be changed. Think about it. Here's what I think is the crucial ingredient; >>> They don’t just need nutrition that will keep them alive longer—they also need a reason to want to live longer. Being healthier by denying yourself the little pleasures you can afford, a cup of tea or a bowl of steaming rice, makes little sense if you have nothing else to look forward to, <<< That man had something to look forward to. They don't. For them survival is ugly and fraught with absolutely no meaning and it's been that way their entire lives. Anyone would ponder suicide in their environment at least once. This helps them to keep sane and escape the drudgery, which is a bit like the rich and the middle class taking extravagant holidays, or going out to get drunk etc. It's something to look forward to, but for us we have other options that give us the same satisfaction. They don't. Partly because they can't visualise them, but mostly because of the daily grind to survive. So, don't judge them. They are real people just like you and me.
temphn 15y ago
It is really as simple as noting the robust heritability of cognitive traits (see "The Blank Slate") and the strong correlation between intelligence, conscientiousness, and wealth. But surprisingly, many highly intelligent people (including many in this very thread) will actually deny that they have any natural cognitive advantages over the poor. They will readily admit they are smarter than those "idiots" who can't code Fizzbuzz, or the ones who comment at Youtube, or the software engineers who're still doing Cobol, or the tea partiers...but they won't admit they are naturally smarter than the average poor person. In fact, they are actually more ready to characterize themselves (or others) as oppressors of some sort than to admit that they are gifted.
- tokenadult 15y ago
  (see "The Blank Slate") The book The Blank Slate was published almost a decade ago http://www.amazon.com/Blank-Slate-Modern-Denial-Nature/dp/0670031518 http://www.amazon.com/Blank-Slate-Modern-Denial-Nature/dp/06... and research has moved on. The chapter in The Blank Slate that has the most to do with heritability of cognitive abilities is largely based, as author Steven Pinker acknowledges in his bibliographic references, on the work of Eric Turkheimer. But Turkheimer has revised his point of view in the last decade, and if Pinker is still reading Turkheimer's writings, Pinker should too. I'll recommend here two articles from Turkheimer's faculty web page http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/vita1_turkheimer.htm http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/vita1_turkheimer.htm that more readers of Pinker's book ought to know about, to bring their understanding of human behavioral genetics up to date. Johnson, Wendy; Turkheimer, Eric; Gottesman, Irving I.; Bouchard Jr., Thomas (2009). Beyond Heritability: Twin Studies in Behavioral Research. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 18, 4, 217-220 http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Articles%20for%20Online%20CV/Johnson%20%282009%29.pdf http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Articles%20for%20O... is an interesting paper that includes the statement "Moreover, even highly heritable traits can be strongly manipulated by the environment, so heritability has little if anything to do with controllability. For example, height is on the order of 90% heritable, yet North and South Koreans, who come from the same genetic background, presently differ in average height by a full 6 inches (Pak, 2004; Schwekendiek, 2008)." Another interesting paper, Turkheimer, E. (2008, Spring). A better way to use twins for developmental research. LIFE Newsletter, 2, 1-5 http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Articles%20for%20Online%20CV/Turkheimer%20%282008%29.pdf http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Articles%20for%20O... admits the disappointment of behavioral genetics researchers. "But back to the question: What does heritability mean? Almost everyone who has ever thought about heritability has reached a commonsense intuition about it: One way or another, heritability has to be some kind of index of how genetic a trait is. That intuition explains why so many thousands of heritability coefficients have been calculated over the years. Once the twin registries have been assembled, it’s easy and fun, like having a genoscope you can point at one trait after another to take a reading of how genetic things are. Height? Very genetic. Intelligence? Pretty genetic. Schizophrenia? That looks pretty genetic too. Personality? Yep, that too. And over multiple studies and traits the heritabilities go up and down, providing the basis for nearly infinite Talmudic revisions of the grand theories of the heritability of things, perfect grist for the wheels of social science. "Unfortunately, that fundamental intuition is wrong. Heritability isn’t an index of how genetic a trait is. A great deal of time has been wasted in the effort of measuring the heritability of traits in the false expectation that somehow the genetic nature of psychological phenomena would be revealed. There are many reasons for making this strong statement, but the most important of them harkens back to the description of heritability as an effect size. An effect size of the R2 family is a standardized estimate of the proportion of the variance in one variable that is reduced when another variable is held constant statistically. In this case it is an estimate of how much the variance of a trait would be reduced if everyone were genetically identical. With a moment’s thought you can see that the answer to the question of how much variance would be reduced if everyone was genetically identical depends crucially on how genetically different everyone was in the first place." I've enjoyed learning about this line of research from several well known behavioral geneticists, including some of the doyens of twin research, as I participate in the journal club in individual differences psychology and behavioral genetics http://www.psych.umn.edu/courses/fall10/psy8935/default.htm http://www.psych.umn.edu/courses/fall10/psy8935/default.htm at the university where those researchers are based. There is always lively discussion on what the data show, and what the data don't show. Thus far, there are no data to show that poor people are poor solely because they lack academic ability (and anyway studies show http://www.jkcf.org/assets/files/0000/0084/Achievement_Trap.pdf http://www.jkcf.org/assets/files/0000/0084/Achievement_Trap.... http://tcf.org/publications/pdfs/pb428/carnrose.pdf http://tcf.org/publications/pdfs/pb428/carnrose.pdf http://reason.com/archives/2008/02/19/legacies-of-injustice http://reason.com/archives/2008/02/19/legacies-of-injustice that poverty is a meaningful disadvantage even for high-ability young people). Nor is there any predictable limit on how much poor people might be able to use their abilities, whatever their current ability level, to improve their condition in life if the undeniable disadvantages of lacking money were alleviated.
joeyespo 15y ago
It may not be quite that easy though. This person would already have prior knowledge on making good decisions whereas the poor (probably) don't. That being said, here's a book with a similar premise and a different outcome: http://www.amazon.com/Nickel-Dimed-Not-Getting-America/dp/0805063897 http://www.amazon.com/Nickel-Dimed-Not-Getting-America/dp/08... The author finds herself barely able to make it. Grant it, she approaches the situation rather pessimistically, the book still paints a decent picture as to why so many people are struggling.
j_baker 15y ago
At 9 months, he had completed his goal, and a family member fell ill. Wait, what was this? He got faced with a situation he couldn't handle with wise decision-making, saving, and elbow grease and had to tap into his riches to get himself out? You know, the real problem is that he got a nice apartment and car. If he lived in a shack and walked everywhere, I bet he'd have been able to help his family member out. Was he just not trying, or was he trying and making bad decisions?
- mapgrep 15y ago
  This is an excellent point: Unexpected and unavoidable costs are precisely the sort of problem that have repeatedly been shown to thwart the accumulation of wealth among the poor. Ironically, the referenced book (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scratch_Beginnings http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scratch_Beginnings) was specifically written to rebut Barbara Ehrenreich's first person book on poverty, Nickel and Dimed. A major theme of that book is the debilitating impact of catastrophic costs, health care in particular, on the poor. "Without health insurance you risk a small cut becoming infected because you can afford neither a visit to the doctor nor antibiotics... [an] impacted wisdom tooth requir[ed] frantic calls to find a free dental clinic" was the NYTimes summary (http://www.nytimes.com/books/01/05/13/reviews/010513.13gallagt.html?_r=1 http://www.nytimes.com/books/01/05/13/reviews/010513.13galla...) So the book referenced by the grandparent comment was derailed exactly as predicted in the very book it was trying to rebut. It is not only the poor who like "things that make life less boring." We all do, and I'd argue we all need these things for sanity. That's why I don't beat myself up too hard for occasionally wasting time doing things like, say, posting comments on Hackers News.
- burgerbrain 15y ago
  The only reason he had to help his relative when they fell ill is because although he was playing poor, he technically still had the money. Refusing to help the family member for the sake of making a point would be highly unethical. Had he actually been that poor (only 5k in his name at the time), then he would have been under no real obligation to drop everything and support that family member.
  - 15y ago
hooande 15y ago
From a statistics point of view, your argument seems to be flawed. It's very unlikely for someone who is born poor to end up rich, no matter how wise their choices are. From the wikipedia page on "Economic Mobility" [1]: "Children previously from lower-income families had only a 1% chance of having an income that ranks in the top 5%" I can't imagine that making perfect decisions for one's entire life would change those odds too much. If you're born poor, you're probably going to stay poor. It seems that the decision for most poor people is "Do you want to struggle and deny yourself for a 1% chance at being rich, or do you just want to enjoy yourself while you're here?" It's always made sense to me that poor people spend most of their money on making life less boring. It's not like they had bright futures lined up but they threw it all away for booze. Most of them were born screwed and had sense enough to see it. [1] http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2006/04/Hertz_MobilityAnalysis.pdf http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2006/04/Hertz_Mobilit...
- Someone 15y ago
  "Children previously from lower-income families had only a 1% chance of having an income that ranks in the top 5%" That phrase is almost devoid of content. In the extreme, both that statistic and "Children previously from lower-income families had a 90% chance of having an income that ranks in the top 25%" could be true. I would be surprised if that was the case, but I couldn't find the data to proof that in that link you posted, either. What I would like to see is the distribution of upward/downward mobility.
  - ippisl 15y ago
    from wikipedia[1]: Moving between quintiles is more frequent in the middle quintiles (2-4) than in the lowest and highest quintiles. Of those in one of the quintiles 2-4 in 1996, approximately 35% stayed in the same quintile; and approximately 22% went up one quintile or down one quintile (moves of more than one quintile are rarer). However, 42% of children born in the bottom quintile are most likely to stay there, and another 42% move up to the second and middle quintile[3]. On the opposite end of the spectrum, 39% of those who were born into the top quintile as children in 1968 are likely to stay there, and 23% end up in the fourth quintile[3]. Children previously from lower-income families had only a 1% chance of having an income that ranks in the top 5%[4]. On the other hand, the children of wealthy families have a 22% chance of reaching the top 5%[4]. [1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_mobility#United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_mobility#United_States
wvoq 15y ago
Hi. I'd like to see if I can offer you some personal insight about the plausibility of extrapolating evidence from the scenarios you describe into broader policy judgments. Currently I'm in a Ph.D. program in a field I find extremely interesting, and am quite happy with my position relative to my goals and background. A few years ago, however, I was living in a one room apartment above an auto body shop, sharing a kitchen and bathroom with several tenants in various stages of socioeconomic distress (viz. social service dependence, street-level prostitution, drug addiction, &c.). My life was generally unpleasant. I was working as a day labourer in construction and drove my four hour daily commute in perpetual terror of being pulled over while driving on a suspended license (for failing to pay an old ticket that was sent to the wrong address). My "roommates" repeatedly stole my food and occasionally broke into my room to steal loose cash. I had no health insurance. When I bit the bullet and drove myself to the ER after receiving an inguinal hernia on the job (while carrying literal tons of demo debris down three flights of stairs in a Baltimore rowhouse in July), I was stuck with an 800 dollar medical bill that plagues my credit to this day. When my parked car was struck in a drug-related accident (remember I didn't live in the best part of town), the city ran my plates and booted my car, soon after which it was towed and I had to find another job. My life was brimming with problems, the solution to any which required money that I didn't have. Moreover, the concurrence of all of these problems seemed to frustrate action on any one of them: how do I work if I don't have a car? How do I recover and fix my car if I don't have any money? How do I find work if I can't lift heavy objects without aggravating the hernia? How do I treat the hernia without health insurance, which I don't have even if I had a job? I am not relating all of this in order to garner sympathy, but rather to explain the kinds of problems I encountered, and their apparent magnitude relative to my means then. One aspect of poverty which is probably less salient to those not acquainted with it is that it alters parts of your personality that you previously considered stable. While I had always considered myself a relatively even and temperate guy, friends who saw me then would tell me that I seemed constantly angry and brooding. Things that I could have taken in stride before were usually occasions for despair. Even my tastes changed. Whereas I had previously considered soda and individually wrapped danishes disgusting, I found I could hardly help myself in 7-11s on my way home from construction sites. I used to enjoy cooking, but could barely manage to throw a can of beans a 25 cent box of mac and artificial cheese when I got home. (I shopped at a discount off-brand grocery store full of security cameras, screaming children and expired fruit.) There is a famous quote from Orwell's _Road to Wigan Pier_ which I had never understood until that point in my life: "The basis of their diet, therefore, is white bread and margarine, corned beef, sugared tea and potatoes -- an appalling diet. Would it not be better if they spent more money on wholesome things like oranges and wholemeal bread or if they even, like the writer of the letter to the New Statesman, saved on fuel and ate their carrots raw? Yes, it would, but the point is that no ordinary human being is ever going to do such a thing. The ordinary human being would sooner starve than live on brown bread and raw carrots. And the peculiar evil is this, that the less money you have, the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food. A millionaire may enjoy breakfasting off orange juice and Ryvita biscuits; an unemployed man doesn't.… When you are unemployed … you don't want to eat dull wholesome food. You want something a little bit "tasty." There is always some cheaply pleasant thing to tempt you." This is just about one of the most accurate and robust observations you can make about the psychology of poverty. So that's why I'm no longer terribly impressed about the exhortations of the rich to "knuckle down and work really hard" in order to bootstrap oneself into economic security and material comfort. My situation wasn't nearly as destitute as that of a lot of people in this country alone, and when I came home from work I wanted--very badly--to blow money I didn't have on cheap comforts and postpone thoughts of tomorrow. Secondly, it's important to acknowledge that even while living with junkies and hauling debris for $10/hr, I was much better off than many in my situation, for reasons that make me much less impressed with riches to rags to riches stories such as you describe. Let me explain. When I first began applying for construction jobs, I was objectively under-qualified in comparison to almost any other applicant, of which there were many since construction jobs were becoming scarce around 2008. I remember one interview where I flatly failed the ``technical portion" and had over-estimated my competence to boot, demonstrating that I didn't even know what I didn't know. I was nevertheless hired because I "talked educated" (verbatim quote, I swear to god), which I assume meant either that I was white, or didn't come from the working class backgrounds of south Baltimore of the other applicants. About three months after my first day labor gig (which I only found because I had internet access and at-the-time reliable private transportation), I was running a crew under my boss. I was offered this not because I was an objectively knowledgeable and competent carpenter, but because 1) I had learned serviceable Spanish in an enrichment program as a kid, and 2) the college-educated owner felt that I was "more like him" than the Salvadoran guys who actually knew what they were doing. I was also able to pull in some lucrative (to me) side gigs tutoring math and Latin in-home (again, internet and car), which ultimately allowed me to get out of construction and start teaching rich kids full time. That obviously would not ever have happened if I were a day labourer from west Baltimore, rather than a middle-class kid from the county who happened to be very down on his luck. The differences that separated me from the people I met during that period were vast. If I had found myself in those circumstances without the advantages of white skin, middle-class education and secret-handshakes, and freedom from further complications like care-giving responsibilities (as you somehow manage to mention and dismiss the significance of), I'm not sure that things would have turned out the same way. Really, I'm not so sure that things were guaranteed to turn out the way they did for me at all.
Khroma 15y ago
Poor people have a different mindset, and I suspect that many of them have a feeling of hopelessness (justified or not, I don't know). I suppose that it could be really easy to improve your situation in a year but then saying that it is possible doesn't actually change anything. If it is truly easy to change your situation, the mindset (which then is the main cause of continual poverty) is not changed, that is. I feel that that would be blaming the poor for their problems while not actually taking steps to change their mindset. Perhaps we cannot change everyone's mindset, but we should take steps to change some people's (?), making a difference in their lives (and not just "it's your fault").
Unseelie 15y ago
You have entirely and completely missed the point. The point is that they are buying things that make their lives better. They aren't buying things that make themselves healthier, no, but they're buying things that make their lives bearable, and you're making the assumption that that's an 'unwise' choice. Their preferences aren't in the line of work hard for nine months, they're on doing well enough to have a bearable life. And, anyhow, your story is about a single, healthy man, with a very clearly defined plan and an escape valve, not a bunch of trapped mothers trying to raise children.
- MaysonL 15y ago
  A single, healthy man in a developed economy.
  - forensic 15y ago
    Who didn't even finish his own experiment. He ejected after 9 months when shit got real. The poor don't have an eject button. This is the whole fucking problem.
  - bruenig 15y ago
    A single, healthy, white man with a college education (the credentials from which he did not use, but the education is itself significant) in a developed economy who could not last more than 9 months.
lsc 15y ago
Tell me. Is defending your betters on a internet form likely to make you more rich? Are you making a good choice by wasting time on hacker news? or one that is likely to leave you in your current financial position? From your comment history, I'd guess you are no more wealthy than I am, and much like me, you are not significantly more wealthy than your parents. Of course, this is just a guess based on little information, but the self-made rich people I know? they do rather than talking about doing. It's actually fairly rare for people to change from their parent's class. Heck, most of the 'super rich' success stories are people who come from rich parents becoming super rich; I mean, I don't want to disparage Bill Gates achievements; but you need to recognize that he started with parents who could afford to send him to Harvard. I mean, I think most people agree that a conscientious and hard working person can better their economic situation, but I don't think it's as cut and dried as you seem to think it is. First, going from middle class to upper class requires very different skills than going from abject poverty to the low end of working class and from there to middle class. It's interesting, 'cause I've lived most of my life as an upper middle class person, but for the last few years I've been living on a working-class salary, as I'm trying to get my business of the ground. It's very different, and I can see how someone who wasn't particularly punctual about, saying, paying bills or tickets on time (something that doesn't matter at all as a sysadmin with a six figure salary) could easily get over their head on a working-class salary. Really, I'd be having a very hard time of it if I didn't have the business with it's reasonably large cashflow to give me a 'bonus' when I get into a really tight spot.
- gaurav_v 15y ago
  Regarding Gates: A lot of people can afford to go to Harvard given financial aid. I think the more relevant point to his story is that his parents were so wealthy they could send him to an elite private _middle and high school,_ where he had access to a computer.
  - lsc 15y ago
    yeah, my understanding was that his parents were pretty wealthy; beyond the minimum to give their kids an elite education. My point is just that Gates turned a small fortune in to a large fortune. And while that was certainly a feat; it is rather different from starting middle or even working class and building up even a small fortune. They say the first million is the hardest. Considering that is my current challenge, that's how I feel. But, I bet that if I didn't already have the skills to land a $100K+/year job, maybe I'd feel that the first hundred grand was the hardest. If I lived in Africa or India, maybe just saving a few hundred bucks would be difficult. Saving even just a year's salary when you aren't making a lot more than what you need to buy minimum food and shelter is a difficult task.
roundsquare 15y ago
"At 9 months, he had completed his goal, and a family member fell ill. He quite before the 1 year, but he had already completed his goals and was on his way to a good life." Unexpected costs, such as medical costs, are one of the biggest hurdles to digging one's self out of poverty. Poor people don't access to insurance to help smooth out their costs. Of course, bad decisions play a part as well, but its not as easy as this guy's experiment made it seem to get out of poverty.

elmindreda 15y ago

For one thing, it makes a lot of difference whether or not you have a safety net when you're on a tightrope.

burgerbrain 15y ago
I'm not sure that analogy holds. I'll accept that in the literal case it does, since I can easily see how being nervous would effect physical coordination while walking on a tightrope, but I don't see how being nervous of failure would render you unable to work hard unskilled labor jobs or save money. On the contrary, I expect it would help by providing real motivation.
- elmindreda 15y ago
  I think what I meant was that being nervous about falling down most likely means you'll be walking a lot slower than the person with the safety net. If you only have what you need to survive, you're far less likely to take any chances with it. Working hard, despite much propaganda to the contrary, isn't a solution. I'm not even sure what it means in this context. Being poor is very hard work in and of itself, as taking care of the basic necessities of life takes a lot more time and effort when you can't use the expensive short cuts that middle-class people take for granted. When you're poor, everything takes longer, everything associated with money causes anxiety, the social stigma can prevent you from making useful connections, healthcare becomes more difficult to access, you have to spend time fixing or working around broken items, if you have a job you likely work longer and/or more uncomfortable hours, if you don't have a job there's the added stress and stigma from that, many government programs in reality become traps due to their desire to control poor people's lives, you cannot afford and/or do not have the time or energy left to make healthy food, etc. There are many, many other factors, many of which can be trivially seen to magnify other factors.

ssharp 15y ago

That story ignores so many of the issues related to growing up in poverty. If poverty is all you've ever been around, it's never as simple as just "working hard and making good decisions".

tomjen3 15y ago
Andrew Carnegie would disagree. He didn't start out rich, but he ended up (very) rich.
- chromatic 15y ago
  Not everyone is Andrew Carnegie. Perhaps other mechanisms to reduce poverty will be more effective.
  - temphn 15y ago
    Capitalism reduced the poverty of Singapore, South Korea, Vietnam, Chile, and Estonia (to name a few). What country was built from foreign aid?
    - chromatic 15y ago
      Perhaps changing the subject from Andrew Carnegie will express my discomfort with the implicit syllogism more effectively. Cory Doctorow gives his books away for free. Cory Doctorow has achieved great financial and literary success. Therefore, everyone who gives books away for free will achieve great financial and literary success.
      - tomjen3 15y ago
        I don't really buy that argument (you could take any property they shared, no matter how irrelevant, and make the same argument, i.e. they both had two feet): Cory Doctorow makes money because he has spent a large amount of time to create an audience, because he writes interesting books and because he is constantly on the lookout for new ways to monitize them. And yeah, most people who pull that of would properly experience success.

GrangalanJr 15y ago

Most very poor people are not young, athletic, with good physical and mental health, no dependents, and the background security of being able to leave their circumstances immediately any time they want. The book is "Scratch Beginnings" by Adam Shepard, btw.

hammock 15y ago
Most very poor people are not young, athletic, with good physical and mental health, no dependents, and the background security of being able to leave their circumstances immediately any time they want. Chicken and egg problem?
Khroma 15y ago
I agree. The book is a poor analogy of actually being poor. Let's put aside the money reserve for a moment. From wiki, it looks as if he put aside anything that would help him, such as his college education. Ok. But poor people also have things that weigh them down, things that hurt them, for example, dependents (children, family), addictions, debt, and what you mentioned.

zem 15y ago

here's the story: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scratch_Beginnings http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scratch_Beginnings

dodo53 15y ago

I think that's quite funny. If he really was poor, that unexpected family member becoming ill would probably have knocked him back financially / meant he had to take time off work to care for them whatever.

burgerbrain 15y ago
Sudden unforseen and expensive illness in the family isn't really all that common though. Furthermore, it is only really a problem in countries such as the US which don't have affordable healthcare for the poor. There certainly are many people in this world that are poor because of a series of very unfortunate incidences that put them at a disadvantage. However, I think it's pretty clear that despite how common that may be, it cannot begin to explain the majority of poverty in "1st world" societies.
- Unseelie 15y ago
  No, sudden unforeseen and expensive illnesses aren't that common. Sudden costs are. Costs don't even need to be unforseen, they just have to be more than you can deal with on a timescale.
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]

mkelly 15y ago

The fact that he could give up without consequence when his family member got ill is significant. If he was actually poor, caring for his family member could have put him back at square one again. [Edit: oops, someone else beat me to it]

repos 15y ago

"In other words, he spent his money wisely and was able to vastly improve his lifestyle in less than a year." He also had the privilege of a good education and good upbringing. You are making way too many assumptions to think that all it takes is wisdom and good decisions. What we can think and do is strongly shaped by our environment, and getting yourself out of poverty is harder than you think.

pbhjpbhj 15y ago
One year is nothing. From experience I'd say that being poor is not hard for a year. It's the 3rd, 4th, 7th year, ... when your clothes all have holes that you've no energy to repair, your home starts to fall in to disrepair, you've been wearing leaky shoes for over a year, there appears to be no hope of ending your situation ...

mcantelon 15y ago

>It isn't about lack of opportunity. It's about wise choices. ...and knowing wise choices exist. If you're brought up to just get by and the people all around you have the same mentality knowing that there's a superior mentality requires looking outside the box. This is where mentorship and real education (beyond education that conditions you to just show up on time) are valuable.

Lost_BiomedE 15y ago
Agree. Dow chemical had a program where they would employ people from welfare families. They had to explain to them telephones, teach them about being on time, teach them to file (sometimes the alphabet as well), etc. Most came in for a week and left. Working was such a foreign concept to them, their families, and community that it did not make any sense to them. It is similar to the fish in water analogy or a reverse of 'if you want to be self-made rich hang out with self-made rich people'
- DenisM 15y ago
  Do you have a link or a keyword to look for? thanks.
  - Lost_BiomedE 15y ago
    Dow has changed a lot since then, and I am unsure if they have continued the program. This was at their Michigan plant in the 80s. Now it looks like they have moved more to diversity, cultural, disability, and gender issues: http://www.dow.com/diversity/beliefs/outreach.htm http://www.dow.com/diversity/beliefs/outreach.htm

todayiamme 15y ago

>>> Are they not trying? Are they trying, but making too many bad decisions? <<< I think that the answer is a combination of bad memes and human nature. I ask almost every auto-rickshaw driver whose vehicle I sit in about their income and how do they live. I then listen to them and offer them suggestions that might help them out. It turns out that things just aren't that simple. From the article; >>> Indeed, they may well be more driven by ideas, simply because they have less information about the world outside and, therefore, feel a greater need to use their collective imagination to fill the gaps in their knowledge <<< It's crucial to understand that these people haven't seen any examples to the contrary. They just don't have access to them. They live in societies that are highly stratified and tend to learn, quickly, to obey the hierarchy when it comes to outsiders, because if they "step out of bounds" the consequences can be ugly. So, they simply don't have access to people with good memes, and their minds are shaped by that narrow microcosm. Neither do they have the means to understand how to attain something better, because for them that's the only existence they know and it is what it is. This might be maddeningly annoying for you and me, but think about how your upbringing and the social circles you run in have shaped you to thrive in your environment. How can someone use those metrics and ideas to eke out success in the hierarchy of a remote african tribe? (I'm talking about concrete, implementable ideas not abstract ones)Well, you say that you'll learn them, but if no one is around and you don't have the means to teach yourself said memes how will you ever learn? Yes, you'll scrape on by, but you just won't thrive. They just don't know any better. Moreover, they don't even know that can be changed. Think about it. Here's what I think is the crucial ingredient; >>> They don’t just need nutrition that will keep them alive longer—they also need a reason to want to live longer. Being healthier by denying yourself the little pleasures you can afford, a cup of tea or a bowl of steaming rice, makes little sense if you have nothing else to look forward to, <<< That man had something to look forward to. They don't. For them survival is ugly and fraught with absolutely no meaning and it's been that way their entire lives. Anyone would ponder suicide in their environment at least once. This helps them to keep sane and escape the drudgery, which is a bit like the rich and the middle class taking extravagant holidays, or going out to get drunk etc. It's something to look forward to, but for us we have other options that give us the same satisfaction. They don't. Partly because they can't visualise them, but mostly because of the daily grind to survive. So, don't judge them. They are real people just like you and me.

temphn 15y ago

It is really as simple as noting the robust heritability of cognitive traits (see "The Blank Slate") and the strong correlation between intelligence, conscientiousness, and wealth. But surprisingly, many highly intelligent people (including many in this very thread) will actually deny that they have any natural cognitive advantages over the poor. They will readily admit they are smarter than those "idiots" who can't code Fizzbuzz, or the ones who comment at Youtube, or the software engineers who're still doing Cobol, or the tea partiers...but they won't admit they are naturally smarter than the average poor person. In fact, they are actually more ready to characterize themselves (or others) as oppressors of some sort than to admit that they are gifted.

tokenadult 15y ago
(see "The Blank Slate") The book The Blank Slate was published almost a decade ago http://www.amazon.com/Blank-Slate-Modern-Denial-Nature/dp/0670031518 http://www.amazon.com/Blank-Slate-Modern-Denial-Nature/dp/06... and research has moved on. The chapter in The Blank Slate that has the most to do with heritability of cognitive abilities is largely based, as author Steven Pinker acknowledges in his bibliographic references, on the work of Eric Turkheimer. But Turkheimer has revised his point of view in the last decade, and if Pinker is still reading Turkheimer's writings, Pinker should too. I'll recommend here two articles from Turkheimer's faculty web page http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/vita1_turkheimer.htm http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/vita1_turkheimer.htm that more readers of Pinker's book ought to know about, to bring their understanding of human behavioral genetics up to date. Johnson, Wendy; Turkheimer, Eric; Gottesman, Irving I.; Bouchard Jr., Thomas (2009). Beyond Heritability: Twin Studies in Behavioral Research. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 18, 4, 217-220 http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Articles%20for%20Online%20CV/Johnson%20%282009%29.pdf http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Articles%20for%20O... is an interesting paper that includes the statement "Moreover, even highly heritable traits can be strongly manipulated by the environment, so heritability has little if anything to do with controllability. For example, height is on the order of 90% heritable, yet North and South Koreans, who come from the same genetic background, presently differ in average height by a full 6 inches (Pak, 2004; Schwekendiek, 2008)." Another interesting paper, Turkheimer, E. (2008, Spring). A better way to use twins for developmental research. LIFE Newsletter, 2, 1-5 http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Articles%20for%20Online%20CV/Turkheimer%20%282008%29.pdf http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Articles%20for%20O... admits the disappointment of behavioral genetics researchers. "But back to the question: What does heritability mean? Almost everyone who has ever thought about heritability has reached a commonsense intuition about it: One way or another, heritability has to be some kind of index of how genetic a trait is. That intuition explains why so many thousands of heritability coefficients have been calculated over the years. Once the twin registries have been assembled, it’s easy and fun, like having a genoscope you can point at one trait after another to take a reading of how genetic things are. Height? Very genetic. Intelligence? Pretty genetic. Schizophrenia? That looks pretty genetic too. Personality? Yep, that too. And over multiple studies and traits the heritabilities go up and down, providing the basis for nearly infinite Talmudic revisions of the grand theories of the heritability of things, perfect grist for the wheels of social science. "Unfortunately, that fundamental intuition is wrong. Heritability isn’t an index of how genetic a trait is. A great deal of time has been wasted in the effort of measuring the heritability of traits in the false expectation that somehow the genetic nature of psychological phenomena would be revealed. There are many reasons for making this strong statement, but the most important of them harkens back to the description of heritability as an effect size. An effect size of the R2 family is a standardized estimate of the proportion of the variance in one variable that is reduced when another variable is held constant statistically. In this case it is an estimate of how much the variance of a trait would be reduced if everyone were genetically identical. With a moment’s thought you can see that the answer to the question of how much variance would be reduced if everyone was genetically identical depends crucially on how genetically different everyone was in the first place." I've enjoyed learning about this line of research from several well known behavioral geneticists, including some of the doyens of twin research, as I participate in the journal club in individual differences psychology and behavioral genetics http://www.psych.umn.edu/courses/fall10/psy8935/default.htm http://www.psych.umn.edu/courses/fall10/psy8935/default.htm at the university where those researchers are based. There is always lively discussion on what the data show, and what the data don't show. Thus far, there are no data to show that poor people are poor solely because they lack academic ability (and anyway studies show http://www.jkcf.org/assets/files/0000/0084/Achievement_Trap.pdf http://www.jkcf.org/assets/files/0000/0084/Achievement_Trap.... http://tcf.org/publications/pdfs/pb428/carnrose.pdf http://tcf.org/publications/pdfs/pb428/carnrose.pdf http://reason.com/archives/2008/02/19/legacies-of-injustice http://reason.com/archives/2008/02/19/legacies-of-injustice that poverty is a meaningful disadvantage even for high-ability young people). Nor is there any predictable limit on how much poor people might be able to use their abilities, whatever their current ability level, to improve their condition in life if the undeniable disadvantages of lacking money were alleviated.

joeyespo 15y ago

It may not be quite that easy though. This person would already have prior knowledge on making good decisions whereas the poor (probably) don't. That being said, here's a book with a similar premise and a different outcome: http://www.amazon.com/Nickel-Dimed-Not-Getting-America/dp/0805063897 http://www.amazon.com/Nickel-Dimed-Not-Getting-America/dp/08... The author finds herself barely able to make it. Grant it, she approaches the situation rather pessimistically, the book still paints a decent picture as to why so many people are struggling.

j_baker 15y ago

At 9 months, he had completed his goal, and a family member fell ill. Wait, what was this? He got faced with a situation he couldn't handle with wise decision-making, saving, and elbow grease and had to tap into his riches to get himself out? You know, the real problem is that he got a nice apartment and car. If he lived in a shack and walked everywhere, I bet he'd have been able to help his family member out. Was he just not trying, or was he trying and making bad decisions?

mapgrep 15y ago
This is an excellent point: Unexpected and unavoidable costs are precisely the sort of problem that have repeatedly been shown to thwart the accumulation of wealth among the poor. Ironically, the referenced book (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scratch_Beginnings http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scratch_Beginnings) was specifically written to rebut Barbara Ehrenreich's first person book on poverty, Nickel and Dimed. A major theme of that book is the debilitating impact of catastrophic costs, health care in particular, on the poor. "Without health insurance you risk a small cut becoming infected because you can afford neither a visit to the doctor nor antibiotics... [an] impacted wisdom tooth requir[ed] frantic calls to find a free dental clinic" was the NYTimes summary (http://www.nytimes.com/books/01/05/13/reviews/010513.13gallagt.html?_r=1 http://www.nytimes.com/books/01/05/13/reviews/010513.13galla...) So the book referenced by the grandparent comment was derailed exactly as predicted in the very book it was trying to rebut. It is not only the poor who like "things that make life less boring." We all do, and I'd argue we all need these things for sanity. That's why I don't beat myself up too hard for occasionally wasting time doing things like, say, posting comments on Hackers News.
burgerbrain 15y ago
The only reason he had to help his relative when they fell ill is because although he was playing poor, he technically still had the money. Refusing to help the family member for the sake of making a point would be highly unethical. Had he actually been that poor (only 5k in his name at the time), then he would have been under no real obligation to drop everything and support that family member.
- 15y ago

hooande 15y ago

From a statistics point of view, your argument seems to be flawed. It's very unlikely for someone who is born poor to end up rich, no matter how wise their choices are. From the wikipedia page on "Economic Mobility" [1]: "Children previously from lower-income families had only a 1% chance of having an income that ranks in the top 5%" I can't imagine that making perfect decisions for one's entire life would change those odds too much. If you're born poor, you're probably going to stay poor. It seems that the decision for most poor people is "Do you want to struggle and deny yourself for a 1% chance at being rich, or do you just want to enjoy yourself while you're here?" It's always made sense to me that poor people spend most of their money on making life less boring. It's not like they had bright futures lined up but they threw it all away for booze. Most of them were born screwed and had sense enough to see it. [1] http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2006/04/Hertz_MobilityAnalysis.pdf http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2006/04/Hertz_Mobilit...

Someone 15y ago
"Children previously from lower-income families had only a 1% chance of having an income that ranks in the top 5%" That phrase is almost devoid of content. In the extreme, both that statistic and "Children previously from lower-income families had a 90% chance of having an income that ranks in the top 25%" could be true. I would be surprised if that was the case, but I couldn't find the data to proof that in that link you posted, either. What I would like to see is the distribution of upward/downward mobility.
- ippisl 15y ago
  from wikipedia[1]: Moving between quintiles is more frequent in the middle quintiles (2-4) than in the lowest and highest quintiles. Of those in one of the quintiles 2-4 in 1996, approximately 35% stayed in the same quintile; and approximately 22% went up one quintile or down one quintile (moves of more than one quintile are rarer). However, 42% of children born in the bottom quintile are most likely to stay there, and another 42% move up to the second and middle quintile[3]. On the opposite end of the spectrum, 39% of those who were born into the top quintile as children in 1968 are likely to stay there, and 23% end up in the fourth quintile[3]. Children previously from lower-income families had only a 1% chance of having an income that ranks in the top 5%[4]. On the other hand, the children of wealthy families have a 22% chance of reaching the top 5%[4]. [1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_mobility#United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_mobility#United_States

wvoq 15y ago

Hi. I'd like to see if I can offer you some personal insight about the plausibility of extrapolating evidence from the scenarios you describe into broader policy judgments. Currently I'm in a Ph.D. program in a field I find extremely interesting, and am quite happy with my position relative to my goals and background. A few years ago, however, I was living in a one room apartment above an auto body shop, sharing a kitchen and bathroom with several tenants in various stages of socioeconomic distress (viz. social service dependence, street-level prostitution, drug addiction, &c.). My life was generally unpleasant. I was working as a day labourer in construction and drove my four hour daily commute in perpetual terror of being pulled over while driving on a suspended license (for failing to pay an old ticket that was sent to the wrong address). My "roommates" repeatedly stole my food and occasionally broke into my room to steal loose cash. I had no health insurance. When I bit the bullet and drove myself to the ER after receiving an inguinal hernia on the job (while carrying literal tons of demo debris down three flights of stairs in a Baltimore rowhouse in July), I was stuck with an 800 dollar medical bill that plagues my credit to this day. When my parked car was struck in a drug-related accident (remember I didn't live in the best part of town), the city ran my plates and booted my car, soon after which it was towed and I had to find another job. My life was brimming with problems, the solution to any which required money that I didn't have. Moreover, the concurrence of all of these problems seemed to frustrate action on any one of them: how do I work if I don't have a car? How do I recover and fix my car if I don't have any money? How do I find work if I can't lift heavy objects without aggravating the hernia? How do I treat the hernia without health insurance, which I don't have even if I had a job? I am not relating all of this in order to garner sympathy, but rather to explain the kinds of problems I encountered, and their apparent magnitude relative to my means then. One aspect of poverty which is probably less salient to those not acquainted with it is that it alters parts of your personality that you previously considered stable. While I had always considered myself a relatively even and temperate guy, friends who saw me then would tell me that I seemed constantly angry and brooding. Things that I could have taken in stride before were usually occasions for despair. Even my tastes changed. Whereas I had previously considered soda and individually wrapped danishes disgusting, I found I could hardly help myself in 7-11s on my way home from construction sites. I used to enjoy cooking, but could barely manage to throw a can of beans a 25 cent box of mac and artificial cheese when I got home. (I shopped at a discount off-brand grocery store full of security cameras, screaming children and expired fruit.) There is a famous quote from Orwell's _Road to Wigan Pier_ which I had never understood until that point in my life: "The basis of their diet, therefore, is white bread and margarine, corned beef, sugared tea and potatoes -- an appalling diet. Would it not be better if they spent more money on wholesome things like oranges and wholemeal bread or if they even, like the writer of the letter to the New Statesman, saved on fuel and ate their carrots raw? Yes, it would, but the point is that no ordinary human being is ever going to do such a thing. The ordinary human being would sooner starve than live on brown bread and raw carrots. And the peculiar evil is this, that the less money you have, the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food. A millionaire may enjoy breakfasting off orange juice and Ryvita biscuits; an unemployed man doesn't.… When you are unemployed … you don't want to eat dull wholesome food. You want something a little bit "tasty." There is always some cheaply pleasant thing to tempt you." This is just about one of the most accurate and robust observations you can make about the psychology of poverty. So that's why I'm no longer terribly impressed about the exhortations of the rich to "knuckle down and work really hard" in order to bootstrap oneself into economic security and material comfort. My situation wasn't nearly as destitute as that of a lot of people in this country alone, and when I came home from work I wanted--very badly--to blow money I didn't have on cheap comforts and postpone thoughts of tomorrow. Secondly, it's important to acknowledge that even while living with junkies and hauling debris for $10/hr, I was much better off than many in my situation, for reasons that make me much less impressed with riches to rags to riches stories such as you describe. Let me explain. When I first began applying for construction jobs, I was objectively under-qualified in comparison to almost any other applicant, of which there were many since construction jobs were becoming scarce around 2008. I remember one interview where I flatly failed the ``technical portion" and had over-estimated my competence to boot, demonstrating that I didn't even know what I didn't know. I was nevertheless hired because I "talked educated" (verbatim quote, I swear to god), which I assume meant either that I was white, or didn't come from the working class backgrounds of south Baltimore of the other applicants. About three months after my first day labor gig (which I only found because I had internet access and at-the-time reliable private transportation), I was running a crew under my boss. I was offered this not because I was an objectively knowledgeable and competent carpenter, but because 1) I had learned serviceable Spanish in an enrichment program as a kid, and 2) the college-educated owner felt that I was "more like him" than the Salvadoran guys who actually knew what they were doing. I was also able to pull in some lucrative (to me) side gigs tutoring math and Latin in-home (again, internet and car), which ultimately allowed me to get out of construction and start teaching rich kids full time. That obviously would not ever have happened if I were a day labourer from west Baltimore, rather than a middle-class kid from the county who happened to be very down on his luck. The differences that separated me from the people I met during that period were vast. If I had found myself in those circumstances without the advantages of white skin, middle-class education and secret-handshakes, and freedom from further complications like care-giving responsibilities (as you somehow manage to mention and dismiss the significance of), I'm not sure that things would have turned out the same way. Really, I'm not so sure that things were guaranteed to turn out the way they did for me at all.

Khroma 15y ago

Poor people have a different mindset, and I suspect that many of them have a feeling of hopelessness (justified or not, I don't know). I suppose that it could be really easy to improve your situation in a year but then saying that it is possible doesn't actually change anything. If it is truly easy to change your situation, the mindset (which then is the main cause of continual poverty) is not changed, that is. I feel that that would be blaming the poor for their problems while not actually taking steps to change their mindset. Perhaps we cannot change everyone's mindset, but we should take steps to change some people's (?), making a difference in their lives (and not just "it's your fault").

Unseelie 15y ago

You have entirely and completely missed the point. The point is that they are buying things that make their lives better. They aren't buying things that make themselves healthier, no, but they're buying things that make their lives bearable, and you're making the assumption that that's an 'unwise' choice. Their preferences aren't in the line of work hard for nine months, they're on doing well enough to have a bearable life. And, anyhow, your story is about a single, healthy man, with a very clearly defined plan and an escape valve, not a bunch of trapped mothers trying to raise children.

MaysonL 15y ago
A single, healthy man in a developed economy.
- forensic 15y ago
  Who didn't even finish his own experiment. He ejected after 9 months when shit got real. The poor don't have an eject button. This is the whole fucking problem.
- bruenig 15y ago
  A single, healthy, white man with a college education (the credentials from which he did not use, but the education is itself significant) in a developed economy who could not last more than 9 months.

lsc 15y ago

Tell me. Is defending your betters on a internet form likely to make you more rich? Are you making a good choice by wasting time on hacker news? or one that is likely to leave you in your current financial position? From your comment history, I'd guess you are no more wealthy than I am, and much like me, you are not significantly more wealthy than your parents. Of course, this is just a guess based on little information, but the self-made rich people I know? they do rather than talking about doing. It's actually fairly rare for people to change from their parent's class. Heck, most of the 'super rich' success stories are people who come from rich parents becoming super rich; I mean, I don't want to disparage Bill Gates achievements; but you need to recognize that he started with parents who could afford to send him to Harvard. I mean, I think most people agree that a conscientious and hard working person can better their economic situation, but I don't think it's as cut and dried as you seem to think it is. First, going from middle class to upper class requires very different skills than going from abject poverty to the low end of working class and from there to middle class. It's interesting, 'cause I've lived most of my life as an upper middle class person, but for the last few years I've been living on a working-class salary, as I'm trying to get my business of the ground. It's very different, and I can see how someone who wasn't particularly punctual about, saying, paying bills or tickets on time (something that doesn't matter at all as a sysadmin with a six figure salary) could easily get over their head on a working-class salary. Really, I'd be having a very hard time of it if I didn't have the business with it's reasonably large cashflow to give me a 'bonus' when I get into a really tight spot.

gaurav_v 15y ago
Regarding Gates: A lot of people can afford to go to Harvard given financial aid. I think the more relevant point to his story is that his parents were so wealthy they could send him to an elite private _middle and high school,_ where he had access to a computer.
- lsc 15y ago
  yeah, my understanding was that his parents were pretty wealthy; beyond the minimum to give their kids an elite education. My point is just that Gates turned a small fortune in to a large fortune. And while that was certainly a feat; it is rather different from starting middle or even working class and building up even a small fortune. They say the first million is the hardest. Considering that is my current challenge, that's how I feel. But, I bet that if I didn't already have the skills to land a $100K+/year job, maybe I'd feel that the first hundred grand was the hardest. If I lived in Africa or India, maybe just saving a few hundred bucks would be difficult. Saving even just a year's salary when you aren't making a lot more than what you need to buy minimum food and shelter is a difficult task.

roundsquare 15y ago

"At 9 months, he had completed his goal, and a family member fell ill. He quite before the 1 year, but he had already completed his goals and was on his way to a good life." Unexpected costs, such as medical costs, are one of the biggest hurdles to digging one's self out of poverty. Poor people don't access to insurance to help smooth out their costs. Of course, bad decisions play a part as well, but its not as easy as this guy's experiment made it seem to get out of poverty.