4 ms·

You can call people who are willing to spend and have access to $10,000 desperate, but I don't know how useful it is to call them poor. Your last sentence quot

You can call people who are willing to spend and have access to $10,000 desperate, but I don't know how useful it is to call them poor. Your last sentence quoted clearly describes people with inherited wealth. In my opinion, that's not describing a poor person, by almost any measure. It falls into the sibling commenter's category description of petit bourgeoisie.

ceejayoz 5y ago
Subsistence farmers tend to have both land and homes, yet are desperately poor, eking out just enough of a living to survive. Some go into debt, hoping there'll be opportunity on the other side of the border. Some lose their lives when they aren't able to pay those debts back to the coyotes.
- teachingassist 5y ago
  I'm not going to claim that living a subsistent lifestyle on your own land is a wonderful utopia - I don't think that. But, relative poverty in this situation would mean that you don't have your own land, to do this. Wikipedia comments that subsistence farmers typically have meaningful economic power in their community: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsistence_agriculture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsistence_agriculture
notdang 5y ago
Those people are really poor, they bet their lives on those $10000 that they don't even own. They are not "willing to spend", they are willing to lose their life for it, it's a huge difference. They borrow it from the extended family, everyone chips in, it's like a risky investment that some day can pay off. When the extended family funds are not enough, they borrow from the "organized crime", i.e. the narcos. Sometimes they don't pay the whole sum before and now they own to the coyotes, which are also the narcos. During the immigration process, they are getting abducted, executed (whole buses of immigrants were killed in Mexico), the rules change midway, usually they own more money at the end that were agreed at the start. Definitively they are not the petit bourgeoisie.

ceejayoz 5y ago

Subsistence farmers tend to have both land and homes, yet are desperately poor, eking out just enough of a living to survive. Some go into debt, hoping there'll be opportunity on the other side of the border. Some lose their lives when they aren't able to pay those debts back to the coyotes.

teachingassist 5y ago
I'm not going to claim that living a subsistent lifestyle on your own land is a wonderful utopia - I don't think that. But, relative poverty in this situation would mean that you don't have your own land, to do this. Wikipedia comments that subsistence farmers typically have meaningful economic power in their community: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsistence_agriculture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsistence_agriculture

notdang 5y ago

Those people are really poor, they bet their lives on those $10000 that they don't even own. They are not "willing to spend", they are willing to lose their life for it, it's a huge difference. They borrow it from the extended family, everyone chips in, it's like a risky investment that some day can pay off. When the extended family funds are not enough, they borrow from the "organized crime", i.e. the narcos. Sometimes they don't pay the whole sum before and now they own to the coyotes, which are also the narcos. During the immigration process, they are getting abducted, executed (whole buses of immigrants were killed in Mexico), the rules change midway, usually they own more money at the end that were agreed at the start. Definitively they are not the petit bourgeoisie.