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I hear lines of thinking like this about poor people where it's never really their fault and it's just an unfortunate circumstance. It has always struck me as w

I hear lines of thinking like this about poor people where it's never really their fault and it's just an unfortunate circumstance. It has always struck me as weird, because I grew up poor and grew up around poor people. I've never come across any of these poor people you describe anywhere besides television.

colpabar 4y ago
A lot of people who have never been poor refuse to acknowledge that a lot of poor people are poor in large part because they make bad choices. I think it makes them feel better.
- grayfaced 4y ago
  And yet many critical positions are paid poverty wages. How can we say a job is a poor choice if it's necessary for a functioning society.
  - SubjectToChange 4y ago
    Is this any more of a conundrum as water costing less than gold?
  - dolni 4y ago
    If a job is critical to society and nobody does it, the wage will necessarily increase. That is the beauty of the free market. A job can be critical and also have WAY too many bodies versus jobs.
    - grayfaced 4y ago
      In an efficient free market. The efficient is the frictionless spherical cow of economics, useful to describe theories even if it's never been observed in real life. That's why we have critical jobs, that are understaffed and poverty wages. If we had a perfectly efficient market, it would never happen. We don't, so it does.
      - Melting_Harps 4y ago
        > We don't, so it does. I still think that the greatest tragedy that happened after 2008 wasn't the obscene amounts of corruption and the mismanagement of assets and misallocation of resources, they were extremely bad, but it wasn't the worst thing. What i think was the worst thing to occur was the massive displacement of qualified STEM degreed workers who ended 'falling thrugh the cracks' over the yaers because the positions that were marketed them as 'waiting for you when you're done' vanished overnight. I have met so many aspiring biologists, chemists, and physicists/mathematicians who ended up in finance or some other aimless thing because debt and bills needed to paid who had pursued their degrees to try and take on climate change, mass hunger, food security etc... many of thier collective idealism turned to angst then morose and even bleak inevitable outcomes for the near future in such a short time. Many never really recovering from the depression, and feeling as how Society failed them despite 'doing the right thing.' I know I felt that way, but I was determined to not let it occur and I used it as fuel to push through it, but I have serious survivor bias and I still deal with PTSD from it all--it's a work in progress, but I think it was a phyrric victory most times. The real tragedy of the last decade will be one of the loss in Human Capital to the aforementioned issues, and this almost inescapable political climate in which we cannot distinguish real threats from trivial ones because we're so distracted by the vapid divisiveness that keeps people at each others throats wit perpetual tribalism.
  - colpabar 4y ago
    I didn't say anything about a job being a bad choice. I recognize not everyone can be a software developer and that some jobs have bad pay. My point was that if you are poor, and you don't choose to live frugally and save what you can, then you are implicitly choosing to remain poor. This is not to say that everyone can escape poverty, because I don't think that's true, but there are people who don't do themselves any favors and it isn't helpful to blame the consequences of their bad choices on everything else.
PeterWhittaker 4y ago
I don't think the comment to which you respond is arguing it's never really their fault, or anything like that, so much as accepting the fact, backed by research (and yes, if you insist, I will find the citations) that there is an intense cognitive burden to managing one's resources when one is sufficiently poor. As we all - assuming we all here on HN do relatively intellectual work - can attest, thinking and deciding have energy and exhaustion costs and we have a finite capacity after which we must recharge and rest. And many of us are familiar with how stress (deadlines, conflicts at home, weather, etc.) tax us even further, reducing our ability to think well and decide well, and leading, sometimes, to poor decisions... ...that bring their own stress and workload. Imagine if everyday the bulk of your decision making was literally about every dollar: heat and lights or shoes? Shoes or food? Food or healthcare? Healthcare of rent? Rent or heat and light? You would do the same thing we do when we are coding something complex and need to make progress. You would pick a thing, do something simple that isn't really enough but is enough for now, slap hic sunt draconis in a comment, and move on. Hopefully you will get back to it. People choose the easy, convenient, less good for them food because that gives more time to consider their other trade offs, maybe even to breathe long enough to reduce some of their stress. And they may never get back to that choice, because the choices, the strains, never end. Poverty is a vicious circle of stress and decline. Yes, there are people who make it out, just like there are people who make the NBA or the NHL. Most people, though, suffer. Literally. It doesn't matter how people get poor. What matters is that poor is hard, harder than most anything most of us will ever face. What matters is that we respond with compassion and consideration and perhaps try to see beyond fault and responsibility and instead try to do something to amend those situations.
- Red_Leaves_Flyy 4y ago
  Being poor is agonizing. Having an overdrawn bank account or no bank account and more bills past due then I’ll be able to pay with my next two checks while worrying about my empty fridge, my gas tank on e, my lapsed car insurance, the donut that’s been on the car for 500 miles, the pile of dirty clothes, and on and on and on. Just listing everything is exhausting and physically painful. It hurts to know so viscerally that there’s nothing I can legally do in a sane timespan to fix these problems. Trying to think even two weeks out is impossible because something else is going to happen that destroys any progress I made. So I’ll tackle the most pressing first. Scrounge couches, the car, and spend a sleepless night wandering the city collecting cans so I can wash my nasty clothes so I won’t get fired. Hopefully I won’t have an accident at work that’ll cost way more than I got for a nights work.
kansface 4y ago
Yeah, I don’t get it. The poor have always been with us - much more so in the past. Obesity is something modern. A ton of cuisine comes from poor people food the world over…

colpabar 4y ago

A lot of people who have never been poor refuse to acknowledge that a lot of poor people are poor in large part because they make bad choices. I think it makes them feel better.

grayfaced 4y ago
And yet many critical positions are paid poverty wages. How can we say a job is a poor choice if it's necessary for a functioning society.
- SubjectToChange 4y ago
  Is this any more of a conundrum as water costing less than gold?
- dolni 4y ago
  If a job is critical to society and nobody does it, the wage will necessarily increase. That is the beauty of the free market. A job can be critical and also have WAY too many bodies versus jobs.
  - grayfaced 4y ago
    In an efficient free market. The efficient is the frictionless spherical cow of economics, useful to describe theories even if it's never been observed in real life. That's why we have critical jobs, that are understaffed and poverty wages. If we had a perfectly efficient market, it would never happen. We don't, so it does.
    - Melting_Harps 4y ago
      > We don't, so it does. I still think that the greatest tragedy that happened after 2008 wasn't the obscene amounts of corruption and the mismanagement of assets and misallocation of resources, they were extremely bad, but it wasn't the worst thing. What i think was the worst thing to occur was the massive displacement of qualified STEM degreed workers who ended 'falling thrugh the cracks' over the yaers because the positions that were marketed them as 'waiting for you when you're done' vanished overnight. I have met so many aspiring biologists, chemists, and physicists/mathematicians who ended up in finance or some other aimless thing because debt and bills needed to paid who had pursued their degrees to try and take on climate change, mass hunger, food security etc... many of thier collective idealism turned to angst then morose and even bleak inevitable outcomes for the near future in such a short time. Many never really recovering from the depression, and feeling as how Society failed them despite 'doing the right thing.' I know I felt that way, but I was determined to not let it occur and I used it as fuel to push through it, but I have serious survivor bias and I still deal with PTSD from it all--it's a work in progress, but I think it was a phyrric victory most times. The real tragedy of the last decade will be one of the loss in Human Capital to the aforementioned issues, and this almost inescapable political climate in which we cannot distinguish real threats from trivial ones because we're so distracted by the vapid divisiveness that keeps people at each others throats wit perpetual tribalism.
- colpabar 4y ago
  I didn't say anything about a job being a bad choice. I recognize not everyone can be a software developer and that some jobs have bad pay. My point was that if you are poor, and you don't choose to live frugally and save what you can, then you are implicitly choosing to remain poor. This is not to say that everyone can escape poverty, because I don't think that's true, but there are people who don't do themselves any favors and it isn't helpful to blame the consequences of their bad choices on everything else.

PeterWhittaker 4y ago

I don't think the comment to which you respond is arguing it's never really their fault, or anything like that, so much as accepting the fact, backed by research (and yes, if you insist, I will find the citations) that there is an intense cognitive burden to managing one's resources when one is sufficiently poor. As we all - assuming we all here on HN do relatively intellectual work - can attest, thinking and deciding have energy and exhaustion costs and we have a finite capacity after which we must recharge and rest. And many of us are familiar with how stress (deadlines, conflicts at home, weather, etc.) tax us even further, reducing our ability to think well and decide well, and leading, sometimes, to poor decisions... ...that bring their own stress and workload. Imagine if everyday the bulk of your decision making was literally about every dollar: heat and lights or shoes? Shoes or food? Food or healthcare? Healthcare of rent? Rent or heat and light? You would do the same thing we do when we are coding something complex and need to make progress. You would pick a thing, do something simple that isn't really enough but is enough for now, slap hic sunt draconis in a comment, and move on. Hopefully you will get back to it. People choose the easy, convenient, less good for them food because that gives more time to consider their other trade offs, maybe even to breathe long enough to reduce some of their stress. And they may never get back to that choice, because the choices, the strains, never end. Poverty is a vicious circle of stress and decline. Yes, there are people who make it out, just like there are people who make the NBA or the NHL. Most people, though, suffer. Literally. It doesn't matter how people get poor. What matters is that poor is hard, harder than most anything most of us will ever face. What matters is that we respond with compassion and consideration and perhaps try to see beyond fault and responsibility and instead try to do something to amend those situations.

Red_Leaves_Flyy 4y ago
Being poor is agonizing. Having an overdrawn bank account or no bank account and more bills past due then I’ll be able to pay with my next two checks while worrying about my empty fridge, my gas tank on e, my lapsed car insurance, the donut that’s been on the car for 500 miles, the pile of dirty clothes, and on and on and on. Just listing everything is exhausting and physically painful. It hurts to know so viscerally that there’s nothing I can legally do in a sane timespan to fix these problems. Trying to think even two weeks out is impossible because something else is going to happen that destroys any progress I made. So I’ll tackle the most pressing first. Scrounge couches, the car, and spend a sleepless night wandering the city collecting cans so I can wash my nasty clothes so I won’t get fired. Hopefully I won’t have an accident at work that’ll cost way more than I got for a nights work.

kansface 4y ago

Yeah, I don’t get it. The poor have always been with us - much more so in the past. Obesity is something modern. A ton of cuisine comes from poor people food the world over…