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It is a similar situation with buying a car for $500 that will require lots of repairs vs. a more expensive car that will give you a lower cost per mile. While

• bluedino 4y ago
  > For example, things like getting a dog, signing up for cable TV, getting an unnecessarily expensive new phone, spending money on going out to eat, etc. In a way, people without a lot of money need to "learn how to be poor" When you're low on money, you eat sandwiches and ramen and beans and potatoes. You don't eat McDonald's or get Starbucks.
  • notRobot 4y ago
    Ah yes. "If only these people would abstain from the joys of eating fucking McDonald's, they'd no longer be poor."
    • unethical_ban 4y ago
      A double quarter pounder meal is $11 with tax in Texas. I'm not poor but I'm realizing just how insane it is to eat out regularly now.
      • bluedino 4y ago
        I remember working retail years ago, and having co-workers that would get fast food for lunch. They're spending 3 hours (after-tax) of of their minimum wage pay on lunch. How much sense does that make?
        • lotsofpulp 4y ago
          There are multiple subsets of poor. There are poor who are so exhausted and so without capacity to move up that a little enjoyment from fast food is what keeps them going. And there are also poor who are wasting resources they could be using to move up. Such as young kids with stable homes working retail/hotel/other lower paying jobs, but instead of a making a healthy moong bean salad at home for $3 of ingredients and 30min of their time, they order a $25 chipotle meal from door dash everyday at work.
      • Mezzie 4y ago
        The poor aren't getting the meals. When I was a grad student, my McD's trips were 'hey I found a toonie (Canada), I can treat myself to a McDouble'.
    • bluedino 4y ago
      I'd first like to respond that McDonalds is terrible and don't see how it brings you joy. I'm also not saying poor people do t get any joy. They just don't get to have every joy they want. Even if you're not poor you don't get to do that. At what point do you see the irresponsibility? Applebees? Ruth's Chris? The French Laundry?
      • TeaDrunk 4y ago
        > At what point do you see the irresponsibility? Applebees? Ruth's Chris? The French Laundry? Definitely not the $2 burger special at Mcdonald's, that's for sure.
    • josephcsible 4y ago
      The point is that even the cheapest restaurants are more expensive than preparing food yourself.
      • notRobot 4y ago
        Do you actually believe poor people don't know that?
        • josephcsible 4y ago
          Your comment made it sound like you didn't know that.
      • zimpenfish 4y ago
        Monetarily, perhaps[1], but there's also the time factor - buying 4 McDonalds meals is a lot quicker than preparing, cooking, and cleaning up after 4 people. [1] I wouldn't say it was 100% true - McDonalds is a pretty cheap way of getting calories.
      • fknorangesite 4y ago
        This is some tired avocado-toast-level commentary.
  • EliRivers 4y ago
    Life with no money and the perpetual fear of being evicted and living in a car with your children until they're taken away, or being fired for taking a day off sick because you work a bad job with no protections, or not being able to pay the electric and making a game of huddling together with your children at night for fear that they'll freeze, this is being poor. Learn to live poor? Learn to live this life? People do, and it's horrible, and life with nothing to ever look forwards to is a long slow suicide. A McDonald's for some of these people IS life. It's the point of being alive, now that they have so little. It's the special treat that they've worked hard for, and it's pretty much the lowest tier special treat.
    • CobaltFire 4y ago
      Happy Meals toys were my ONLY toys for the first decade of my life. I remember every single one I had; I didn’t have many.
    • bluedino 4y ago
      Does it sound better if I say "live within their means"?
      • pertymcpert 4y ago
        No, you still don’t understand, at all.
  • GZJOHN 4y ago
    Thank you for so succinctly summing up the sort of utterly out of touch combined with willful ignorance attitude I've come to associate with Hacker News in general.
• orev 4y ago
  > a culture or mindset that prioritizes short term benefit/feelings over long term benefits even when there are other options. For example, things like getting a dog, signing up for cable TV, getting an unnecessarily expensive new phone, spending money on going out to eat, etc. While there are definitely elements of spending badly, this idea that they spend money on the “wrong” things gets dangerously close to dehumanizing the impoverished. Those people are still people, and they like to have the joys and feel included in society like everyone else. There’s a huge mental health aspect to that which can mean the difference between being motivated to change your situation vs just accepting it. Having cable TV gives you access to unlimited entertainment. A smartphone gives you access to all known human knowledge, and is essentially required now to access benefits, banking, etc. Dogs are widely recognized as being one of the most beneficial things to help with general mood and mental health. The decisions people are making are rational, their just not aimed at the goal you think they should be aiming for (getting out of poverty).
  • josephcsible 4y ago
    > Having cable TV gives you access to unlimited entertainment. So does having Internet access, and I don't think very many people pay for cable TV but not Internet. > A smartphone gives you access to all known human knowledge, and is essentially required now to access benefits, banking, etc. GP said "an unnecessarily expensive new phone", not "a smartphone". A $160 Samsung Galaxy A03s is perfectly capable of doing all of the things you mentioned. If you're having trouble making ends meet, there is zero excuse to ever buy the new $1000 iPhone.
    • orev 4y ago
      Which I already addressed, and then expanded on the bigger point that’s often being made by this line of thinking: > While there are definitely elements of spending badly, this idea that they spend money on the “wrong” things gets dangerously close to dehumanizing the impoverished.
      • josephcsible 4y ago
        How is that dangerously close to dehumanizing?
• Mezzie 4y ago
  > The main barrier seems to be a culture or mindset that prioritizes short term benefit/feelings over long term benefits even when there are other options. Interesting because the main barriers I see are how the system creates perverse incentives for poor people re: getting to be not poor. For example, people on SSI aren't allowed to save. If my sister makes more than ~1k/mo or I save too much (as she's my dependent) she loses her healthcare which is what keeps her from going full Kanye. If I make/save much, I stop getting assistance for my MS meds. Basically, working to get out of poverty wouldn't actually get us out of poverty, we'd just end up giving our money to healthcare companies instead of buying ourselves little luxuries. Another example is that often assistance programs won't help you unless you empty your savings. So if you have 200 dollars and can't make rent, they'll take it from you before they help. So it's more 'rational' to spend that 200 on something else. Disability, chronic health conditions, and unexpected dependents (be it children, elderly parents, or (in my case) a sibling who manifested a severe mental illness in their 20s) are huge factors in poverty.
  • didericis 4y ago
    Centralized finance and inflationary consumerist policies seem to be a major underlying contributor in all of this. Credit is most available and most advantageous to those higher up that get new money first, and creates a moving target that makes long term stability artificially difficult for those with no capital. Material poverty was much more prevalent in the past than now, but the kind of housing instability and moving goalposts people experience is I think relatively new for the US. I’m not entirely sure/my history is not good enough to know, but I think local ties and familiarity with neighbors used to be much more instrumental for housing stability. Local banks used to be way different/loans were much more about community buy in and local sponsorship than the kind of disconnected financial blob it is now. That came with all kinds of cons, but I think there were some unappreciated pros we’ve forgotten about; I think the different social dynamics when banking was local is part of why housing was treated like more like a commodity than an investment. A lot of the problems we have now seem to be a consequence of scale and increasing disconnect. Modern access to cheap low interest credit seems increasingly political and disconnected from the real economy, and responsible for keeping old, creaky, dysfunctional behemoths from imploding and restructuring. That kind of credit heavy policy made sense when there was massive growth opportunity, but it seems increasingly perverse and going to maintaining existing systems instead of investing in new systems, and is I think partially responsible for the amount of centralization of assets we’ve been experiencing. Without cheap credit, it’s much harder to suck up as many assets as have been centralized the past couple of decades, and wage decreases are much more transparent and difficult to get away with. Cheap credit also severely distorts prices signals/makes it hard for both consumers and producers to know what is getting cheaper to produce and what isn’t. On the other hand, without cheap credit, a lot of capital intensive research heavy startup companies would be much more difficult to start, which is essential to lowering production costs. The material advances due to production efficiency are under-appreciated in the US, which makes sense when cost of living and basics keep expanding, but are still extremely beneficial, especially on a global scale. I wish it was easier to know what a good solution was to lowering the cost of living without hampering innovation. They seem somewhat inversely related right now. But this stuff gets complicated and is not my area of expertise.
• TeaDrunk 4y ago
  The main barrier to poverty is that there is a statistically almost no way to meaningfully save up enough money to get out of poverty, by onesself, just by forgoing anything that doesn't contribute directly to food and shelter. Literally: what is the point of saving up 5$/wk? That's less than 300$ by the year. What can you realistically do to get yourself out of poverty for a one-time payment of 300$? You can't even afford therapy to help you get yourself out of immense, soul-crushing burnout because you've been doing nothing to enrich yourself psychologically such as companionship, entertainment, or gifting yourself a nice meal all year. 10$/wk is $520. You can't even start a business selling soap on etsy for 520$. You can maybe get a loan to do so, but now you're on the hook for even more debt for entrepreneurship and the majority of businesses fail. This is assuming you never have a health problem, you never need medical care, you never have someone you love need medical care, and you have superhuman discipline to go without love, joy, and little pleasures in life for a year.
  • djbebs 4y ago
    Small amounts let you gather up enough capital to reduce the negative impact of emergencies. People who don't have thay ability make mistakes when emergencies inevitably come around. Those 10$ a week after a year is enough to make up a small car repair, or problem with your paycheck. Just last year I had an issue where my paycheck was short 1000$, because I wasn't spending everything as it came in, it wasn't a problem. I had a big enough buffer in income and emergency funds to make up for it. If it had happened to my colleague who doesn't save up, he would have had to get a payday loan to put food on his families table. That's how people stay poor.
• all2well 4y ago
  All the poorer people I know are very skilled at saving small amounts of money on things, e.g. pirating shows, using a cheap old phone, knowing where to find the cheapest groceries, and so on. I know that I've gotten a lot lazier about stuff like pirating a show vs just paying three dollars or whatever to watch it as my income has gone up. The things that prevent poor people from becoming not poor, in my experience, are things like chronic health conditions and abusive upbringings. The things that have gotten people I know out of poverty have usually been education. I don't know a single person who got out of poverty by cancelling netflix. Where are you getting this idea from?
• majormajor 4y ago
  > For example, things like getting a dog, signing up for cable TV, getting an unnecessarily expensive new phone, spending money on going out to eat, etc. How much money do you think it takes to get out of poverty? Is not buying an iPhone and having an extra $1k, even - let's say they went big on the phone - "out of poverty"? That may not even be a month's rent, depending on location... to have security, you need many multiples of that.
  • josephcsible 4y ago
    A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. Sure, no individual action will ever make you rich, but that doesn't mean you should never do anything.