5 ms·

This is a hot take on America when the same problem is replicated globally.

majormajor 4y ago
> How is it that the United States, a country with a gross domestic product “larger than the combined economies of Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom, India, France, and Italy,” has a higher relative poverty rate than those other advanced democracies? Why do one in eight Americans, and one in six children, live in poverty—a rate about the same as it was in 1970? Why do we put up with it? The entire article is about why the relative numbers go in the wrong direction for the richer country... and why it's stagnated like that? There's a ton of valuable economic activity happening, why is the value inaccessible to so many? Is your claim just that "poverty exists everywhere therefore everywhere is doing equally badly" or do you dispute that comparison with other advanced countries? If you had to be poor somewhere, would the US be your first choice? It wouldn't be mine; but it quite probably would be if I was choosing where to be rich.
- Aeolun 4y ago
  The US is a very good place to be rich. If all the tiny expenses don’t bother you you can save a lot on the big ones.
- anon291 4y ago
  > If you had to be poor somewhere, would the US be your first choice? Yes. My parents flew halfway across the world with nothing in their pocket, and no family / friends, to be poor in this country. This is not an isolated story. Tens of millions did the same, and by and large, it worked out quite well. I've been to their country of origin, and I would absolutely not want to be poor there, given what I saw of the poor people. People will point to all kinds of social problems in America. For example, many Americans believe street homelessness is due to poverty. It's obviously not. I've seen street homelessness due to poverty in the country my parents left, and it looks nothing like what's going on in America.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - onlyonhckrnws 4y ago
    Only on Hacker News can you have an article detailing the systematic ways in which America holds people in poverty and have someone respond with a 30-year old anecdote about how great America is. Thanks for reminding me that 30% of this site is never, ever, ever going to grasp the concept of class consciousness. Here's to a sad shout-out to the ever rapidly increasingly incidence of single-family homelessness in the United States, apparently there's an escalating drug use (or whatever you're handwavedly referring to) problem that perfectly coincides with decades of deregulation and defunding of education and social welfare systems, not to mention extreme corporate monopolization and inflation. America is not yet a third world country, and thus we must ignore documented, systematic failures. Apparently.
    - greatwave1 4y ago
      > Here's to a sad shout-out to the ever rapidly increasingly incidence of single-family homelessness in the United States Can you provide any evidence that single-family homelessness is rapidly increasing in the United States? Everything I'm seeing is showing that it has been trending downwards over the last decade. One example: https://endhomelessness.org/homelessness-in-america/homelessness-statistics/state-of-homelessness/ https://endhomelessness.org/homelessness-in-america/homeless...
  - jbdistaken 4y ago
    >many Americans believe street homelessness is due to poverty. It's obviously not. I've seen street homelessness due to poverty in the country my parents left, and it looks nothing like what's going on in America. can you please elaborate on discerning different types of poverty based on causes? This sounds like something I should understand
    - aimkey 4y ago
      [dead]
- ipnon 4y ago
  The federal poverty level is roughly equal to the average income in Mexico or China in nominal terms.
  - amrocha 4y ago
    Yes, the US is more expensive to live in than Mexico or China
- brightlancer 4y ago
  > If you had to be poor somewhere, would the US be your first choice? The millions of folks traveling from all over the world to enter the US, often enough illegally, suggests that lots of people would choose the US.
  - amrocha 4y ago
    This is disingenuous. People entering the US illegally are often here in order to provide for their families in other parts of the world, where even high paying careers can't compete with the dollar. It says nothing about their lives here vs in other places.
    - brightlancer 4y ago
      > This is disingenuous. Don't impugn my motives. > People entering the US illegally are often here in order to provide for their families in other parts of the world, where even high paying careers can't compete with the dollar. That's not representative of the whole. Plenty of articles have been written about the "unaccompanied minors" illegally entering the US; sometimes they are joining parents who already entered the US illegally, sometimes they're joining other family (here legally or not), sometimes they are the first member of their family and are staying with friends or by themselves. Post Sept 11th, the percentage of illegal aliens who were in families increased; it was an unintended side effect that restricting border crossings meant that the prior model, where men would travel back and forth frequently to support their family elsewhere, was no longer viable, so the entire family entered the US illegally.
      - amrocha 4y ago
        Well, I assumed that you're knowledgeable enough to know why people immigrate illegally to the US, so I went with disingenuous. If you don't know then misinformed is the better term. >That's not representative of the whole. I wasn't claiming to represent the entire demographic, just providing a counter argument to your statement that people move to the US because it's better than being poor elsewhere. I could have also mentioned the people escaping violence.
braingenious 4y ago
What exactly is a “hot take” in this context? If someone were to post “How McDonald’s makes their burgers” would it be a hot take because In-N-Out also makes burgers? https://www.businessinsider.com/i-went-to-a-mcdonalds-factory-and-saw-how-the-burgers-are-really-made-2018-10?op=1 https://www.businessinsider.com/i-went-to-a-mcdonalds-factor...
- onlyonhckrnws 4y ago
  A hot take here is anything that remotely triggers cognitive dissonance.
- yallpendantools 4y ago
  Maybe don't present a problem as "American" when the problem is global? The problem is not so much that America manufactures poverty as much as that the consumerist(/capitalist) economic system the majority of the world depends on manufactures poverty. The article is just listing out American symptoms of a global disease.
  - braingenious 4y ago
    I’m still not following here. If somebody were to post their personal experience with chlamydia would you reply with be “It’s a hot take to not mention the very serious problem that chlamydia poses to koala bears. When I read about something happening somewhere, I assume that that means it isn’t happening elsewhere.”
    - jspaetzel 4y ago
      A hot take is defined as "a quickly produced, strongly worded, and often deliberately provocative or sensational opinion or reaction (as in response to current news)" So you can't really do a hot take on a personal experience. Because a personal experience generally isn't "hot". You'd just be an a-hole. You might be able to have a hot take specifically about chlamydia in koalas though... ouch. Lets try... "Koala bears keep dying because they cant keep it in their pants" See the difference? AKA Click Bait.
solatic 4y ago
Only some aspects are shared globally, like a lack of affordable housing and labor exploitation. Payday lending, forced storage charges upon eviction, low take-up of available benefits, using the tax code to assist the middle class instead of direct spending to assist the poor, lots of these seem uniquely American. Of course poverty exists in many places outside the United States, and people in poverty are universally exploited. But much of that poverty outside the US, at least so it seems, to be rooted in much the same causes: poor governance and corruption. This book seems to question how poverty persists in a country which seems beyond such "third-world" concerns.
- refurb 4y ago
  Payday lending, forced storage charges upon eviction, low take-up of available benefits, using the tax code to assist the middle class instead of direct spending to assist the poor, lots of these seem uniquely American. I’m guessing you haved lived in many places outside the US? Those are common in a lot of countries.

> How is it that the United States, a country with a gross domestic product “larger than the combined economies of Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom, India, France, and Italy,” has a higher relative poverty rate than those other advanced democracies? Why do one in eight Americans, and one in six children, live in poverty—a rate about the same as it was in 1970? Why do we put up with it? The entire article is about why the relative numbers go in the wrong direction for the richer country... and why it's stagnated like that? There's a ton of valuable economic activity happening, why is the value inaccessible to so many? Is your claim just that "poverty exists everywhere therefore everywhere is doing equally badly" or do you dispute that comparison with other advanced countries? If you had to be poor somewhere, would the US be your first choice? It wouldn't be mine; but it quite probably would be if I was choosing where to be rich.

Aeolun 4y ago
The US is a very good place to be rich. If all the tiny expenses don’t bother you you can save a lot on the big ones.
anon291 4y ago
> If you had to be poor somewhere, would the US be your first choice? Yes. My parents flew halfway across the world with nothing in their pocket, and no family / friends, to be poor in this country. This is not an isolated story. Tens of millions did the same, and by and large, it worked out quite well. I've been to their country of origin, and I would absolutely not want to be poor there, given what I saw of the poor people. People will point to all kinds of social problems in America. For example, many Americans believe street homelessness is due to poverty. It's obviously not. I've seen street homelessness due to poverty in the country my parents left, and it looks nothing like what's going on in America.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- onlyonhckrnws 4y ago
  Only on Hacker News can you have an article detailing the systematic ways in which America holds people in poverty and have someone respond with a 30-year old anecdote about how great America is. Thanks for reminding me that 30% of this site is never, ever, ever going to grasp the concept of class consciousness. Here's to a sad shout-out to the ever rapidly increasingly incidence of single-family homelessness in the United States, apparently there's an escalating drug use (or whatever you're handwavedly referring to) problem that perfectly coincides with decades of deregulation and defunding of education and social welfare systems, not to mention extreme corporate monopolization and inflation. America is not yet a third world country, and thus we must ignore documented, systematic failures. Apparently.
  - greatwave1 4y ago
    > Here's to a sad shout-out to the ever rapidly increasingly incidence of single-family homelessness in the United States Can you provide any evidence that single-family homelessness is rapidly increasing in the United States? Everything I'm seeing is showing that it has been trending downwards over the last decade. One example: https://endhomelessness.org/homelessness-in-america/homelessness-statistics/state-of-homelessness/ https://endhomelessness.org/homelessness-in-america/homeless...
- jbdistaken 4y ago
  >many Americans believe street homelessness is due to poverty. It's obviously not. I've seen street homelessness due to poverty in the country my parents left, and it looks nothing like what's going on in America. can you please elaborate on discerning different types of poverty based on causes? This sounds like something I should understand
  - aimkey 4y ago
    [dead]
ipnon 4y ago
The federal poverty level is roughly equal to the average income in Mexico or China in nominal terms.
- amrocha 4y ago
  Yes, the US is more expensive to live in than Mexico or China
brightlancer 4y ago
> If you had to be poor somewhere, would the US be your first choice? The millions of folks traveling from all over the world to enter the US, often enough illegally, suggests that lots of people would choose the US.
- amrocha 4y ago
  This is disingenuous. People entering the US illegally are often here in order to provide for their families in other parts of the world, where even high paying careers can't compete with the dollar. It says nothing about their lives here vs in other places.
  - brightlancer 4y ago
    > This is disingenuous. Don't impugn my motives. > People entering the US illegally are often here in order to provide for their families in other parts of the world, where even high paying careers can't compete with the dollar. That's not representative of the whole. Plenty of articles have been written about the "unaccompanied minors" illegally entering the US; sometimes they are joining parents who already entered the US illegally, sometimes they're joining other family (here legally or not), sometimes they are the first member of their family and are staying with friends or by themselves. Post Sept 11th, the percentage of illegal aliens who were in families increased; it was an unintended side effect that restricting border crossings meant that the prior model, where men would travel back and forth frequently to support their family elsewhere, was no longer viable, so the entire family entered the US illegally.
    - amrocha 4y ago
      Well, I assumed that you're knowledgeable enough to know why people immigrate illegally to the US, so I went with disingenuous. If you don't know then misinformed is the better term. >That's not representative of the whole. I wasn't claiming to represent the entire demographic, just providing a counter argument to your statement that people move to the US because it's better than being poor elsewhere. I could have also mentioned the people escaping violence.

braingenious 4y ago

What exactly is a “hot take” in this context? If someone were to post “How McDonald’s makes their burgers” would it be a hot take because In-N-Out also makes burgers? https://www.businessinsider.com/i-went-to-a-mcdonalds-factory-and-saw-how-the-burgers-are-really-made-2018-10?op=1 https://www.businessinsider.com/i-went-to-a-mcdonalds-factor...

onlyonhckrnws 4y ago
A hot take here is anything that remotely triggers cognitive dissonance.
yallpendantools 4y ago
Maybe don't present a problem as "American" when the problem is global? The problem is not so much that America manufactures poverty as much as that the consumerist(/capitalist) economic system the majority of the world depends on manufactures poverty. The article is just listing out American symptoms of a global disease.
- braingenious 4y ago
  I’m still not following here. If somebody were to post their personal experience with chlamydia would you reply with be “It’s a hot take to not mention the very serious problem that chlamydia poses to koala bears. When I read about something happening somewhere, I assume that that means it isn’t happening elsewhere.”
  - jspaetzel 4y ago
    A hot take is defined as "a quickly produced, strongly worded, and often deliberately provocative or sensational opinion or reaction (as in response to current news)" So you can't really do a hot take on a personal experience. Because a personal experience generally isn't "hot". You'd just be an a-hole. You might be able to have a hot take specifically about chlamydia in koalas though... ouch. Lets try... "Koala bears keep dying because they cant keep it in their pants" See the difference? AKA Click Bait.

solatic 4y ago

Only some aspects are shared globally, like a lack of affordable housing and labor exploitation. Payday lending, forced storage charges upon eviction, low take-up of available benefits, using the tax code to assist the middle class instead of direct spending to assist the poor, lots of these seem uniquely American. Of course poverty exists in many places outside the United States, and people in poverty are universally exploited. But much of that poverty outside the US, at least so it seems, to be rooted in much the same causes: poor governance and corruption. This book seems to question how poverty persists in a country which seems beyond such "third-world" concerns.

refurb 4y ago
Payday lending, forced storage charges upon eviction, low take-up of available benefits, using the tax code to assist the middle class instead of direct spending to assist the poor, lots of these seem uniquely American. I’m guessing you haved lived in many places outside the US? Those are common in a lot of countries.