10 ms·

I can speak to this. For a while in 2010 I was completely broke after leaving my first job out of college, which I hated, and having some other employment oppor

I can speak to this. For a while in 2010 I was completely broke after leaving my first job out of college, which I hated, and having some other employment opportunities fall through. Having that little money changes your decision making process about absolutely everything. Obviously every financial decision is effected, even the tiniest purchases weigh into bigger questions like "will I have enough money in my bank account to pay rent on the first?" It can reach a point where you can barely purchase a soda without any stress over spending money. And at least for me who is fortunate enough that this was not a chronic way of life, one thing that weighed on my mind was how I was spending my time and whether I was doing enough to make sure I wasn't so broke all the time. I could imagine that at some point that sort of thinking goes away and you believe poverty is a way of life. But I can think of a variety of other meta concerns stemming from poverty that could plague your thoughts. Mentally poverty can be an all consuming condition. I've come to think of it as comparable to programming in a high level language versus programming in a low level language. If you're financially stable you are like someone programming in a high level language who has tedious tasks like memory management taken care of for you. Whereas if you live in poverty before you can get to some of the really productive work you have some hurdles to overcome. Another way of thinking of the difference between being financially stable and being poor is that if you are poor it is constantly a necessity to think about short term outcomes first so your mind gets clogged up with them. It is very difficult to get to think about your long term good because failing to properly address your short term outcomes could end in complete disaster. This is why I cannot take seriously comments like this on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6301856 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6301856 although thankfully the commenter does acknowledge he is being cynical and disrespectful.

scott_s 13y ago
I observe this at the grocery store. The ones I visit have people from a wide range of economic status. When I go in, I grab what I need and don't think about price - it's almost always just the staples like bread, milk, fruit and eggs, and I know with certainty that I can afford it. And that I don't think about price is literally true until I'm told how much it costs, then I pay it, then I promptly stop thinking about it. I know my eating habits, I know my income, and I know that my eating habits are well within my budget, so it's not worth spending any more cycles on it. Contrast this with the people who, upon learning that some item in their basket is not actually on sale, put a different item back. Or split the cost of the groceries across a WIC card and cash. Or use five coupons for a small basket. For me, going to get groceries is an afterthought - I'm out of certain food, I'm out of my place, so I'll pick them up. But for some other people, it's clear to me that visiting the grocery store is an exercise in risk management and weighing priorities. In other words, being poor is hard work.
- angersock 13y ago
  One of the most interesting domestic exercises is to think about how much different items cost in terms of other items. A steak dinner (say, $50) is worth just a bit more than 3 double-meat Chipotle burritos with drink and chips and guac (say, $14). Each of those burrito meals is worth a bit more than 4 dozen eggs (say, fancy-pants eggs at $3/dz.) Each of those dozen eggs is worth 20 packs of shitty ramen ($.15/pack). It's an exercise worth practicing, lest you find yourself one day needing to use that calculus. EDIT: This is also why buying Mississippi Mud ($4/qt. of passable black & tan) or Arizona RX energy drinks (~$1/can) is a good investment, as is rolling your own cigarettes or smoking pipes.
  - pfisch 13y ago
    I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say smoking tobacco is most certainly not a good investment.
    - sillysaurus2 13y ago
      We all have our addictions. Being automatically prejudiced against one that happens to shorten your life isn't as useful as realizing you may be addicted to something far worse, e.g. spending most of your time thinking about dating or worrying how to shape yourself to fit the die that some institution has cast for your life, like college or work.
      - ramchip 13y ago
        To be honest, I don't think these are worse than smoking at all. They sound more like phases in a normal person's life.
        sillysaurus2 13y ago
        Take the idea of evolution. As pg points out in his essay, the reason evolution was so difficult for people to accept is that species seem to be unchanging, static fixtures. It would be absurd to suggest that a dolphin used to walk around on land, yet evidence shows that they did, a couple million years ago. It turns out that the idea of evolution is useful in other contexts. Most of the best software was written by following a procedure strikingly similar to how a creature evolves. The idea of "release early, release often" is the idea of evolution applied to the process of writing software. In fact, this idea is so valuable that we probably wouldn't be having this conversation without it, because neither Viaweb nor Arc nor YC would exist. It was normal for society to be unaware of evolution the same way we're unaware of the spin of the Earth. And when people started to look at the evidence, it was normal for society to reject it. It wasn't until Darwin, an established scientist near the end of his life, that society allowed the idea to take hold. The consequence is that those who live a life that society lays out for them are almost universally denied access to the best ideas, because the best ideas are the ones you haven't thought of yet. It's tempting to believe that you're resistant to the effects of society laying out a normal path for you to follow. Aren't we free to think whatever we want? After all, no one can prevent us from thinking, right? Actually, that's exactly what happens. "Here is where you live. Here is where you play. Here is where you learn. Here is where you work. These are the hours you may relax." That cycle is too powerful to resist unless you actively try to break it. It stamps its seal onto your brain. For 16 hours a day, your thoughts are not your own -- they are owned by whomever pays you. The reason is because even though you are technically free to think whatever you want whenever you want, most people never do. At work, people think about work, or about coworkers. At school, you think about school or (more commonly) about other students. That sounds quite a lot like an addiction. In the same way a drug user becomes obsessed with acquiring their fix, most people are obsessed with living whatever life society tells them to be living. And in practice that means most people are limiting themselves to a small fraction of their potential, because your potential stems from your ideas, and your ideas come from your thoughts, and your thoughts are mostly not your own. I believe those addictions are the real ones to be avoided. And avoiding smoking is good while you're at it, but probably doesn't matter as much.
angersock 13y ago
"If you're financially stable you are like someone programming in a high level language who has tedious tasks like memory management taken care of for you. " This is exactly the correct metaphor. I had to, at one point, stop using my coworking space and start working from home because I couldn't deal with the occasional overhead of "Huh, shit, I forget to bring lunch--can I afford to eat out today? Do I have enough gas to commute?". Money is this magical barrier to all sorts of annoying daily minutiae--even a little bit is enough to let you shrug off the effects of suboptimal decisions. Being able to simply buy a lunch when you forgot to bring one can change your whole afternoon of productivity.
- 3825 13y ago
  This is why you don't need to pay your programmers too much but you do need to pay them enough that they can focus more on their job and not on trivial items. In hindsight, nicely presented lunches, gym (and perhaps babysitting?) on campus apparently serve a very real purpose. It makes sense that they are minimizing distractions. (When you think of it this way, employees should not have to pay income tax for free lunch at work but that's a different conversation.) However, your parent comment made me think a little: >It can reach a point where you can barely purchase a soda without any stress over spending money. Do people with money not stress about spending money? I mean sure, I have a decent wage rate. According to the New York Times[0], a little more than half of Americans make less money than I do. However, it is difficult to shake the fear. I am by no means wealthy and I have no alternate source of income. If I am out of the work force for a few months, I will have to take shelter with my (retired) parents. I am by no means the most frugal person in the world. I have a nice Nexus 4 phone and I make whimsical purchases like going to the water park ($40+ for about three hours) and I eat out and stuff a few times a week. However, there is that fear in the back of my head that says what happens tomorrow? I would like to go to grad school. Will I be able to afford it? The article makes me feel like the wealthy people don't have worries like that. I kind of envy that. [0] http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/01/15/business/one-percent-map.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/01/15/business/one-p...
  - bartonfink 13y ago
msandford 13y ago
I agree with a lot of what you're saying but one thing that's always bugged me is how we account for sub-optimal decisions. What I mean is that if I make 60k per year and I choose to spend very little of it by driving an un-fancy car and cooking all my meals at home and living in a small apartment (perhaps with a roommate) I might be able to save half my net income. Or I could spend nearly all of that income on a bigger place, nicer car and meals out. And then I would potentially be in the exact same mental place as the person in poverty. What if that gets scaled down to 20k instead of 60k? Is there still nothing I can do to figure out a way to save money? Even if my cognitive load is high due to being poor, which way does causation go? Maybe I consciously decided to live in a bigger place and eat more meals out and as a result I now have more financial worry. I guess what I'm asking is which way does the causation go? Does being in poverty cause you to become overloaded or does the inability to prioritize well or think under stress cause the poverty? To me this question is neigh impossible to answer because you can't look at a single decision or experiment to determine the outcome. My naive thinking about this kind of thing is that it's like a betting game. With 50/50 odds you might be up some or down some but in the long run little changes. A hundred $1 bets on a coin toss should leave you with just as much money as you started with. But if the odds change, even just a tiny bit, the outcome of a hundred bets gets really different. Having a slight edge on the house, 51% instead of 50%, can cause you to slowly but surely come ahead of the house. And similarly, going from 50% to 49% can cause you to slowly bleed to death. Now some math. A 50% chance of winning is the same as a 100% payout. For each win you double your money, for each loss you get nothing. 51% is a 102% payout. 49% is a 98% payout. We'll neglect the notion of a finite bankroll since these are small bets; our bankroll is the full $100. With 50% odds: 1^100 = 1 so you never make or lose money With 51% odds: 1.02^100 = 7.24 With 49% odds: 0.98^100 = 0.133 Now of course I don't know how this game would scale to real life. Would a person have only a few chances in a lifetime to make these kinds of "bets" or do you get these chances several times a day? And what is the quantity of the bet? Is it how much I spend, or how much I choose to spend versus my other options of how much to spend? For example if I feel thirsty I could choose to drink water from a drinking fountain (free) or buy a soda ($2). Is the bet quantity $2 (how much I spend or don't spend) or is it $1 because I either "double my money" (which is to say, I don't spend the $2) or I "lose that bet" buy the soda and spend the $2. I would tend to think it's a $1 bet. Anyhow I'd love getting some kind of real feedback on the math here rather than just "you're an asshole for not thinking those in poverty are victims"
delluminatus 13y ago
I also find that poverty detrimentally affects people's self-esteem and confidence. It's hard to avoid seeing income as a societal judgement of your value or ability (even though it really isn't). I've seen this in my family: if people are laid off or struggling financially, it is just incredibly destructive. Losing a job had more impact on my relatives' happiness than getting a divorce. When I called my family I could tell they still hadn't gotten hired without having to ask. Their voice was depressed and they were frustrated with even the littlest things. It is heartbreaking to witness the effects of poverty in people you love. I know when I was quite poor in college, thinking about money made my chest tighten and my eyes get hot. I knew I couldn't pay for a fourth year. If the slightest thing went wrong, I was just fucked. There was terrible anxiety, and simmering fury, that wasn't alleviated for years.
- 90002 13y ago
  While this may not be true to everyone contributing their 2 cents on this piece, most folks here cannot possibly fathom nor understands what it's like to be buried in stress due to poverty or near poverty experiences. I, too, have experienced my fair share of impoverished conditions throughout the course of my life, but it is a bit difficult, even frustrating, trying to explain to someone the effects of poverty. The emotional and physical toll poverty takes on one individual is beyond belief, but some folks will never get it, to be honest. Furthermore, the effects never quite diminish, even if one is able to climb out of poverty, unfortunately.
w_t_payne 13y ago
It is all that and more; it is not just the extra mental effort, it is also the stress that messes with your ability to reason; that makes rationality diminish, and drives emotional instability and crisis creating behaviors.
ajslater 13y ago
There is a definition of "social class" I read in the last few years that separates income or wealth from social class. The definitive marker in this definition is the length of time you are able to plan for. Naturally wealth affects this, but is not the be all end all. This definition separates the spendy nouveau riche who blow millions on status markers as still being 'lower class', where thrifty thoughtful people of modest current means would be of a 'higher' social class. Thoughtful thrifty people of great means are able to think in terms of what their grandchildren or foundation might be doing. The impoverished, disadvantaged of education (Like the SOB who stole my motorcycle only to crash it immediately) might be thinking minutes or hours into the future. Having been in various economic conditions under varying amounts of stress, I find ritchiea's post dead on the money.
- desas 13y ago
  This is how the class system in Britain works. As far as I can tell in the US, wealth is the only input into the social class equation. In Britain there are lots of inputs e.g. where you went to school, your accent, your vocabulary, your occupation, your friends and that of your parents. Wealth is a very small input (except so far in that you can afford to send your kids to the "right" schools where they will make the "right" friends and perhaps ascend a rung).
goggles99 13y ago
I am sick of this whole notion that poor people cannot pull themselves up by their bootstraps. This notion that "poverty taxes the brain" is utter nonsense. Peoples brains are generally not taxed by being poor, their brains are lazy and their attitudes are bad, that is why they are poor to begin with. I take personal interest and issue with comments surrounding this since I lived it. I have personally experienced, watched and read detailed stories of so many living in America who have done just this - Pulled themselves up out of poverty. My personal experience (and those close to me as well) with having almost nothing was this: You have a lot less to worry about (literally). You don't own much, you have a lot of time to think and research how best you should improve your life. You have less distractions and it is easier to focus on your goals and ambitions. If you have a simple budget (takes hardly any time to make one when you are poor) you don't have to even think about "will I have enough money to make rent this month". This whole notion of poverty taxing the brain is yet another "excuse" for the poor disadvantaged soul living in poverty. It comes down to this, if someone works hard and makes good choices (either on their own accord or by following wise advice), they are absolutely going to escape the poverty they may have been born into or ended up in by some circumstance. Let me give you a little example of how things have changed in the last couple of hundred years. Do you think that early settlers brains were "taxed" so hard that they could not work hard? That they could not make good choices? They had to work hard just to eat, just to feed their families (if they had them). If they made one bad choice or made one mistake, they could have lost their herd or crop. This could mean their very lives. They may never have been able to escape barely surviving back then, but times are much different today. Take that level of work ethic and wise/conscientious decision making and put it into the average poverty stricken youth today and do you think would happen? Your family's lack of money should mean almost nothing today, if anything - it should be extra motivation to work hard and improve you and your family's lives. Is there a reason that a minority youth in the worst and poorest inner city project cannot go to school, pay attention in class, do their homework and achieve at least a "C" average? Well with that average, they will be accepted to any state college. If they are poor, there is a ton of financial aid (free money) available. If necessary - get a student loan (this is your ticket out of poverty here, it is worth it). This is the escape out of the projects that almost everyone can do. It will not cost you a single penny of your own money until you finish college. Even then you can take an online film study (or similar) class at a local community college ($50) every semester and put off paying back your student loan almost indefinitely. we see case after case of middle or upper class people lose everything and climb back up out of poverty, immigrant after immigrant (or refugee) come to America with nothing to their name and even not be fluent in English in many cases, yet climb out of poverty, minorities from the poorest and most violent inner-city projects climb out of poverty, yet I hear again and again how and why people cannot do it on their own. Well people do. What makes these people so special? Are they extra smart? Do they have more attractive faces and bodies? What is it that allows some to climb out of poverty where most cannot. The limiting factor here is themselves - their attitude. This has been fostered by such things as the collapse of the family, the loss of strong morals and ethics, the nanny state (creating dependency and sending a message that they cannot do it on their own - creating victims), the entitlement attitude, the victim and disenfranchised mentality, racism (I mean minorities toward majorities here), class envy, the entire black culture in America today. You would think that if the government really wanted to solve poverty, they would lookup everyone in the country who had escaped poverty, and interview them. How did you do it? How could others do this too? Then publish the results in a big ad campaign. What would we find? A huge overlap of answers (which I already outlined). The problem is - the government is not really interested in eliminating poverty. Nor keeping people out of prison. The government (generally) is not the friend of the minority or the impoverished. The government does not wish to eliminate or diminish itself by enabling people to become independent of it. Is it "fair" that someone is born with a silver spoon in their mouth and can move through life lazy and comfortable, while another is born in poverty and must work harder and have to make better choices to succeed? Of course it is not "fair", but it is reality and it is not changing. I can tell you a fact though that the individual who pulls themselves up by their bootstraps is a lot happier and more content person than the one born into wealth. Is that "fair" too? Happiness is something that can never be purchased (for any amount of money).

scott_s 13y ago

I observe this at the grocery store. The ones I visit have people from a wide range of economic status. When I go in, I grab what I need and don't think about price - it's almost always just the staples like bread, milk, fruit and eggs, and I know with certainty that I can afford it. And that I don't think about price is literally true until I'm told how much it costs, then I pay it, then I promptly stop thinking about it. I know my eating habits, I know my income, and I know that my eating habits are well within my budget, so it's not worth spending any more cycles on it. Contrast this with the people who, upon learning that some item in their basket is not actually on sale, put a different item back. Or split the cost of the groceries across a WIC card and cash. Or use five coupons for a small basket. For me, going to get groceries is an afterthought - I'm out of certain food, I'm out of my place, so I'll pick them up. But for some other people, it's clear to me that visiting the grocery store is an exercise in risk management and weighing priorities. In other words, being poor is hard work.

angersock 13y ago
One of the most interesting domestic exercises is to think about how much different items cost in terms of other items. A steak dinner (say, $50) is worth just a bit more than 3 double-meat Chipotle burritos with drink and chips and guac (say, $14). Each of those burrito meals is worth a bit more than 4 dozen eggs (say, fancy-pants eggs at $3/dz.) Each of those dozen eggs is worth 20 packs of shitty ramen ($.15/pack). It's an exercise worth practicing, lest you find yourself one day needing to use that calculus. EDIT: This is also why buying Mississippi Mud ($4/qt. of passable black & tan) or Arizona RX energy drinks (~$1/can) is a good investment, as is rolling your own cigarettes or smoking pipes.
- pfisch 13y ago
  I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say smoking tobacco is most certainly not a good investment.
  - sillysaurus2 13y ago
    We all have our addictions. Being automatically prejudiced against one that happens to shorten your life isn't as useful as realizing you may be addicted to something far worse, e.g. spending most of your time thinking about dating or worrying how to shape yourself to fit the die that some institution has cast for your life, like college or work.
    - ramchip 13y ago
      To be honest, I don't think these are worse than smoking at all. They sound more like phases in a normal person's life.
      - sillysaurus2 13y ago
        Take the idea of evolution. As pg points out in his essay, the reason evolution was so difficult for people to accept is that species seem to be unchanging, static fixtures. It would be absurd to suggest that a dolphin used to walk around on land, yet evidence shows that they did, a couple million years ago. It turns out that the idea of evolution is useful in other contexts. Most of the best software was written by following a procedure strikingly similar to how a creature evolves. The idea of "release early, release often" is the idea of evolution applied to the process of writing software. In fact, this idea is so valuable that we probably wouldn't be having this conversation without it, because neither Viaweb nor Arc nor YC would exist. It was normal for society to be unaware of evolution the same way we're unaware of the spin of the Earth. And when people started to look at the evidence, it was normal for society to reject it. It wasn't until Darwin, an established scientist near the end of his life, that society allowed the idea to take hold. The consequence is that those who live a life that society lays out for them are almost universally denied access to the best ideas, because the best ideas are the ones you haven't thought of yet. It's tempting to believe that you're resistant to the effects of society laying out a normal path for you to follow. Aren't we free to think whatever we want? After all, no one can prevent us from thinking, right? Actually, that's exactly what happens. "Here is where you live. Here is where you play. Here is where you learn. Here is where you work. These are the hours you may relax." That cycle is too powerful to resist unless you actively try to break it. It stamps its seal onto your brain. For 16 hours a day, your thoughts are not your own -- they are owned by whomever pays you. The reason is because even though you are technically free to think whatever you want whenever you want, most people never do. At work, people think about work, or about coworkers. At school, you think about school or (more commonly) about other students. That sounds quite a lot like an addiction. In the same way a drug user becomes obsessed with acquiring their fix, most people are obsessed with living whatever life society tells them to be living. And in practice that means most people are limiting themselves to a small fraction of their potential, because your potential stems from your ideas, and your ideas come from your thoughts, and your thoughts are mostly not your own. I believe those addictions are the real ones to be avoided. And avoiding smoking is good while you're at it, but probably doesn't matter as much.

angersock 13y ago

"If you're financially stable you are like someone programming in a high level language who has tedious tasks like memory management taken care of for you. " This is exactly the correct metaphor. I had to, at one point, stop using my coworking space and start working from home because I couldn't deal with the occasional overhead of "Huh, shit, I forget to bring lunch--can I afford to eat out today? Do I have enough gas to commute?". Money is this magical barrier to all sorts of annoying daily minutiae--even a little bit is enough to let you shrug off the effects of suboptimal decisions. Being able to simply buy a lunch when you forgot to bring one can change your whole afternoon of productivity.

3825 13y ago
This is why you don't need to pay your programmers too much but you do need to pay them enough that they can focus more on their job and not on trivial items. In hindsight, nicely presented lunches, gym (and perhaps babysitting?) on campus apparently serve a very real purpose. It makes sense that they are minimizing distractions. (When you think of it this way, employees should not have to pay income tax for free lunch at work but that's a different conversation.) However, your parent comment made me think a little: >It can reach a point where you can barely purchase a soda without any stress over spending money. Do people with money not stress about spending money? I mean sure, I have a decent wage rate. According to the New York Times[0], a little more than half of Americans make less money than I do. However, it is difficult to shake the fear. I am by no means wealthy and I have no alternate source of income. If I am out of the work force for a few months, I will have to take shelter with my (retired) parents. I am by no means the most frugal person in the world. I have a nice Nexus 4 phone and I make whimsical purchases like going to the water park ($40+ for about three hours) and I eat out and stuff a few times a week. However, there is that fear in the back of my head that says what happens tomorrow? I would like to go to grad school. Will I be able to afford it? The article makes me feel like the wealthy people don't have worries like that. I kind of envy that. [0] http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/01/15/business/one-percent-map.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/01/15/business/one-p...
- bartonfink 13y ago

msandford 13y ago

I agree with a lot of what you're saying but one thing that's always bugged me is how we account for sub-optimal decisions. What I mean is that if I make 60k per year and I choose to spend very little of it by driving an un-fancy car and cooking all my meals at home and living in a small apartment (perhaps with a roommate) I might be able to save half my net income. Or I could spend nearly all of that income on a bigger place, nicer car and meals out. And then I would potentially be in the exact same mental place as the person in poverty. What if that gets scaled down to 20k instead of 60k? Is there still nothing I can do to figure out a way to save money? Even if my cognitive load is high due to being poor, which way does causation go? Maybe I consciously decided to live in a bigger place and eat more meals out and as a result I now have more financial worry. I guess what I'm asking is which way does the causation go? Does being in poverty cause you to become overloaded or does the inability to prioritize well or think under stress cause the poverty? To me this question is neigh impossible to answer because you can't look at a single decision or experiment to determine the outcome. My naive thinking about this kind of thing is that it's like a betting game. With 50/50 odds you might be up some or down some but in the long run little changes. A hundred $1 bets on a coin toss should leave you with just as much money as you started with. But if the odds change, even just a tiny bit, the outcome of a hundred bets gets really different. Having a slight edge on the house, 51% instead of 50%, can cause you to slowly but surely come ahead of the house. And similarly, going from 50% to 49% can cause you to slowly bleed to death. Now some math. A 50% chance of winning is the same as a 100% payout. For each win you double your money, for each loss you get nothing. 51% is a 102% payout. 49% is a 98% payout. We'll neglect the notion of a finite bankroll since these are small bets; our bankroll is the full $100. With 50% odds: 1^100 = 1 so you never make or lose money With 51% odds: 1.02^100 = 7.24 With 49% odds: 0.98^100 = 0.133 Now of course I don't know how this game would scale to real life. Would a person have only a few chances in a lifetime to make these kinds of "bets" or do you get these chances several times a day? And what is the quantity of the bet? Is it how much I spend, or how much I choose to spend versus my other options of how much to spend? For example if I feel thirsty I could choose to drink water from a drinking fountain (free) or buy a soda ($2). Is the bet quantity $2 (how much I spend or don't spend) or is it $1 because I either "double my money" (which is to say, I don't spend the $2) or I "lose that bet" buy the soda and spend the $2. I would tend to think it's a $1 bet. Anyhow I'd love getting some kind of real feedback on the math here rather than just "you're an asshole for not thinking those in poverty are victims"

delluminatus 13y ago

I also find that poverty detrimentally affects people's self-esteem and confidence. It's hard to avoid seeing income as a societal judgement of your value or ability (even though it really isn't). I've seen this in my family: if people are laid off or struggling financially, it is just incredibly destructive. Losing a job had more impact on my relatives' happiness than getting a divorce. When I called my family I could tell they still hadn't gotten hired without having to ask. Their voice was depressed and they were frustrated with even the littlest things. It is heartbreaking to witness the effects of poverty in people you love. I know when I was quite poor in college, thinking about money made my chest tighten and my eyes get hot. I knew I couldn't pay for a fourth year. If the slightest thing went wrong, I was just fucked. There was terrible anxiety, and simmering fury, that wasn't alleviated for years.

90002 13y ago
While this may not be true to everyone contributing their 2 cents on this piece, most folks here cannot possibly fathom nor understands what it's like to be buried in stress due to poverty or near poverty experiences. I, too, have experienced my fair share of impoverished conditions throughout the course of my life, but it is a bit difficult, even frustrating, trying to explain to someone the effects of poverty. The emotional and physical toll poverty takes on one individual is beyond belief, but some folks will never get it, to be honest. Furthermore, the effects never quite diminish, even if one is able to climb out of poverty, unfortunately.

w_t_payne 13y ago

It is all that and more; it is not just the extra mental effort, it is also the stress that messes with your ability to reason; that makes rationality diminish, and drives emotional instability and crisis creating behaviors.

ajslater 13y ago

There is a definition of "social class" I read in the last few years that separates income or wealth from social class. The definitive marker in this definition is the length of time you are able to plan for. Naturally wealth affects this, but is not the be all end all. This definition separates the spendy nouveau riche who blow millions on status markers as still being 'lower class', where thrifty thoughtful people of modest current means would be of a 'higher' social class. Thoughtful thrifty people of great means are able to think in terms of what their grandchildren or foundation might be doing. The impoverished, disadvantaged of education (Like the SOB who stole my motorcycle only to crash it immediately) might be thinking minutes or hours into the future. Having been in various economic conditions under varying amounts of stress, I find ritchiea's post dead on the money.

desas 13y ago
This is how the class system in Britain works. As far as I can tell in the US, wealth is the only input into the social class equation. In Britain there are lots of inputs e.g. where you went to school, your accent, your vocabulary, your occupation, your friends and that of your parents. Wealth is a very small input (except so far in that you can afford to send your kids to the "right" schools where they will make the "right" friends and perhaps ascend a rung).

goggles99 13y ago

I am sick of this whole notion that poor people cannot pull themselves up by their bootstraps. This notion that "poverty taxes the brain" is utter nonsense. Peoples brains are generally not taxed by being poor, their brains are lazy and their attitudes are bad, that is why they are poor to begin with. I take personal interest and issue with comments surrounding this since I lived it. I have personally experienced, watched and read detailed stories of so many living in America who have done just this - Pulled themselves up out of poverty. My personal experience (and those close to me as well) with having almost nothing was this: You have a lot less to worry about (literally). You don't own much, you have a lot of time to think and research how best you should improve your life. You have less distractions and it is easier to focus on your goals and ambitions. If you have a simple budget (takes hardly any time to make one when you are poor) you don't have to even think about "will I have enough money to make rent this month". This whole notion of poverty taxing the brain is yet another "excuse" for the poor disadvantaged soul living in poverty. It comes down to this, if someone works hard and makes good choices (either on their own accord or by following wise advice), they are absolutely going to escape the poverty they may have been born into or ended up in by some circumstance. Let me give you a little example of how things have changed in the last couple of hundred years. Do you think that early settlers brains were "taxed" so hard that they could not work hard? That they could not make good choices? They had to work hard just to eat, just to feed their families (if they had them). If they made one bad choice or made one mistake, they could have lost their herd or crop. This could mean their very lives. They may never have been able to escape barely surviving back then, but times are much different today. Take that level of work ethic and wise/conscientious decision making and put it into the average poverty stricken youth today and do you think would happen? Your family's lack of money should mean almost nothing today, if anything - it should be extra motivation to work hard and improve you and your family's lives. Is there a reason that a minority youth in the worst and poorest inner city project cannot go to school, pay attention in class, do their homework and achieve at least a "C" average? Well with that average, they will be accepted to any state college. If they are poor, there is a ton of financial aid (free money) available. If necessary - get a student loan (this is your ticket out of poverty here, it is worth it). This is the escape out of the projects that almost everyone can do. It will not cost you a single penny of your own money until you finish college. Even then you can take an online film study (or similar) class at a local community college ($50) every semester and put off paying back your student loan almost indefinitely. we see case after case of middle or upper class people lose everything and climb back up out of poverty, immigrant after immigrant (or refugee) come to America with nothing to their name and even not be fluent in English in many cases, yet climb out of poverty, minorities from the poorest and most violent inner-city projects climb out of poverty, yet I hear again and again how and why people cannot do it on their own. Well people do. What makes these people so special? Are they extra smart? Do they have more attractive faces and bodies? What is it that allows some to climb out of poverty where most cannot. The limiting factor here is themselves - their attitude. This has been fostered by such things as the collapse of the family, the loss of strong morals and ethics, the nanny state (creating dependency and sending a message that they cannot do it on their own - creating victims), the entitlement attitude, the victim and disenfranchised mentality, racism (I mean minorities toward majorities here), class envy, the entire black culture in America today. You would think that if the government really wanted to solve poverty, they would lookup everyone in the country who had escaped poverty, and interview them. How did you do it? How could others do this too? Then publish the results in a big ad campaign. What would we find? A huge overlap of answers (which I already outlined). The problem is - the government is not really interested in eliminating poverty. Nor keeping people out of prison. The government (generally) is not the friend of the minority or the impoverished. The government does not wish to eliminate or diminish itself by enabling people to become independent of it. Is it "fair" that someone is born with a silver spoon in their mouth and can move through life lazy and comfortable, while another is born in poverty and must work harder and have to make better choices to succeed? Of course it is not "fair", but it is reality and it is not changing. I can tell you a fact though that the individual who pulls themselves up by their bootstraps is a lot happier and more content person than the one born into wealth. Is that "fair" too? Happiness is something that can never be purchased (for any amount of money).