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Being poor changes your thinking about everything
- teddyh 13y agoI'm very much reminded of these: http://www.cracked.com/blog/5-things-nobody-tells-you-about-being-poor/ http://www.cracked.com/blog/5-things-nobody-tells-you-about-... http://www.cracked.com/blog/the-5-stupidest-habits-you-develop-growing-up-poor/ http://www.cracked.com/blog/the-5-stupidest-habits-you-devel... http://www.cracked.com/blog/4-things-politicians-will-never-understand-about-poor-people/ http://www.cracked.com/blog/4-things-politicians-will-never-... Especially the last one. EDIT: Fixed last link
- sandesh247 13y agoThat's a distressing read. The first and the third links are the same - did you mean to post only two?
- teddyh 13y agoFixed, thanks. (I meant to post three links, but I mistakenly posted one of the links twice instead.)
- narrator 13y agoWhat I keep thinking when I read these is if poor one should live with a large number of roommates you trust and share expenses and pitch in to help each other in an emergency. This in how people survive in developing countries. Something has collapsed in America though and everyone HAS to live by themselves and can't seem to trust anybody else.
- teddyh 13y agoThere's a problem starting such a collective (which is, in effect, what you are proposing): Housing. To have many people live together, you need square footage (or m², for metric people). This necessitates a large apartment or house. Such a thing, (if not bought outright, ha, ha, just kidding), will be expensive. The landlord will need a single legal person to be responsible for the paying of this rent, and own the lease. And I think we can assume from our premise that none of the individuals in question will have anything close to the sort of documented income or credit history to make any sensible landlord agree to the lease. “My friends will totally chip in to pay the rent!” is just not going to work. So there's a bootstrapping problem which I think is mostly insurmountable. Which is a shame, because it's a good plan, otherwise.
- 6ren 13y agoIn Australia, it's common for students to share a house, and all go on the lease. This favors the landlord, because each tenant is liable for the entire rent.
- teddyh 13y agoThis is in university areas, with many students, I assume. In those areas, the large masses of students have made landlords open to this kind of arrangement, and they are used to dealing with students and their… special… economic situation. But try it in a non-university town where non-students vastly outnumber the students? I don't think so. The landlord has everything to risk and nothing to gain by doing strange and unfamiliar things. If they have even heard of the practice, it's only for students, in student-dense areas, in housing long used in this way, with all the features (internal locks for each room, etc.). Why would they risk their nice house when they can just rent to somebody else?
- jpau 13y agoHaving multiple people on the lease is not a strange practice in Australia; it's normal and not as you described. When signing the lease you're not signing for a room, you're signing responsibility for the rent and condition of the whole house/unit (excluding responsibilities remaining with the landlord, e.g. maintenance). Each of your housemates are too. Rents are expensive. It makes no financial sense to live by yourself. Even in my home town - which has no substantial university - it's generally assumed that if you rent and do not have dependents, you almost certainly have housemates.
- teddyh 13y agoInteresting. I would guess that the general economics have forced the landlords to accept and perhaps even promote this scheme, as it's the only was they can find a market for their services. I wonder if this acceptance will keep once the economics changes?
- joonix 13y agoPeople do this in America. Mexican immigrants namely. I see it for myself. They know how to live well on low incomes.
- angersock 13y agoSo, I've done some flavor of this for the past several years. To make it work, houses are better than apartments. More than 4 people is too much, and you really need to trust and respect the other folks you live with. You also need to be able to not sweat the little things--having people ask if they need to pick up an extra X when they go to the grocery store is handy. Living close to a grocery store (within walking distance) is even handier. Also, you need to not be messy party folks--your landlord is much more likely to give you an easy time if they don't see evidence of this. Talk to your landlord semi-frequently to touch base and let them be secure in their investment.
- prostoalex 13y agoUS government tried to experiment with Soviet-style high density housing in the 1950s. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruitt%E2%80%93Igoe http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruitt%E2%80%93Igoe
- throwaway344 13y agoThis proposed collective of people who can help you when you need help in exchange for giving when you can, already exists in a the form of the welfare state. Your idea is functionally the idealized vision for how welfare works.
- bronxbomber92 13y agoThere are some places, I'm not sure how common but my guess would be "rather common", where it's illegal to have > x (where x is usually 2-4) amount of non-related people living in the same residence. This exists where I live (but it was recently put into effect about a year ago, so it hasn't yet been enforced).
- bcoates 13y agoDoesn't really work if you have a family, but roommates are pretty common in some parts of the US, across a wide span of income levels. Popular Southern California apartment listing company Westside Rentals has a whole roommate matching service, for example.
- alina24 13y agoMy experience may be an extreme one but the last apartment I shared,my flatmate would go for long periods without talking to me at all,only communicating by writing note after note,which sometimes was so odd as our rooms were right next to each other,we could easily hear the other person coming and going and would be easier,nicer(in my view)to actually talk. I felt that she wanted to believe she lived alone but couldn't handle the fact that both of us needed the other for the apartment sharing to really work.
- wolfgke 13y agoHaving read these articles, there's one thing that I don't appreciate: in these articles kids of poor people are mentioned. Why in the hell are these people "producing" children, if they aren't 100% certain that they'll be able to support them for the years until they are old enough to stand on their own feet? Strokes of fate that lead to poverty are one side, but the side is reproding if you are poor: I consider this as highly irresponsible - for you as for your children.
- pharrington 13y agoAre you sure you thought this post through?
- lod 13y ago"These people", "producing children". He doesn't see that these are humans. This is a result of a combination of logical, and irrational situations.
- murtali 13y agolack of access to contraceptives or family planning services?
- Raphmedia 13y agoThe answer is "love", you robots.
- wolfgke 13y agoDoes it really show love towards your partner, if you give him/her a big future financial burden? Also: does it show love towards the prospective child to give him birth into a family where it will suffer of the poverty?
- Aloha 13y agoPeople dont produce children, Humans have sex, make babies. We've been doing it for as long as humans have existed.
- pchristensen 13y agoThursday is John Cheese Day on Cracked. His stuff is great.
- vacri 13y agoThese were, without a doubt, the best articles that Cracked has put forth. I've never been in poverty, but I've seen it from a near distance. I've been poor, but if push came to shove, I always had a middle-class mother I could move back to. That's a 'safety net' that many in poverty simply do not have. And so it annoys the shit out of me that when a friend in finance got a $10k raise, all she could talk about was "but I lose half of it to the government!". In some strange world where 30% equals half, she's more concerned about what she lost than the fact that her gain was almost equal to a poor person's annual income. She couldn't even frame her payrise as a positive. I was discussing poverty with a colleague yesterday, as we were discussing the concept of Basic Income. I mentioned that when I was on welfare, it still wasn't quite enough to keep me fed and housed. His response was "then move house to where it's cheaper". My counter was "firstly, the point of 'social security' is to keep people socially secure, at least for short stints, which means not kicking them out of their homes for a handful of dollars". Secondly, of course, was the ignorance of the fact that moving house is expensive (fiscally and socially), from the hunt, to the security deposit, to the day of shifting furniture, to having utilities hooked up. Thirdly, if the point was to give me welfare in the short term until I get a job, moving house to where it's cheaper is going to make it harder to get a job. Discussing poverty is difficult, because unless you've been close to it, you won't understand the limitations of being in it. And conversely, if you're currently in it, it's hard to view it in a 'big picture' sense.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- sillysaurus2 13y agoAnd so it annoys the shit out of me that when a friend in finance got a $10k raise, all she could talk about was "but I lose half of it to the government!". In some strange world where 30% equals half, she's more concerned about what she lost than the fact that her gain was almost equal to a poor person's annual income. She couldn't even frame her payrise as a positive. There's more to life than feeling lucky we aren't in bad situations. I'd say ambition is more useful. A million dollars at 4% interest accrues $40k/yr, so in effect any millionaire is given 4x her raise every year just by doing nothing. That's not a bad thing. It's just a fact of life. But "you should be happy with what you have" is practically a recipe for sabotaging your ambition.
- mattmanser 13y agoOne of the articles is making a massive deal about 'afford[ing] those grocery trips' and 'burning shitloads of gas'. As someone who comes from a country where 'gas' is a shit load more expensive than the US because of tax I call utter bullshit. It costs about 20-40p to go to a supermarket, or at most a dollar in your US terms. Over here there's also a massive competition war going on at the moment between Tesco & Sainsbury's for local convenience stores which have a good percentage of your normal weekly shop if you were buying everything fresh. I suspect that mom just preferred to serve up frozen shit. And bullshit again on stuff like TV dinners being cheaper than other foods, they're certainly not over here in the UK. A simple chilli or bolognese is much cheaper if you buy the raw ingredients than any processed foods. I suspect the problem's more that Mom just doesn't know how to cook.
- teddyh 13y agoThings like grocery stores tend to be further away in the US, thereby costing more fuel to get to.
- msprague 13y agoFrom the data I've found, this is incorrect. The average US household spends 4% of it's pretax income on gas, whereas the average British household spends around 10% http://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.cfm?id=9831 http://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.cfm?id=9831 http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/cars/article-2127644/Worlds-expensive-petrol-hotspots-revealed-Norway-tops-charts--does-Britain-make-ten.html http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/cars/article-2127644/Worl...
- tsotha 13y agoThat may be true, but we're not talking about the average household.
- HarryRotha 13y agoThe nearest grocery store to my house is about 35 miles away. The nearest Sams Club (big discount grocer) is about 60 miles away.
- Sukotto 13y agoAlso "Being Poor" by John Scalzi http://whatever.scalzi.com/2005/09/03/being-poor/ http://whatever.scalzi.com/2005/09/03/being-poor/ I was deeply moved by that piece.
- buro9 13y agoNail on the head. I've never been able to explain my childhood satisfactorily (to me, to see the listener get it) to anyone. Less still why I made myself homeless and slept rough. But those three articles... at a certain point, throwing in your hand is the best thing you can do. At least you've broken the cycle and now have the freedom to figure out your way out.
- chiph 13y agoLast one about the politicians not understanding poor people -- it's the same reason as to why the TARP money all went to big corporations -- your Senator doesn't know any poor people or small business owners. He doesn't know any poor people, because he's more than likely rich (they have an average net worth of $10m) and has no reason to associate with them. And he doesn't know any small business owners because the US Capitol complex supplies everything he needs -- haircuts, dry cleaning, catering, car service. And the lobbyists that come to see him? Defense industry, insurance industry, agribusiness, etc. Not Jim's Handyman Services.
- erict19 13y agoI find the underlying behavioral economics fascinating - here's a good rundown: "Why Can’t More Poor People Escape Poverty?" http://www.newrepublic.com/article/environment-energy/89377/poverty-escape-psychology-self-control http://www.newrepublic.com/article/environment-energy/89377/...
- AsymetricCom 13y agoI get the feeling that our friends in marketing are already well aware of this type of psychology.
- hayksaakian 13y agoAnd in fact, it can be used to avoid targeting that demographic. Remove options that are specifically attractive to less wealthy / poor people and you increase the average wealthiness of your demographic
- jalayir 13y agoI've noticed this where I come from in India, in the feudal badlands of Awadh. We have a saying, "You think like a peasant". It means you lead a frightened existence, and you're completely risk-averse. The answer is a gradual gentrification of the populace accompanying industrialization, as Germany has achieved over the past hundred years. One aspect of gentrification is that the populace acquires a tremendous respect of and desire for education for learning's sake. This is rare in most countries, and it is the one thing about German culture that really stands out.
- jloughry 13y agoFrom the article: 'Imagine how bad our PhD student theses would be if we said, "It's year two. Course work is done. Come back in three years with a thesis, and if you want you could always come and ask me questions, but otherwise that's it. You're off." Of course it would be awful. That’s just too distant a deadline.' 'You realize you're describing the experience of 30 percent of all graduate students in the United States.' Ouch. That's just painful.
- alan_cx 13y agoAnd being rich doesn't? Is it the poor who have power to change things, or the rich? Which is the bigger group? The poor or the rich? If it is the poor, then isn't it relatively the rich who think differently?
- afterburner 13y ago"Is it the poor who have power to change things, or the rich?" Mostly the rich. That's the point. Laws get passed to service the wants of the rich, because they have orders of magnitude more influence. These laws then screw over the poor, but the rich can't properly sympathize because they just don't understand, because their world is so different.
- tsotha 13y agoI don't see any evidence "laws then screw over the poor". Exactly what are you talking about?
- ryoshu 13y ago"In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets, and steal loaves of bread."
- afterburner 13y agoDeregulation of the financial industry lets risk-hungry banks take ever greater risks, causes the financial crisis, costs taxpayer money, causes high unemployment, and leaves the rich back where they started before the crisis while the poor still suffer. Dismantling of welfare programs in order to cut costs in order to lower taxes on the rich stops critical services to the poor and keeps them trapped in poverty. Tax liens sold to rich investors lets them practically steal homes (or get them at bargain prices) and evict the owners in order to flip them off what are sometimes ridiculously small amounts of debt compared to the home value owed by the not-well-off (but not ridiculously small compared to their financial situation). And that's just off the top of my head... I'll give you a hint, most of the laws concerned are related in some way to cutting taxes or letting rich money play more (ie. make more money).
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- hosh 13y agoI really like this article. There are a lot of good insights I will be mining over the next several weeks. One interesting thing is how it connects with John Boyd's concept of OODA. Boyd talks about "stacking" the opposing force's OODA loop and injecting it with misinformation to get it going. It more or less describes, for example, the predatory loans. It's also interesting to see this kind of dynamic play out in the TV shows, Burn Notice and Leverage.
- unono 13y agoThe root cause of poverty is the incompetent government education system - The Teacher's Union. Most public school teachers I've come across have contempt for the businessmen (people who create the wealth) and for poor people (teachers tend to be limousine liberals). The first country or state to disband the current teaching system and replace with a competitive system will skyrocket to success. This is a no-brainer, but it's so to difficult implement because there's so many of the 'government handout' teachers voting they swamp the rest of us.
- reverius42 13y agoI would think in order to qualify as a "limousine liberal", you'd have to be able to afford a limousine. I think you'd more likely see a teacher driving one, to supplement their income.
- unono 13y agoBoo-hoo, teachers, who cannot clearly demonstrate how they actually add economic value to anything, want to be paid even more than their current $52,000 median salary. Meanwhile, fisherman, who hold the most dangerous job, have a median salary of $25,000. Firefighters, whose job is to enter dangerous buildings, $45,000. Fast food workers, $18,000.
- theorique 13y agoYou seriously don't see any economic value associated with the education of a child from age 6-18? We can argue about what specific subjects are best to teach in school, and what a teacher ought to be paid, but don't you think that, broadly speaking, educating children provides some economic benefit to a nation?
- unono 13y agoChild care workers who watch children when parents aren't present make $19,000, that's maybe more appropriate. http://www.bls.gov/ooh/personal-care-and-service/childcare-workers.htm http://www.bls.gov/ooh/personal-care-and-service/childcare-w... Where are the proper studies (with 1000s of participants) showing teachers can do a better job than babysitters who hand out an ipad with learning software to every student? The teaching system is a 19th system. It's like if the tech industry continued on with using telegraphs and morse code for everything.
- goggles99 13y agoBeing poor in America is a state of mind. Do you think that the majority of people in the world today would consider themselves "poor" if they suddenly traded places with a "poor" American? Do you think that the majority of people would think that it was "too hard to bear" if they had to work, live in low rent apartment AND go to school? America's poor are the worlds wealthiest. The sad state of mind that people fall into is all about relativism. They are poor relative to X people. They are disadvantages relative to X groups. They have to work harder than X people so this is suddenly an insurmountable feat. Put nearly ANY (truly) poor immigrant in the US and watch the magic work. Watch this insurmountable feat accomplished again and again. Watch this success propagate for a couple of the immigrant's generations. Then watch the values that they brought, the very reasons that made them succeed them washed away by American influence. I have seen this first hand on many many occasions. I would like to see a study of immigrants and how hard they work compared to the inner city people of America. I would like to see the difference in choices that they made. Why don't we see this. Why don't we see the government publish and advertise what poor people must do to escape poverty. Advertise how the immigrants do it without wellfare. You never see it (and probably never will).
- shalmanese 13y agoI asked a question on Quora that garnered a number of interesting replies to this question: http://www.quora.com/Poverty/Which-is-harder-being-poor-in-America-or-being-middle-class-in-the-developing-world?share=1 http://www.quora.com/Poverty/Which-is-harder-being-poor-in-A... The basic gist is that just looking at quantity of physical possessions is an impoverished way of analyzing the situation.
- qu4z-2 13y agoI think that way of looking at poverty is also very telling about the people doing the assessing.
- ap22213 13y ago"Being poor in America is a state of mind." Having spent most of my childhood living with my mom and my three siblings on her meager $8,000 / year income, I'd say I have to agree. Poor is a state of mind. But, I'll argue that it's not a state of mind that the poor take on themselves. "Poor" is a distinction that others will give to you, not the other way around. Being poor is about being relegated by the other members of society. It's about being isolated, segregated, and honestly, constantly dealing with all sorts of mean-spirited people who believe they could have made better decisions...obviously. Please try to imagine living a world where you're the lowest status person around, where the kids and adults look upon you in disgust. Imagine no support network, few friends, and a life void of most conveniences. Is it better than the poor of other countries? Maybe. I don't know. But, at least, I would hope that they have some sort of community. Being poor in America is about being alone and laughed at, while suffering.
- frank_boyd 13y ago1 thing we should keep in mind: Being rich is only possible when others are poor. "Being rich" is a relative situation: If you have privileges because you're rich, you're not likely to say "I'm going to downgrade my life so all the others can meet me at the same level (of privileges)". Why? Because, a little simplified: you wouldn't find anybody to take care of your garden anymore. No rich person really has a natural incentive to call for real equality. So, the idea that we're all born with the same rights is currently still just an idea and nothing more. It's not respected and implemented: "The Richest 10% of American Families Got Half of All Income Last Year." [0] And it's likely to get even worse (for the 90%, that is), as money has this natural polarizing/monopolizing effect. [0] http://www.theatlanticwire.com/politics/2013/09/richest-one-tenth-american-families-got-half-all-income-last-year/69260/ http://www.theatlanticwire.com/politics/2013/09/richest-one-...
- PeterisP 13y agoThe "wouldn't find anybody to take care of your garden anymore" approach isn't that valid today - just look at the lifestyles of rich people and compare them to earlier times. The "0.1%" are far more wealthy than ever before - however, they are not employing more people for their personal needs. Assistants, butlers, maids, chauffeurs, live-in nannies/governesses, dedicated gardeners, etc. are a very rare breed nowadays used by tiny numbers of ultra-rich, while a hundred years ago many "upper-middle" class specialists (doctors, lawyers, civil servants) employed other people for their personal needs. In fact, I'd say that it's entirely the opposite - the rich don't need or want the common people anymore, they can do almost without them; so they're not associating with them and not redistributing the wealth to "common laborers" by paying for their services, almost all of the wealth is invested in capital not in labor. So labor as such loses; the lower class would be better off being employed as gardeners rather than rotting without income, but they aren't. The top 5% can't afford them, and the top 0.1% need/want just a few.
- swalsh 13y agoMy Wife and I just bought a house, so the conversation about kids has come up. I guess i knew child care was expensive, but after talking to my coworkers it turns out they spend on average 20k a year (this is MA). That figure blows my mind. How can someone not on an engineers salary afford this?
- gregd 13y agoThere are a multitude of things that are expensive. You've hit upon one of the major ones. Unfortunately, you'll have to crunch the numbers if you wish to have children. It may be in your best financial interest for one of you to quit your job and stay home with the kids, at least until they start school. Yes, you'll be broke all the time, but damn if your kids won't benefit in the long run from it. This is what my wife and I had to do. We had our two kids two years apart. She quit a pretty good job to stay home and raise them because by the time it was all said and done, she would have brought home less than $1000/month after daycare for two children...one of which was a baby.
- guspe 13y agoMost of the comments here focus on poverty but the author is talking about a broader subject, he is talking about scarcity. Being poor is but one of the forms to experience scarcity. And this is a brilliant idea. What intrigues me is that poverty is essential to the dynamics of capitalism. Some are rich because some are poor. Modern capitalism operates on a very abstract layer and my basic comprehension of economics is not enough to understand how this relationship between rich and poor translates to modern times but I have I feeling it still holds true. That said, and here's an inconvenient idea, what if some are lonely because others have too many friends? In the same way the richness of some breeds the poverty of others, what if the abundance of some breeds the scarcity of others? I hope you understand this doesn't imply guilty on any side. It just hints at a somewhat cruel dynamics underlying the commodification of life. Doesn't it?