11 ms·

No Money, No Time

193 points by aturek 12y ago

javajosh 12y ago
We are hackers, and for those of us with whom this article resonates, we can connect those with time but little money (e.g. teenagers looking for charities to contribute to) with the poor through technology. The teens could help with chores, maintenance, errands, filling out forms. Taking some of the time-pressure off might help them to get out of the cycle. I'm willing to build it if you are. Contact me.
- droopyEyelids 12y ago
  In my experience, in everything from going out to lunch to planning a camping trip to having a party to asking someone out to doing any work-- you have to do it, and yes let other people know you're doing it, but you have to be doing it regardless. Things generally don't work if you say "I'll do it if you agree to do it too."
  - javajosh 12y ago
    Nonsense. If I can't find someone to go to the movies with me, I probably won't go. I care about this issue, and am willing to work toward it - and it might even be fundable through grants, and other philanthropy. So I'd recommend contacting me if it interests you.
- zackmorris 12y ago
  I actually think this is one of the great problems of our time (how wealth inequality lowers productivity by suppressing people who might otherwise contribute to society) and have experienced it acutely at times. One of my mottos is that you can have money or time but not both, but if you do manage to achieve both, then you are in a position to change the world. I'm not sure I would quite take the matching approach you propose, but I've often thought that a better contracting service like fiverr (where people could make money quickly for the skills they truly excel at) could change the world by giving people alternatives to things like credit cards and payday loans. But there needs to be no little or no friction to make it feasible. Right now it's a PITA to make money through most of the online freelance sites because it's too hands-on, and technology doesn't do nearly enough. Anyway, just wanted to say hi because this is something that I would like to work on also.
fit2rule 12y ago
There's a saying, it goes like this: "its expensive being poor", and its really the truth. If you don't have enough money to buy in bulk, you end up paying way more for the smaller amount of product. If you can't afford to spend time on something because you have a limited number of calories before you become unproductive, and therefore have to work on aquiring more calories, then you're stuck in a feedback loop of no progress. And so it goes. This is why the truly rich (not necessarily wealthy) find pleasure in lifes' simple, cheap, offerings. It's almost impossible to find vegetables as good as the ones we grow in our home garden, but yet it takes on average 30 minutes of work every day to keep things in order .. finding that balance is what is key to moving from being poor to rich, in my opinion. The time not spent getting in the car to go grocery shopping is instead spent maintaining a well-ordered garden plot ..
- judk 12y ago
  Not really true. Buying in bulk is a minor savings that offsets the cost if a big car or big house or whatever. The core issue is that life has transaction costs on that the wealthier folks don't need to worry about, but a poor person faces catastrophic collapse by going over budget with no way to borrow against the future.
  - JASchilz 12y ago
    Could you give a few examples of these transaction costs?
    - OrwellianChild 12y ago
      A simple example is the concept of living paycheck to paycheck... If you work on contract or hourly and payment is delayed (either because there weren't enough hours to work or your client is slow to pay), one of two things happens: 1) You are wealthy enough to have credit and perhaps a bit of cash savings, and you can pay your bills with that savings/credit card. When your paycheck comes, you pay down the short-term credit and you are as good as if it never happens. 2) You have no credit and no savings. You must directly choose between which bills you can and cannot pay. Some bills go into default or incur late fees. Other bills may cancel service because you cannot be relied upon to pay. In this scenario, when the paycheck comes, you pay your late bills, but you are left with the extra fees, lost services, and are at a net-loss going into the next period. Compound scenario 2 for a few periods, and you start to incur heavily negative consequences that are very difficult to overcome.
yummyfajitas 12y ago
Strange that little correlation data is provided. Microdata is available from the BLS on what people spend time on, sliced by income and poverty. Checking whether poverty or low income are correlated with having little time should be a fairly straightforward python/pandas job. It seems unlikely that the money-poor are also time-poor (given that the main cause of money-poverty is not working), but it's straightforward to check in any case. http://www.bls.gov/tus/#data http://www.bls.gov/tus/#data If I have time tomorrow I may do it myself.
- Spooky23 12y ago
  Imagine: You're one of the lucky retail employees that work a full 40 hour week. Your annual gross salary is somewhere in the 24-30k range. That's not enough to support a 2br apartment and car, so you're relying on public transit. You work retail, so your hours suck and you're often stuck bumming rides or waiting for the bus, which only runs every half hour when the mall closes. When I was in college, I worked in a mall restaurant. That was a pretty common scenario for waitresses, line cooks, retail assistant managers, and similar roles.
- nilkn 12y ago
  > given that the main cause of money-poverty is not working Is that really true? I'm not sure if my girlfriend's family qualifies as truly poor, but they certainly don't have much money. Her dad has two jobs--line cook and hotel janitor--and her mom is also a line cook. They frequently have to go to check cashing places, they have only one car so her mom relies on taking the bus to work (which takes over an hour each way, and also requires walking to the bus stop), and they rarely if ever do things like run the AC in their house. They do live in a house as opposed to an apartment, but that's a relatively new development. The house is also in a somewhat sketchy area--for example, her brother was robbed at gunpoint walking through an adjacent neighborhood at 10PM.
  - nilkn 12y ago
    I wanted this to be an edit to the original post, but it looks like that post is locked into stone for now. I wanted to expand on the robbery incident and illustrate how something like that is potentially even worse than you'd expect. The reason he was walking through the neighborhood is because he doesn't have (and can't afford) a car, and he was walking back from work. They made the "mistake" of calling 911 to report the incident. He was mildly beaten up, and they were worried about potential injuries, so they sent an ambulance. It turns out he was completely okay, and they put on a few bandages and that was it. Then he was hit with a $3k bill. Her brother works part time at a minimum wage job while going to school. A random $3k bill out of the blue is really not affordable to him, so now he's on a payment plan paying off that debt. This is on top of the items that were actually stolen from him, like his phone, which he had to replace, and the general trauma of having been robbed.
sogen 12y ago
Another article in the increasing line of studies of the poor getting poorer. tl;dr: The poor are worse at managing time and money because they are exhausted all the time and have fewer/no options (i.e. costlier credits than the wealthy)
- yoshko 12y ago
  The good news is that 2pac is back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7900763 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7900763
beat 12y ago
The thing that frustrates me the most about this situation is the waste of human capital this represents for society. Now, I'm a firm believer that society is advanced mostly by a small minority of highly talented individuals - the intelligent, creative, charismatic, and hardworking few change the game for everyone else. Now, what happens when those rare talents are born into the cycle of poverty? What lessons do they learn? Too often, their talents just get them into trouble. They find themselves caught up in crime, addiction, and the other short-term thinking failures of poverty, and thus unable to express their talent. Worse, society simply expects nothing of them. They have no role models, and they have no external motivations to be and do better. Even those who can do better often simply escape, leaving the culture of their birth behind. Frankly, I did that. I was raised about one step above what southerners call "white trash". My father, a tremendously intelligent and charismatic man, was constantly lured by petty crime and get-rich-quick ideas, and wasted his life. His interactions with the wealthy men he worked for generated feelings not of admiration and example, but contempt. To this day, when I'm not sure what to do about a situation, I think of what he would have done, and do the opposite. And he took a big step up himself - I remember visiting my grandfather's farm in rural Kentucky as a child. I didn't notice the lack of electricity or running water at the time. I notice it now. My father escaped sharecropping, but he never escaped his own demons. I see the effects of those escapes now in my sister's life. She loves living in the rural south, but is constantly brought down by the ignorance and awful habits of her neighbors. Everyone in her area (southern Virginia) who has any brains simply moves away. What's left are the addicts, the fools, and the spiteful. Sure, it's beautiful there, but I don't see how she can stand living around people with so little ambition. I do, however, see how she suffers in poverty and hopelessness. Me, I got up and left. I made a good career for myself, living in a nice safe neighborhood in a beautiful city, making a good income in a safe field, raising my kids safe from the things that got me as a child. I can't imagine going back to that life. But oh, so many lost souls. So much talent put to waste in jail or in the grave. This is what we allow poverty to do to our society.
- judk 12y ago
  Pretty harsh. I'd bet the shirt you are wearing was made by a hard working person you consider not important enough to matter, yet worth taking a shirt from.
incision 12y ago
I'm glad to see a few studies bearing out the sort of things I perceived growing up. 'To him, the obvious conclusion is to radically change our thinking. “Just like you wouldn’t charge them $1,000 to fill out a form, you shouldn’t charge them $1,000 in cognitive complexity,” he says. One study found that if you offer help with filling out the Fafsa form, pickup goes up significantly.' I believe this is exactly the right sort of thinking. Finding ways to encourage and enable people to start moving gradually in order to build positive momentum. The "front loading" of forms, waiting lists and probationary periods are like mountains. Some people break themselves on the ascent, others spend themselves reaching the summit and have no energy to continue safely down the far side. These man made mountains need not remain arbitrarily steep.
- _delirium 12y ago
  As mostly an outside observer in both countries (fortunately), this is one of the big differences I see between the American and Danish welfare systems. The Danish one has a reputation for being much more generous, which is true to some extent, but is not as true in terms of throughput as it is in terms of latency. The Danish system does a lot of short-term "business": people get onto the system in a matter of days, use it for 6-12 months, then get off again. (By "the system" I mean a range of things: housing subsidy, retraining, cash welfare, mental-health treatment, etc.) Whereas the American one seems incapable of delivering anything with less than a 6-month waiting list, with an extremely bureaucratic and unfriendly process almost always serving as the gatekeeper.
  - incision 12y ago
    >'Whereas the American one seems incapable of delivering anything with less than a 6-month waiting list..' My family was on a wait list for housing assistance from the time I was a child until I dropped out of school and started working, making us ineligible. The list is currently closed and was last open over half a decade ago, for less than two weeks - like something out of a fantasy novel. >...with an extremely bureaucratic and unfriendly process almost always serving as the gatekeeper.' Well, there's a popular notion in the US that the process should be as difficult and unfriendly as possible - that people seeking public assistance are not just lazy, but living well. The 'welfare queen' [1] still haunts the system 40 years later. 1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welfare_queen http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welfare_queen
Mz 12y ago
I just wish that articles like this focused more on how to solve it. It's nice that it acknowledges the problem. But that is not enough. The end of the piece gives a small snippet of examples of what works. How do we start promoting things that do work? That really work? I think that does not get done in part because many people really do not want "the poor" to solve their problems. I do not understand why that is but there seems to be a hostile attitude towards poor people, as if being poor is evidence of lack of good morals or something and thus you deserve to suffer. But this doesn't just hurt people who are currently poor. It means anyone who falls down gets kicked while they are down so it becomes unlikely they can get back up. This is not a good paradigm for society. It hurts everyone.
- prawn 12y ago
  I don't think it's that people don't want "the poor" to solve their problems, but there isn't an immediate benefit for others to solve that problem for them. Many have their own problems (even if they aren't as series as those faced by others).
- xnerak 12y ago
  I recently finished reading the book mentioned in the article and in the book, they have a chapter focused on ways to improve the situation for people living in poverty. What I got from it was that programs to help poor people need to be tweaked to not tax their bandwidth as much and there is no real one size fits all solution. One example in the book is the computer skills programs that are often offered by employment services offices. These programs are usually several weeks long and build on knowledge from previous weeks. For someone who is struggling financially, attending these classes weekly could be difficult. You miss one class, and the next class makes no sense and you feel like you're wasting your time. The authors' suggestion is to restructure these classes to be more modular and allow people to attend these classes based on their schedules. I think it's not so much that people don't want the poor to solve their problems. It's that they don't want to make it easier for them. People feel that they themselves did just fine without all the benefits that the poor get, so why should we make it easier for them?
  - 12y ago
alexqgb 12y ago
Outside of the SV bubble, it's extraordinarily difficult to fail without seeing your credit take a serious hit. And boy howdy is getting back on your feet hard when you (a) can't get an apartment, and (b) find yourself getting screened out of otherwise available jobs. Forget getting money on loan, this is just getting access to the basics of economical survival - work to do and a place to sleep. The fact that we punish economic failure by making economic success even harder to achieve is evidence of the deep insanity within American culture. Sink or swim is a misnomer. Swim or be drowned is closer to the mark. So it's great that we're making technical progress on every front imaginable. But how many of these advances see their promise still born in a culture that pays more attention to recycling its trash than the people it discards on its streets? This winner-take-all/losers-get-ruin problem goes way beyond the business cycle. As Reuters noted a couple of years ago, entrepreneurship has been suffering a decades-long retreat. Having peaked in 1987, it's declined precipitously ever since. http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/05/02/us-usa-economy-businesses-idUSBRE84113G20120502 http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/05/02/us-usa-economy-bus... In just about every way imaginable, SV is the exception not the rule. For those who are young enough, smart enough, skilled enough, male enough, credentialed enough, connected enough, unencumbered enough, and possibly delusional enough it's great. But strike any one of those factors from the list, and watch the curve get steep. Start crossing off two or more and the odds on the lottery start looking good. Those are the odds that the rest of America sees. So it's no wonder they're backing further and further away from risk, regardless of the long-terms costs the country. Until this country has a social contract that's worth a damn, people are going to be very adverse to even the slightest setback. And for good reason. After all, there's a big difference between the kind of failure that can be chalked up "a valuable learning experience" and failure so catastrophically crushingly severe you never, ever, get back on your feet. There's a lot of that in America. It's where the Fear comes from. That's what drives most people. Not dreams of being one of the great or the good. Those are luxuries for the fortunate few. Most people just live in constant dread of being thrown in the street.
kimonos 12y ago
Great insights I see in here! Nice post!
jseliger 12y ago
I wrote about this in more detail here: http://blog.seliger.com/2014/06/15/talking-about-progressive-ideals-in-proposals-money-time-and-poverty-in-grant-writing/ http://blog.seliger.com/2014/06/15/talking-about-progressive... , but one underappreciated facet of this dynamic is the extent to which the infrastructure we've collectively put in place to help people financially and otherwise has an enormous time cost of its own. I do grant writing for nonprofit and public agencies. Virtually all federal, state, and local programs either mandate or imply that case managers must be hired or deployed. Each one of those people, and each one of their interactions, carries a cost. The situation is different from but still analogous to the one pg describes in "Makers Schedule, Managers Schedule": http://paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html http://paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html .
- ThrustVectoring 12y ago
  The time cost of welfare a big part of why I think an unconditional direct cash subsidy is a better plan than our current welfare system. The bureaucratic efficiency losses for both welfare recipients and grantors is more than enough to pay for expanding the recipient pool.
jqm 12y ago
This was a good article. The comments seem to focus mostly on the financial aspects but I found the portion regarding how time is spent interesting. (True, the article does tie them together to an extent). As far as financial poverty... my personal opinion is that "finance" is too widely regarded as an unalterable given that is intrinsic to the human condition. Certainly the concept of money has produced a system that has advanced human control over our environment, but a bit of perspective suggests it is a concept that we did without for tens of thousands of years. And, I suspect sometime in the future we will do without it again. Maybe not "poor people need money" but rather "hungry people need food" might be the type of larger and more directly useful framework to address some of these problems within. Certainly we are at the level we should be able to provide basic food, clothing and shelter to all members of our species and no one should suffer and die from want. If we aren't doing this, given what we have and what we can do, then there is something wrong with the system and this needs correcting before we will be able to move much further. IMHOP. Maybe the thing that got us here (the concept of money) is becoming a conceptual problem that is now keeping us from advancing further. I don't have a fix. I just see what I think is part of the problem.
gambiting 12y ago
>>It wasn’t that the poor participants were doing better; it was that the rich ones were doing worse. I reminds me of a sentence from a recent study of breastfeeding vs. formula milk - "It's not that natural milk is better for babies - it's that baby formula is worse for the babies".
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
harmonicon 12y ago
In a capitalist society, the key to "a good life" is passing a certain threshold of capital accumulation. The poor, not having much to begin with, has to constantly fight this uphill battle of trying to save more money, of finding more resources constantly, adding to their net worth, etc. This article shows that there is even an adverse psychological effect that makes reaching the goal still harder. All this seems to require big intervention of the governments part to level the playing field and make capital accumulation possible. Unfortunately in the US, one bad financial decision, one loss of job, one bad case of illness or one trouble at home can reset the pool to 0 and often negative due the extensive background and credit history checking. It is the US government's responsibility to fix this because we submit to its authority, fund its existence and elect its officials for the purpose of trusting it to steward our nation and its people. Sadly when I tune into the political discourse it's all about gun/abortion/tax/federal debt and whatever other kinds of "freedom". Why is helping people never and enhancing social mobility on the table. And I am so so tired of politicians parading education as the silver bullet.

193 points by aturek 12y ago

We are hackers, and for those of us with whom this article resonates, we can connect those with time but little money (e.g. teenagers looking for charities to contribute to) with the poor through technology. The teens could help with chores, maintenance, errands, filling out forms. Taking some of the time-pressure off might help them to get out of the cycle. I'm willing to build it if you are. Contact me.

droopyEyelids 12y ago
In my experience, in everything from going out to lunch to planning a camping trip to having a party to asking someone out to doing any work-- you have to do it, and yes let other people know you're doing it, but you have to be doing it regardless. Things generally don't work if you say "I'll do it if you agree to do it too."
- javajosh 12y ago
  Nonsense. If I can't find someone to go to the movies with me, I probably won't go. I care about this issue, and am willing to work toward it - and it might even be fundable through grants, and other philanthropy. So I'd recommend contacting me if it interests you.
zackmorris 12y ago
I actually think this is one of the great problems of our time (how wealth inequality lowers productivity by suppressing people who might otherwise contribute to society) and have experienced it acutely at times. One of my mottos is that you can have money or time but not both, but if you do manage to achieve both, then you are in a position to change the world. I'm not sure I would quite take the matching approach you propose, but I've often thought that a better contracting service like fiverr (where people could make money quickly for the skills they truly excel at) could change the world by giving people alternatives to things like credit cards and payday loans. But there needs to be no little or no friction to make it feasible. Right now it's a PITA to make money through most of the online freelance sites because it's too hands-on, and technology doesn't do nearly enough. Anyway, just wanted to say hi because this is something that I would like to work on also.

fit2rule 12y ago

There's a saying, it goes like this: "its expensive being poor", and its really the truth. If you don't have enough money to buy in bulk, you end up paying way more for the smaller amount of product. If you can't afford to spend time on something because you have a limited number of calories before you become unproductive, and therefore have to work on aquiring more calories, then you're stuck in a feedback loop of no progress. And so it goes. This is why the truly rich (not necessarily wealthy) find pleasure in lifes' simple, cheap, offerings. It's almost impossible to find vegetables as good as the ones we grow in our home garden, but yet it takes on average 30 minutes of work every day to keep things in order .. finding that balance is what is key to moving from being poor to rich, in my opinion. The time not spent getting in the car to go grocery shopping is instead spent maintaining a well-ordered garden plot ..

judk 12y ago
Not really true. Buying in bulk is a minor savings that offsets the cost if a big car or big house or whatever. The core issue is that life has transaction costs on that the wealthier folks don't need to worry about, but a poor person faces catastrophic collapse by going over budget with no way to borrow against the future.
- JASchilz 12y ago
  Could you give a few examples of these transaction costs?
  - OrwellianChild 12y ago
    A simple example is the concept of living paycheck to paycheck... If you work on contract or hourly and payment is delayed (either because there weren't enough hours to work or your client is slow to pay), one of two things happens: 1) You are wealthy enough to have credit and perhaps a bit of cash savings, and you can pay your bills with that savings/credit card. When your paycheck comes, you pay down the short-term credit and you are as good as if it never happens. 2) You have no credit and no savings. You must directly choose between which bills you can and cannot pay. Some bills go into default or incur late fees. Other bills may cancel service because you cannot be relied upon to pay. In this scenario, when the paycheck comes, you pay your late bills, but you are left with the extra fees, lost services, and are at a net-loss going into the next period. Compound scenario 2 for a few periods, and you start to incur heavily negative consequences that are very difficult to overcome.

yummyfajitas 12y ago

Strange that little correlation data is provided. Microdata is available from the BLS on what people spend time on, sliced by income and poverty. Checking whether poverty or low income are correlated with having little time should be a fairly straightforward python/pandas job. It seems unlikely that the money-poor are also time-poor (given that the main cause of money-poverty is not working), but it's straightforward to check in any case. http://www.bls.gov/tus/#data http://www.bls.gov/tus/#data If I have time tomorrow I may do it myself.

Spooky23 12y ago
Imagine: You're one of the lucky retail employees that work a full 40 hour week. Your annual gross salary is somewhere in the 24-30k range. That's not enough to support a 2br apartment and car, so you're relying on public transit. You work retail, so your hours suck and you're often stuck bumming rides or waiting for the bus, which only runs every half hour when the mall closes. When I was in college, I worked in a mall restaurant. That was a pretty common scenario for waitresses, line cooks, retail assistant managers, and similar roles.
nilkn 12y ago
> given that the main cause of money-poverty is not working Is that really true? I'm not sure if my girlfriend's family qualifies as truly poor, but they certainly don't have much money. Her dad has two jobs--line cook and hotel janitor--and her mom is also a line cook. They frequently have to go to check cashing places, they have only one car so her mom relies on taking the bus to work (which takes over an hour each way, and also requires walking to the bus stop), and they rarely if ever do things like run the AC in their house. They do live in a house as opposed to an apartment, but that's a relatively new development. The house is also in a somewhat sketchy area--for example, her brother was robbed at gunpoint walking through an adjacent neighborhood at 10PM.
- nilkn 12y ago
  I wanted this to be an edit to the original post, but it looks like that post is locked into stone for now. I wanted to expand on the robbery incident and illustrate how something like that is potentially even worse than you'd expect. The reason he was walking through the neighborhood is because he doesn't have (and can't afford) a car, and he was walking back from work. They made the "mistake" of calling 911 to report the incident. He was mildly beaten up, and they were worried about potential injuries, so they sent an ambulance. It turns out he was completely okay, and they put on a few bandages and that was it. Then he was hit with a $3k bill. Her brother works part time at a minimum wage job while going to school. A random $3k bill out of the blue is really not affordable to him, so now he's on a payment plan paying off that debt. This is on top of the items that were actually stolen from him, like his phone, which he had to replace, and the general trauma of having been robbed.

sogen 12y ago

Another article in the increasing line of studies of the poor getting poorer. tl;dr: The poor are worse at managing time and money because they are exhausted all the time and have fewer/no options (i.e. costlier credits than the wealthy)

yoshko 12y ago
The good news is that 2pac is back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7900763 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7900763

beat 12y ago

The thing that frustrates me the most about this situation is the waste of human capital this represents for society. Now, I'm a firm believer that society is advanced mostly by a small minority of highly talented individuals - the intelligent, creative, charismatic, and hardworking few change the game for everyone else. Now, what happens when those rare talents are born into the cycle of poverty? What lessons do they learn? Too often, their talents just get them into trouble. They find themselves caught up in crime, addiction, and the other short-term thinking failures of poverty, and thus unable to express their talent. Worse, society simply expects nothing of them. They have no role models, and they have no external motivations to be and do better. Even those who can do better often simply escape, leaving the culture of their birth behind. Frankly, I did that. I was raised about one step above what southerners call "white trash". My father, a tremendously intelligent and charismatic man, was constantly lured by petty crime and get-rich-quick ideas, and wasted his life. His interactions with the wealthy men he worked for generated feelings not of admiration and example, but contempt. To this day, when I'm not sure what to do about a situation, I think of what he would have done, and do the opposite. And he took a big step up himself - I remember visiting my grandfather's farm in rural Kentucky as a child. I didn't notice the lack of electricity or running water at the time. I notice it now. My father escaped sharecropping, but he never escaped his own demons. I see the effects of those escapes now in my sister's life. She loves living in the rural south, but is constantly brought down by the ignorance and awful habits of her neighbors. Everyone in her area (southern Virginia) who has any brains simply moves away. What's left are the addicts, the fools, and the spiteful. Sure, it's beautiful there, but I don't see how she can stand living around people with so little ambition. I do, however, see how she suffers in poverty and hopelessness. Me, I got up and left. I made a good career for myself, living in a nice safe neighborhood in a beautiful city, making a good income in a safe field, raising my kids safe from the things that got me as a child. I can't imagine going back to that life. But oh, so many lost souls. So much talent put to waste in jail or in the grave. This is what we allow poverty to do to our society.

judk 12y ago
Pretty harsh. I'd bet the shirt you are wearing was made by a hard working person you consider not important enough to matter, yet worth taking a shirt from.

incision 12y ago

I'm glad to see a few studies bearing out the sort of things I perceived growing up. 'To him, the obvious conclusion is to radically change our thinking. “Just like you wouldn’t charge them $1,000 to fill out a form, you shouldn’t charge them $1,000 in cognitive complexity,” he says. One study found that if you offer help with filling out the Fafsa form, pickup goes up significantly.' I believe this is exactly the right sort of thinking. Finding ways to encourage and enable people to start moving gradually in order to build positive momentum. The "front loading" of forms, waiting lists and probationary periods are like mountains. Some people break themselves on the ascent, others spend themselves reaching the summit and have no energy to continue safely down the far side. These man made mountains need not remain arbitrarily steep.

_delirium 12y ago
As mostly an outside observer in both countries (fortunately), this is one of the big differences I see between the American and Danish welfare systems. The Danish one has a reputation for being much more generous, which is true to some extent, but is not as true in terms of throughput as it is in terms of latency. The Danish system does a lot of short-term "business": people get onto the system in a matter of days, use it for 6-12 months, then get off again. (By "the system" I mean a range of things: housing subsidy, retraining, cash welfare, mental-health treatment, etc.) Whereas the American one seems incapable of delivering anything with less than a 6-month waiting list, with an extremely bureaucratic and unfriendly process almost always serving as the gatekeeper.
- incision 12y ago
  >'Whereas the American one seems incapable of delivering anything with less than a 6-month waiting list..' My family was on a wait list for housing assistance from the time I was a child until I dropped out of school and started working, making us ineligible. The list is currently closed and was last open over half a decade ago, for less than two weeks - like something out of a fantasy novel. >...with an extremely bureaucratic and unfriendly process almost always serving as the gatekeeper.' Well, there's a popular notion in the US that the process should be as difficult and unfriendly as possible - that people seeking public assistance are not just lazy, but living well. The 'welfare queen' [1] still haunts the system 40 years later. 1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welfare_queen http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welfare_queen

Mz 12y ago

I just wish that articles like this focused more on how to solve it. It's nice that it acknowledges the problem. But that is not enough. The end of the piece gives a small snippet of examples of what works. How do we start promoting things that do work? That really work? I think that does not get done in part because many people really do not want "the poor" to solve their problems. I do not understand why that is but there seems to be a hostile attitude towards poor people, as if being poor is evidence of lack of good morals or something and thus you deserve to suffer. But this doesn't just hurt people who are currently poor. It means anyone who falls down gets kicked while they are down so it becomes unlikely they can get back up. This is not a good paradigm for society. It hurts everyone.

prawn 12y ago
I don't think it's that people don't want "the poor" to solve their problems, but there isn't an immediate benefit for others to solve that problem for them. Many have their own problems (even if they aren't as series as those faced by others).
xnerak 12y ago
I recently finished reading the book mentioned in the article and in the book, they have a chapter focused on ways to improve the situation for people living in poverty. What I got from it was that programs to help poor people need to be tweaked to not tax their bandwidth as much and there is no real one size fits all solution. One example in the book is the computer skills programs that are often offered by employment services offices. These programs are usually several weeks long and build on knowledge from previous weeks. For someone who is struggling financially, attending these classes weekly could be difficult. You miss one class, and the next class makes no sense and you feel like you're wasting your time. The authors' suggestion is to restructure these classes to be more modular and allow people to attend these classes based on their schedules. I think it's not so much that people don't want the poor to solve their problems. It's that they don't want to make it easier for them. People feel that they themselves did just fine without all the benefits that the poor get, so why should we make it easier for them?
- 12y ago

alexqgb 12y ago

Outside of the SV bubble, it's extraordinarily difficult to fail without seeing your credit take a serious hit. And boy howdy is getting back on your feet hard when you (a) can't get an apartment, and (b) find yourself getting screened out of otherwise available jobs. Forget getting money on loan, this is just getting access to the basics of economical survival - work to do and a place to sleep. The fact that we punish economic failure by making economic success even harder to achieve is evidence of the deep insanity within American culture. Sink or swim is a misnomer. Swim or be drowned is closer to the mark. So it's great that we're making technical progress on every front imaginable. But how many of these advances see their promise still born in a culture that pays more attention to recycling its trash than the people it discards on its streets? This winner-take-all/losers-get-ruin problem goes way beyond the business cycle. As Reuters noted a couple of years ago, entrepreneurship has been suffering a decades-long retreat. Having peaked in 1987, it's declined precipitously ever since. http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/05/02/us-usa-economy-businesses-idUSBRE84113G20120502 http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/05/02/us-usa-economy-bus... In just about every way imaginable, SV is the exception not the rule. For those who are young enough, smart enough, skilled enough, male enough, credentialed enough, connected enough, unencumbered enough, and possibly delusional enough it's great. But strike any one of those factors from the list, and watch the curve get steep. Start crossing off two or more and the odds on the lottery start looking good. Those are the odds that the rest of America sees. So it's no wonder they're backing further and further away from risk, regardless of the long-terms costs the country. Until this country has a social contract that's worth a damn, people are going to be very adverse to even the slightest setback. And for good reason. After all, there's a big difference between the kind of failure that can be chalked up "a valuable learning experience" and failure so catastrophically crushingly severe you never, ever, get back on your feet. There's a lot of that in America. It's where the Fear comes from. That's what drives most people. Not dreams of being one of the great or the good. Those are luxuries for the fortunate few. Most people just live in constant dread of being thrown in the street.

kimonos 12y ago

Great insights I see in here! Nice post!

jseliger 12y ago

I wrote about this in more detail here: http://blog.seliger.com/2014/06/15/talking-about-progressive-ideals-in-proposals-money-time-and-poverty-in-grant-writing/ http://blog.seliger.com/2014/06/15/talking-about-progressive... , but one underappreciated facet of this dynamic is the extent to which the infrastructure we've collectively put in place to help people financially and otherwise has an enormous time cost of its own. I do grant writing for nonprofit and public agencies. Virtually all federal, state, and local programs either mandate or imply that case managers must be hired or deployed. Each one of those people, and each one of their interactions, carries a cost. The situation is different from but still analogous to the one pg describes in "Makers Schedule, Managers Schedule": http://paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html http://paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html .

ThrustVectoring 12y ago
The time cost of welfare a big part of why I think an unconditional direct cash subsidy is a better plan than our current welfare system. The bureaucratic efficiency losses for both welfare recipients and grantors is more than enough to pay for expanding the recipient pool.

jqm 12y ago

This was a good article. The comments seem to focus mostly on the financial aspects but I found the portion regarding how time is spent interesting. (True, the article does tie them together to an extent). As far as financial poverty... my personal opinion is that "finance" is too widely regarded as an unalterable given that is intrinsic to the human condition. Certainly the concept of money has produced a system that has advanced human control over our environment, but a bit of perspective suggests it is a concept that we did without for tens of thousands of years. And, I suspect sometime in the future we will do without it again. Maybe not "poor people need money" but rather "hungry people need food" might be the type of larger and more directly useful framework to address some of these problems within. Certainly we are at the level we should be able to provide basic food, clothing and shelter to all members of our species and no one should suffer and die from want. If we aren't doing this, given what we have and what we can do, then there is something wrong with the system and this needs correcting before we will be able to move much further. IMHOP. Maybe the thing that got us here (the concept of money) is becoming a conceptual problem that is now keeping us from advancing further. I don't have a fix. I just see what I think is part of the problem.

gambiting 12y ago

>>It wasn’t that the poor participants were doing better; it was that the rich ones were doing worse. I reminds me of a sentence from a recent study of breastfeeding vs. formula milk - "It's not that natural milk is better for babies - it's that baby formula is worse for the babies".

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harmonicon 12y ago

In a capitalist society, the key to "a good life" is passing a certain threshold of capital accumulation. The poor, not having much to begin with, has to constantly fight this uphill battle of trying to save more money, of finding more resources constantly, adding to their net worth, etc. This article shows that there is even an adverse psychological effect that makes reaching the goal still harder. All this seems to require big intervention of the governments part to level the playing field and make capital accumulation possible. Unfortunately in the US, one bad financial decision, one loss of job, one bad case of illness or one trouble at home can reset the pool to 0 and often negative due the extensive background and credit history checking. It is the US government's responsibility to fix this because we submit to its authority, fund its existence and elect its officials for the purpose of trusting it to steward our nation and its people. Sadly when I tune into the political discourse it's all about gun/abortion/tax/federal debt and whatever other kinds of "freedom". Why is helping people never and enhancing social mobility on the table. And I am so so tired of politicians parading education as the silver bullet.