4 ms·

i grew up in a poor family around a lot of poor people. i'm not rich, but definitely out of the poor category. even as a child, i was amazed at the plethora o

by autokad 12y ago

i grew up in a poor family around a lot of poor people. i'm not rich, but definitely out of the poor category. even as a child, i was amazed at the plethora of bad decisions (or simple refusal to give important things a second thought) of the poor people around me, family included. an example was a couple years ago when i mentioned how wonderful it is that we can take free online classes from institutions like harvard, stanford, wharton, etc, and its absolutely free! how wonderful!! their response 'what do i get out of it'. its not just anecdotal either, numbers have shown that those that already have educations are the ones that are mostly uses these resources. for a very large amount of the poor, i feel its them, not 'us'. the opportunities are there, and america may have disadvantages for those not well off, but we certainly have more poor people than whats justified by those disadvantages. we created a system where people who are smart and ambitious can thrive. we also created many opportunities in that system, and those same people are the ones that take advantage of them. I think thats a huge part of this 'gap'. the 2nd part happens to be with the time that we are in. most of this 'wealth' has been either inflated up by the fed's massive additions to the money supply (which does only help the rich but it is fully implemented and endorsed by democrats) and annother reason for the gap is the internet barons of the present age. back in the late 1990s, bill gates was worth more than the bottom 50% of the country. if figures like that are still withstanding, how do you think its distorted now that we have brin/page, zuckerberg, bezos, etc etc?

TheOtherHobbes 12y ago
If you have no experience of good education, how are you supposed to know what good education can do for you? America used to have first-rate public schools. So did many other Western countries. A lot of the early computer pioneers from the late 40s to the late 60s came up through that system, and it's a fair bet that technology would have developed more slowly without it. But for some reason teaching the proles to think and improve themselves doesn't meet with universal approval, and public education now is much less generous than it used to be. At the same time there's been a constant propaganda onslaught from low-information media that shapes perceptions about what's interesting and important, and that media menu doesn't include learning cool stuff for fun or for profit. So people end up educationally damaged and demotivated for a reason. Pigeon-holing them as 'lazy and unmotivated' is a very lazy way to misunderstand what's happened to them.
crdoconnor 12y ago
Being poor renders it very difficult to think long term as the survival instinct kicks in. If you have to constantly worry about whether you can put food on the table and pay the electric bill tomorrow, you simply stop thinking about what happens next month. This instinct kicks in on such a low cognitive level that it's almost impossible to suppress. This makes it very easy to leech profits from the underclasses through payday loans. The profit is made at the point that the survival instinct programs them to ignore. This is why outright prohibition of payday loans usually has a positive impact on the financial wellbeing of the underclasses. Unfortunately, even the middle and upper classes who struggle with giving up smoking still look down on the set of people who take payday loans, thinking that their superior intelligence and good sense is what leads them to not be suckered. Empirical study on the effect of poverty on short term thinking: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/11/your-brain-on-poverty-why-poor-people-seem-to-make-bad-decisions/281780/ http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/11/your-bra... Study on the effect of banning payday loans on the financial health of the underclasses: http://www.federalreserve.gov/pubs/feds/2013/201381/201381pap.pdf http://www.federalreserve.gov/pubs/feds/2013/201381/201381pa...
- obvious_throw 12y ago
  In which upper-class HN tells someone who grew up poor how poor people think. And then downvotes the heretic, despite relevant, first-hand experience contribution to discussion. Nice.
  - ianmcgowan 12y ago
    I grew up in a poor family, and would say the downvotes are for stereotyping and gross generalizations I vehemently disagree with. That may be his story, but it's not mine.
  - LnxPrgr3 12y ago
    To be fair, first-hand anecdotes don't rank high as evidence. But, for what they are worth, I'll add my own. I am where I am today because my family had enough money to own a computer (and never threw out the old ones, so the kids got to mess with the cast-aways—my first program was for a Kaypro 2), because my brother's interest in programming inspired my own, and because I was able to spend years without adult responsibilities learning everything I could. That, and my parents fully supported every dive I took into every crazy interest. My parents kept books around and bought me toys to feed my interests—I had a chemistry set, an electronics kit, a violin, multiple microscopes, and access to books on subjects from photography to biology. I lived in nerd heaven… except for that bit where my parents expected me to clean my room. I was working on a hobby OS in high school (1) because I was smart and dedicated, but also (2) because I didn't really have much else to worry about. I had plenty to eat and a safe place to sleep. Eventually, I even had a dial-up Internet connection, so I wasn't stuck with the local library's computer books from the 80s. All this was straight-up handed to me in the hope I'd do something great with it. That advantage continues today. Because I have a stable job in middle-class territory, I can spend my free time on whatever crazy experiments I want. I do, and they continue to teach me things, even when the end result only 2 people on Earth actually care about. (Case in point: https://github.com/LnxPrgr3/crossfeed https://github.com/LnxPrgr3/crossfeed) I know people in rural Tennessee who see an Internet connection as an unnecessary luxury, and the first bill to be cut when money gets tight. I imagine my life would be dramatically different had I grown up there. Would I even know what I'd be missing?
MisterBastahrd 12y ago
Those wonderful online classes require a working computer and an internet connection to take them, and aren't worth the printer paper you print the results out on. Unless there's a reputable non-profit organization that can validate the results of those classes and make them worth recognizing, they create a bit of education for the consumer but are worth little in the working world. Udacity is much better than most MOOCs at this, given that most of them have a limited window for which you can submit projects for completion. My anecdote: I wanted to take classes from Coursera on data science, but I am the sole developer for a publisher and have worked 60-70 hour weeks during the time that they've published the classes due to a project crunch. I don't currently have time to keep up with the course material in order to complete the class satisfactorily. Now, you can rebut that somewhat by saying that we have free public resources in libraries to take advantage of, but when you're raising a kid and working a shift at the grocery store, you don't have much time to be in the library, most of which have very short hours on Saturdays and are closed on Sundays. What we need are cheaper computers and subsidized internet access.

by autokad 12y ago

TheOtherHobbes 12y ago

If you have no experience of good education, how are you supposed to know what good education can do for you? America used to have first-rate public schools. So did many other Western countries. A lot of the early computer pioneers from the late 40s to the late 60s came up through that system, and it's a fair bet that technology would have developed more slowly without it. But for some reason teaching the proles to think and improve themselves doesn't meet with universal approval, and public education now is much less generous than it used to be. At the same time there's been a constant propaganda onslaught from low-information media that shapes perceptions about what's interesting and important, and that media menu doesn't include learning cool stuff for fun or for profit. So people end up educationally damaged and demotivated for a reason. Pigeon-holing them as 'lazy and unmotivated' is a very lazy way to misunderstand what's happened to them.

crdoconnor 12y ago

Being poor renders it very difficult to think long term as the survival instinct kicks in. If you have to constantly worry about whether you can put food on the table and pay the electric bill tomorrow, you simply stop thinking about what happens next month. This instinct kicks in on such a low cognitive level that it's almost impossible to suppress. This makes it very easy to leech profits from the underclasses through payday loans. The profit is made at the point that the survival instinct programs them to ignore. This is why outright prohibition of payday loans usually has a positive impact on the financial wellbeing of the underclasses. Unfortunately, even the middle and upper classes who struggle with giving up smoking still look down on the set of people who take payday loans, thinking that their superior intelligence and good sense is what leads them to not be suckered. Empirical study on the effect of poverty on short term thinking: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/11/your-brain-on-poverty-why-poor-people-seem-to-make-bad-decisions/281780/ http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/11/your-bra... Study on the effect of banning payday loans on the financial health of the underclasses: http://www.federalreserve.gov/pubs/feds/2013/201381/201381pap.pdf http://www.federalreserve.gov/pubs/feds/2013/201381/201381pa...

obvious_throw 12y ago
In which upper-class HN tells someone who grew up poor how poor people think. And then downvotes the heretic, despite relevant, first-hand experience contribution to discussion. Nice.
- ianmcgowan 12y ago
  I grew up in a poor family, and would say the downvotes are for stereotyping and gross generalizations I vehemently disagree with. That may be his story, but it's not mine.
- LnxPrgr3 12y ago
  To be fair, first-hand anecdotes don't rank high as evidence. But, for what they are worth, I'll add my own. I am where I am today because my family had enough money to own a computer (and never threw out the old ones, so the kids got to mess with the cast-aways—my first program was for a Kaypro 2), because my brother's interest in programming inspired my own, and because I was able to spend years without adult responsibilities learning everything I could. That, and my parents fully supported every dive I took into every crazy interest. My parents kept books around and bought me toys to feed my interests—I had a chemistry set, an electronics kit, a violin, multiple microscopes, and access to books on subjects from photography to biology. I lived in nerd heaven… except for that bit where my parents expected me to clean my room. I was working on a hobby OS in high school (1) because I was smart and dedicated, but also (2) because I didn't really have much else to worry about. I had plenty to eat and a safe place to sleep. Eventually, I even had a dial-up Internet connection, so I wasn't stuck with the local library's computer books from the 80s. All this was straight-up handed to me in the hope I'd do something great with it. That advantage continues today. Because I have a stable job in middle-class territory, I can spend my free time on whatever crazy experiments I want. I do, and they continue to teach me things, even when the end result only 2 people on Earth actually care about. (Case in point: https://github.com/LnxPrgr3/crossfeed https://github.com/LnxPrgr3/crossfeed) I know people in rural Tennessee who see an Internet connection as an unnecessary luxury, and the first bill to be cut when money gets tight. I imagine my life would be dramatically different had I grown up there. Would I even know what I'd be missing?

MisterBastahrd 12y ago

Those wonderful online classes require a working computer and an internet connection to take them, and aren't worth the printer paper you print the results out on. Unless there's a reputable non-profit organization that can validate the results of those classes and make them worth recognizing, they create a bit of education for the consumer but are worth little in the working world. Udacity is much better than most MOOCs at this, given that most of them have a limited window for which you can submit projects for completion. My anecdote: I wanted to take classes from Coursera on data science, but I am the sole developer for a publisher and have worked 60-70 hour weeks during the time that they've published the classes due to a project crunch. I don't currently have time to keep up with the course material in order to complete the class satisfactorily. Now, you can rebut that somewhat by saying that we have free public resources in libraries to take advantage of, but when you're raising a kid and working a shift at the grocery store, you don't have much time to be in the library, most of which have very short hours on Saturdays and are closed on Sundays. What we need are cheaper computers and subsidized internet access.