7 ms·

Poor decision making skills? I don't think you understand what it is to be poor. People are more rational than you think - when people experience long term prob

by taurath 11y ago

Poor decision making skills? I don't think you understand what it is to be poor. People are more rational than you think - when people experience long term problems and generally a very inconsistent world (food/money/resources come by sporadically), they make decisions that help them in the short term, because to their experience there is unlikely to be a long term. If someone below the poverty line wins $10,0000 in the lottery they'll buy a few luxuries, spend a lot of money on short term things for a little while and then go right back to being poor. If you tell them they'll get $10,000 for the next 4 years no matter what they do, I'll bet their attitudes change. What people need to make rational decisions is to be able to develop confidence that tomorrow will not be another disaster - of course, that is a much more difficult thing. As long as we continue this meme that people that are poor have poor character poverty will be allowed to continue and fester.

pdeuchler 11y ago
>>> "they make decisions that help them in the short term, because to their experience there is unlikely to be a long term." This is also known as "poor decision making skills". Granted, it's very understandable in many situations, but let's call a spade a spade
- Frondo 11y ago
  What? How is acting rationally given your past life experience "poor decision making"? If you don't have money to spare, and then one month you get a windfall and do, it's absolutely rational to assume (and consequently base your decisions on) that you'll go back to the former state.
  - pdeuchler 11y ago
    Because they're not actually acting rationally? Semantically correct logic built upon false assumptions is still fundamentally incorrect. You seem to be caught in a circular argument... the poor can't help that they're poor because, well, they're poor!
    - mixonic 11y ago
      > the poor can't help that they're poor because, well, they're poor! exactly :-)
    - DiabloD3 11y ago
      As a poor person myself, who grew up poor, and am still quite poor (although less poor than I used to be).... That is exactly what it is. Poor people are poor because we are poor. We see rich people making money on the stock market, and wish we could, but we have no excess money to do that with. We see rich people upgrading their homes and their cars and their whatevers to be more energy efficient, but when our car breaks down and can't be repaired, we buy whatever car we can afford, not whatever car would have the lowest TCO per mile. Or hell, anything that has a calculable TCO, usually the most efficient TCO-wise has a very large initial investment... poor people can't afford that, thus we are punished, literally, because we are poor. Like, a few days ago, I finally ran out of my strategic supply of incandescent bulbs. I can't have CFLs in my house because they tend to give me headaches, and they make everything look like shit anyways; but for the past decade, LED lighting has been absolutely too expensive. I basically fought with myself for 3 days over finally spending $75 to upgrade sixteen 40 watt bulbs and seven 60 watt bulbs. Power efficiency wise, trying to estimate my average usage as best as possible, it is going to take 2.7 years for for those bulbs to pay for themselves (I use the lights very little, but our power prices are very high)... sometimes I wonder if I'm going to survive the month, let alone 2.7 years. Hell, I'm trying to grow food in my backyard just to try to get better vegetables cheaper: the farmers market around here is pretty bad, and what little local vegetables we grow are sold out of state, while most of what is on store shelves is either from California or out of the country, and often half-rotten. The people who eat pre-packaged frozen garbage all the time, or eat at McDs and KFC all the time, and become massively overweight and generally suffer from health problems (which also punishes us because we're poor, thus making us even poorer) eat that way because at least it isn't half rotten garbage being sold as fresh vegetables. My fellow poor people around here think I'm insane for going Paleo, such as getting rid of cheap sources of carbs (such as breads and pastas and refined sugars), and eating more fresh vegetables (organic brands tend to actually not be rotten garbage; yet another punishment for being poor), and eating more healthy fat and protein sources (such as better cuts of real meat instead of eating chicken or really bad cuts of pork, or processed shit like hot dogs or whatever)... ... and that choice of mine? Sure, I'm not going to die of being overweight now. I had pre-Diabetus, it's gone. I used to weigh 340 pounds (I'm 6'0"), now I weigh 190ish. I went from that 340 to 214 in exactly a year. I did this with diet modification alone. I lost all that weight? Punished by being forced to buy new clothes. Punished by being shunned by fatter people who basically hate me because I chose to become skinny and make better choices about my diet because somehow I'm better than them (as if that thought process even begins to make sense). Punished by having an even larger chunk of my budget eaten up my better diet. Now, back to the garden? Sure, if I can put a little bit of work in, and get a fresh source of vegetables, that'd be great: the soil is apparently so bad that it may take years of adding nutrients and fertilizer and other organic material back to the soil to get it to grow a good crop. What I've already put into the soil? Cost money. What I will put into the soil in the future? Costs money. When will I see a return on that investment? Never is still a possibility, I have not ruled it out yet. So yes, being poor is a punishment for being poor, and the punishment for being guilty of the crime of being poor is being poor. Its a never ending loop of bullshit that is very hard to climb out of. Want to fix society? Give everyone their basic needs so they can go focus on actually being productive members of society, and THEY BECOME PRODUCTIVE MEMBERS OF SOCIETY. Treat people like how you want them to behave, AND THEY BECOME THAT PERSON. I have no clue why the hell so many people have problems with what is basically Psychology 101. None of this is new, but we keep rediscovering it every few years as if it is some magical new tablet handed down from Mount Sinai with brand new information on it.
  - Veratyr 11y ago
    Because assuming you'll go back to the former state means that you've decided you're unable to learn. If you live your life a certain way and it ends up with you being homeless or poor, sure, living life that same way will end up with you being homeless or poor again. Now if you learn (that blob of grey matter in your head is great at this by the way) from your past mistakes, there's a chance you can avoid that. Let's say I'm a homeless guy who ended up being homeless because I lived far far above my means and gambled away my savings. I suddenly get a $10000 from a lottery ticket I found in the street. I could immediately buy a suit, rent a car and go stay in a hotel and live the high life for all of 2 weeks. I could go to a casino and get that glorious rush I remembered so fondly for a few hours. And then I'm back on the street. Or I could learn from my mistakes and go buy a nice cheap business casual outfit ($100), pay upfront for a room with housemates/students for a few months (6 months - $300/month in a cheap area = $1800), buy a cheap prepaid phone ($80), car ($2000) and couple of weeks gas ($100) then put together a resume and start looking at jobs. If I'm not an appealing worker, I can potentially go to community college for a few months and get qualified doing something useful while also getting federal aid. I'll have around $5920 left over so I'll allocate $920 for a few sets of clothes and general things that a human being needs and put the other $5000 either in the bank or into education.
    - Frondo 11y ago
      This hypothetical sounds so divorced from reality, it's kind of tough to imagine that anyone would think of it as reflective of poor people's reality. I'm saying, if you're living on $800 a month, and you get that sweet, sweet EITC money, you're going to use it to buy a new sofa, since your brother puked all over your sofa one night and you could never really get the smell out, and get all your bills current. You might say that the stink of puke is worth putting up with, and the hypothetical poor person should pay for two credits of an associate's degree at the community college instead, which, ok, education is great, but the real reality is that for a lot of people, it's just not possible to work harder or earn your way out of poverty. Not because of bad choices (e.g. living high on the hog from their magic $10,000 lottery ticket), but because low-end jobs in this country are unlivable and there's a whole cottage industry built up around screwing the poor with extra fees on every transaction they face throughout the day. The solution isn't to tell poor people to put up with the puke smell and work their way through a 20-year associate's degree two credits at a time, so they can make 30c more. The solution is to make the economy work for them, as well as it works for those of us posting here.
- clavalle 11y ago
  No, it is making decisions based on information you aren't considering. Poor people are making economic decisions not to come out ahead but to mitigate their losses. They aren't doing this because they want to, it is because it is the best decision they can make given their constraints. For example, they can either sell their time for minimum wage, far less than the value they create, or they can starve or go homeless. The person they are selling their time to knows that the alternative to taking the deal on the table is pain or death -- that the poor person cannot walk away from the bargaining table without making themselves worse off. So they are free to ignore the value those people create and, instead, offer the least amount possible for the poor person to avoid the fate they'd suffer if the walk away from the deal. In a word, exploitation. So, the poor person makes a deal that looks terrible to people who have the luxury of being able to walk away from a potential trade with no loss. People that must be enticed, that must leave the table with more than they brought, people who are on an upward spiral, who do not generally have to make a deal or face loss. People who are used to all parties leaving the table with more value. They are, as much as any human can, making the best decisions they can in their situation. Are there people that are simply too dumb to figure out what is best for themselves? Yes, but that number isn't anywhere close to the 45 million people we have living below the poverty line in the US.
  - csentropy 11y ago
    Minimum wage is an artifact of economic folly. If you are voluntarily selling your labor, it means that you are getting the best value for it. If you could get more for your labor, you would. If no one else wants your labor, it means that the price you get is the most for your labor. It does not mean that that is all you will "ever" get. It just means that is all you can get until you can figure out a way to be more productive and be paid more for your labor.
    - dragonwriter 11y ago
      > If you are voluntarily selling your labor, it means that you are getting the best value for it. If you assume (as do most Econ 101 models) that humans are pure rational actors in the sense of the rational choice model, which there is considerable empirical evidence that they are not. And also assume that the market for purchase of the kind of labor that the subject is selling is perfectly competitive on the buyer-of-labor side, rather than distorted by monopsony or oligopsony (which may be more frequently true than the former assumption -- though subtle collusion make it false even when it seems to be true superficially -- but certainly is not universally true.) [The second condition is necessary because if it fails, minimum price regulation will change the best price, since in the absence of competition, the purchaser of labor can do so at artificially depressed prices.]
- rue 11y ago
  No; and if I have the time I’ll find an article… but basically poverty is a state that worsens decision making skills. It’s a chronic crisis, a chronic stressor, and it affects the way people think. Short-term infusion of money will probably be blown on what you might consider to be frivolities because of this reason. There are exceptions, to be sure, and plenty of ignorance about good decisions… but “poor decision making skills” is at best a crass, misleading oversimplification. (Most dangerously it’s intentionally used to mislead.)
lliamander 11y ago
ianferrel is not perpetuating the meme that poor people are poor because they lack decision making skills. He acknowledges that there are poor people with good decision making skills, and that giving them money will help them. Pointing out that fools impoverish themselves is not the same as saying that all impoverished people are fools.
- JupiterMoon 11y ago
  He is perpetuating the meme of the deserving and the undeserving poor though... EDIT source http://lmgtfy.com/?q=deserving+and+the+undeserving+poor http://lmgtfy.com/?q=deserving+and+the+undeserving+poor
  - lliamander 11y ago
    I don't presume to speak on his behalf, but from what I can tell, he is saying that some poor are helped by direct cash payments, and some are not. How does that lead to a distinction of deserving/undeserving? I guess my question is, what do you mean by deserving/undeserving? Deserving of what?
    - JupiterMoon 11y ago
      The concept of the deserving and undeserving poor is an old (Victorian times) concept in the UK. It relates to the idea that some people are poor because they are feckless and lazy (the undeserving), whilst others are poor due to circumstances beyond their control (the deserving). The links from google in my earlier post should be sufficient to explain further details.
      - lliamander 11y ago
        Citing a google search is a bit lame. Suffice it to say that I am familiar with the concept (hint: it is a lot older than Victorian England) and that I am asking you to defend your statement about ianferrel's comment. So again, what do you mean by "deserving"? What do the poor deserve that (in your interpretation) ianferrel claims they do not? It is one thing to say that some peoples' poverty is the result of their bad decision making skills. It is another to say that cash payments are not an effective form of assistance for such people. It is something else altogether to say that we should throw such people to the wolves. Do you acknowledge these distinctions, or do you think they are insignificant?
csentropy 11y ago
Some people who remain poor do have poor character. Some people who are poor are so because of hard luck. It is extremely impolite to say it but it is true. Not that it should prevent you from helping any of them. Your hypothetical example is irrelevant because rationally, they should save the money for a rainy day, if they know that every day is not going to be as bountiful as this one. And try to leverage that to elevate themselves out of poverty. I saw this in lot in the third world. But many other people (both there and the west) lack it. Acknowledging that fact is the cause of the problem? Thats just silly.
Shorel 11y ago
And you don't understand what it is to be poor either. I live in a country (Colombia) where plenty of men waste their paychecks in beer. I see it every month. Less now than when I was younger, but still. It has made the beer company very rich and profitable, but I can assure those were not good decisions made by the men, and it was not the fault of the government. What happens when someone doesn't want to fit in to that mold? Their own friends call them cheap, not so close friends try to con them from their savings, and general people think of them of 'the bourgeois who we have to steal from'. There are polls where people in Colombia are self-described as 'one of the happiest in the world'. It's actually 'we have to pretend to be happy' just to fit in society. And that involves wasting paychecks in booze with friends and/or family. Think about people in NY pretending to be rich. It's the same here, but the pretension is: we-party-more-than-anyone. I even remember when parties had to be until 6am or even 11am of the next day to be considered 'normal' and not a failure. And all this has the consequence of most people having no savings at all.

by taurath 11y ago

pdeuchler 11y ago

>>> "they make decisions that help them in the short term, because to their experience there is unlikely to be a long term." This is also known as "poor decision making skills". Granted, it's very understandable in many situations, but let's call a spade a spade

Frondo 11y ago
What? How is acting rationally given your past life experience "poor decision making"? If you don't have money to spare, and then one month you get a windfall and do, it's absolutely rational to assume (and consequently base your decisions on) that you'll go back to the former state.
- pdeuchler 11y ago
  Because they're not actually acting rationally? Semantically correct logic built upon false assumptions is still fundamentally incorrect. You seem to be caught in a circular argument... the poor can't help that they're poor because, well, they're poor!
  - mixonic 11y ago
    > the poor can't help that they're poor because, well, they're poor! exactly :-)
  - DiabloD3 11y ago
    As a poor person myself, who grew up poor, and am still quite poor (although less poor than I used to be).... That is exactly what it is. Poor people are poor because we are poor. We see rich people making money on the stock market, and wish we could, but we have no excess money to do that with. We see rich people upgrading their homes and their cars and their whatevers to be more energy efficient, but when our car breaks down and can't be repaired, we buy whatever car we can afford, not whatever car would have the lowest TCO per mile. Or hell, anything that has a calculable TCO, usually the most efficient TCO-wise has a very large initial investment... poor people can't afford that, thus we are punished, literally, because we are poor. Like, a few days ago, I finally ran out of my strategic supply of incandescent bulbs. I can't have CFLs in my house because they tend to give me headaches, and they make everything look like shit anyways; but for the past decade, LED lighting has been absolutely too expensive. I basically fought with myself for 3 days over finally spending $75 to upgrade sixteen 40 watt bulbs and seven 60 watt bulbs. Power efficiency wise, trying to estimate my average usage as best as possible, it is going to take 2.7 years for for those bulbs to pay for themselves (I use the lights very little, but our power prices are very high)... sometimes I wonder if I'm going to survive the month, let alone 2.7 years. Hell, I'm trying to grow food in my backyard just to try to get better vegetables cheaper: the farmers market around here is pretty bad, and what little local vegetables we grow are sold out of state, while most of what is on store shelves is either from California or out of the country, and often half-rotten. The people who eat pre-packaged frozen garbage all the time, or eat at McDs and KFC all the time, and become massively overweight and generally suffer from health problems (which also punishes us because we're poor, thus making us even poorer) eat that way because at least it isn't half rotten garbage being sold as fresh vegetables. My fellow poor people around here think I'm insane for going Paleo, such as getting rid of cheap sources of carbs (such as breads and pastas and refined sugars), and eating more fresh vegetables (organic brands tend to actually not be rotten garbage; yet another punishment for being poor), and eating more healthy fat and protein sources (such as better cuts of real meat instead of eating chicken or really bad cuts of pork, or processed shit like hot dogs or whatever)... ... and that choice of mine? Sure, I'm not going to die of being overweight now. I had pre-Diabetus, it's gone. I used to weigh 340 pounds (I'm 6'0"), now I weigh 190ish. I went from that 340 to 214 in exactly a year. I did this with diet modification alone. I lost all that weight? Punished by being forced to buy new clothes. Punished by being shunned by fatter people who basically hate me because I chose to become skinny and make better choices about my diet because somehow I'm better than them (as if that thought process even begins to make sense). Punished by having an even larger chunk of my budget eaten up my better diet. Now, back to the garden? Sure, if I can put a little bit of work in, and get a fresh source of vegetables, that'd be great: the soil is apparently so bad that it may take years of adding nutrients and fertilizer and other organic material back to the soil to get it to grow a good crop. What I've already put into the soil? Cost money. What I will put into the soil in the future? Costs money. When will I see a return on that investment? Never is still a possibility, I have not ruled it out yet. So yes, being poor is a punishment for being poor, and the punishment for being guilty of the crime of being poor is being poor. Its a never ending loop of bullshit that is very hard to climb out of. Want to fix society? Give everyone their basic needs so they can go focus on actually being productive members of society, and THEY BECOME PRODUCTIVE MEMBERS OF SOCIETY. Treat people like how you want them to behave, AND THEY BECOME THAT PERSON. I have no clue why the hell so many people have problems with what is basically Psychology 101. None of this is new, but we keep rediscovering it every few years as if it is some magical new tablet handed down from Mount Sinai with brand new information on it.
- Veratyr 11y ago
  Because assuming you'll go back to the former state means that you've decided you're unable to learn. If you live your life a certain way and it ends up with you being homeless or poor, sure, living life that same way will end up with you being homeless or poor again. Now if you learn (that blob of grey matter in your head is great at this by the way) from your past mistakes, there's a chance you can avoid that. Let's say I'm a homeless guy who ended up being homeless because I lived far far above my means and gambled away my savings. I suddenly get a $10000 from a lottery ticket I found in the street. I could immediately buy a suit, rent a car and go stay in a hotel and live the high life for all of 2 weeks. I could go to a casino and get that glorious rush I remembered so fondly for a few hours. And then I'm back on the street. Or I could learn from my mistakes and go buy a nice cheap business casual outfit ($100), pay upfront for a room with housemates/students for a few months (6 months - $300/month in a cheap area = $1800), buy a cheap prepaid phone ($80), car ($2000) and couple of weeks gas ($100) then put together a resume and start looking at jobs. If I'm not an appealing worker, I can potentially go to community college for a few months and get qualified doing something useful while also getting federal aid. I'll have around $5920 left over so I'll allocate $920 for a few sets of clothes and general things that a human being needs and put the other $5000 either in the bank or into education.
  - Frondo 11y ago
    This hypothetical sounds so divorced from reality, it's kind of tough to imagine that anyone would think of it as reflective of poor people's reality. I'm saying, if you're living on $800 a month, and you get that sweet, sweet EITC money, you're going to use it to buy a new sofa, since your brother puked all over your sofa one night and you could never really get the smell out, and get all your bills current. You might say that the stink of puke is worth putting up with, and the hypothetical poor person should pay for two credits of an associate's degree at the community college instead, which, ok, education is great, but the real reality is that for a lot of people, it's just not possible to work harder or earn your way out of poverty. Not because of bad choices (e.g. living high on the hog from their magic $10,000 lottery ticket), but because low-end jobs in this country are unlivable and there's a whole cottage industry built up around screwing the poor with extra fees on every transaction they face throughout the day. The solution isn't to tell poor people to put up with the puke smell and work their way through a 20-year associate's degree two credits at a time, so they can make 30c more. The solution is to make the economy work for them, as well as it works for those of us posting here.
clavalle 11y ago
No, it is making decisions based on information you aren't considering. Poor people are making economic decisions not to come out ahead but to mitigate their losses. They aren't doing this because they want to, it is because it is the best decision they can make given their constraints. For example, they can either sell their time for minimum wage, far less than the value they create, or they can starve or go homeless. The person they are selling their time to knows that the alternative to taking the deal on the table is pain or death -- that the poor person cannot walk away from the bargaining table without making themselves worse off. So they are free to ignore the value those people create and, instead, offer the least amount possible for the poor person to avoid the fate they'd suffer if the walk away from the deal. In a word, exploitation. So, the poor person makes a deal that looks terrible to people who have the luxury of being able to walk away from a potential trade with no loss. People that must be enticed, that must leave the table with more than they brought, people who are on an upward spiral, who do not generally have to make a deal or face loss. People who are used to all parties leaving the table with more value. They are, as much as any human can, making the best decisions they can in their situation. Are there people that are simply too dumb to figure out what is best for themselves? Yes, but that number isn't anywhere close to the 45 million people we have living below the poverty line in the US.
- csentropy 11y ago
  Minimum wage is an artifact of economic folly. If you are voluntarily selling your labor, it means that you are getting the best value for it. If you could get more for your labor, you would. If no one else wants your labor, it means that the price you get is the most for your labor. It does not mean that that is all you will "ever" get. It just means that is all you can get until you can figure out a way to be more productive and be paid more for your labor.
  - dragonwriter 11y ago
    > If you are voluntarily selling your labor, it means that you are getting the best value for it. If you assume (as do most Econ 101 models) that humans are pure rational actors in the sense of the rational choice model, which there is considerable empirical evidence that they are not. And also assume that the market for purchase of the kind of labor that the subject is selling is perfectly competitive on the buyer-of-labor side, rather than distorted by monopsony or oligopsony (which may be more frequently true than the former assumption -- though subtle collusion make it false even when it seems to be true superficially -- but certainly is not universally true.) [The second condition is necessary because if it fails, minimum price regulation will change the best price, since in the absence of competition, the purchaser of labor can do so at artificially depressed prices.]
rue 11y ago
No; and if I have the time I’ll find an article… but basically poverty is a state that worsens decision making skills. It’s a chronic crisis, a chronic stressor, and it affects the way people think. Short-term infusion of money will probably be blown on what you might consider to be frivolities because of this reason. There are exceptions, to be sure, and plenty of ignorance about good decisions… but “poor decision making skills” is at best a crass, misleading oversimplification. (Most dangerously it’s intentionally used to mislead.)

lliamander 11y ago

ianferrel is not perpetuating the meme that poor people are poor because they lack decision making skills. He acknowledges that there are poor people with good decision making skills, and that giving them money will help them. Pointing out that fools impoverish themselves is not the same as saying that all impoverished people are fools.

JupiterMoon 11y ago
He is perpetuating the meme of the deserving and the undeserving poor though... EDIT source http://lmgtfy.com/?q=deserving+and+the+undeserving+poor http://lmgtfy.com/?q=deserving+and+the+undeserving+poor
- lliamander 11y ago
  I don't presume to speak on his behalf, but from what I can tell, he is saying that some poor are helped by direct cash payments, and some are not. How does that lead to a distinction of deserving/undeserving? I guess my question is, what do you mean by deserving/undeserving? Deserving of what?
  - JupiterMoon 11y ago
    The concept of the deserving and undeserving poor is an old (Victorian times) concept in the UK. It relates to the idea that some people are poor because they are feckless and lazy (the undeserving), whilst others are poor due to circumstances beyond their control (the deserving). The links from google in my earlier post should be sufficient to explain further details.
    - lliamander 11y ago
      Citing a google search is a bit lame. Suffice it to say that I am familiar with the concept (hint: it is a lot older than Victorian England) and that I am asking you to defend your statement about ianferrel's comment. So again, what do you mean by "deserving"? What do the poor deserve that (in your interpretation) ianferrel claims they do not? It is one thing to say that some peoples' poverty is the result of their bad decision making skills. It is another to say that cash payments are not an effective form of assistance for such people. It is something else altogether to say that we should throw such people to the wolves. Do you acknowledge these distinctions, or do you think they are insignificant?

csentropy 11y ago

Some people who remain poor do have poor character. Some people who are poor are so because of hard luck. It is extremely impolite to say it but it is true. Not that it should prevent you from helping any of them. Your hypothetical example is irrelevant because rationally, they should save the money for a rainy day, if they know that every day is not going to be as bountiful as this one. And try to leverage that to elevate themselves out of poverty. I saw this in lot in the third world. But many other people (both there and the west) lack it. Acknowledging that fact is the cause of the problem? Thats just silly.

Shorel 11y ago

And you don't understand what it is to be poor either. I live in a country (Colombia) where plenty of men waste their paychecks in beer. I see it every month. Less now than when I was younger, but still. It has made the beer company very rich and profitable, but I can assure those were not good decisions made by the men, and it was not the fault of the government. What happens when someone doesn't want to fit in to that mold? Their own friends call them cheap, not so close friends try to con them from their savings, and general people think of them of 'the bourgeois who we have to steal from'. There are polls where people in Colombia are self-described as 'one of the happiest in the world'. It's actually 'we have to pretend to be happy' just to fit in society. And that involves wasting paychecks in booze with friends and/or family. Think about people in NY pretending to be rich. It's the same here, but the pretension is: we-party-more-than-anyone. I even remember when parties had to be until 6am or even 11am of the next day to be considered 'normal' and not a failure. And all this has the consequence of most people having no savings at all.