Being truly poor is not being able to imagine anything else.
Both of my parents grew up with absolutely nothing.
My mother shared a bed with her sisters and wore nothing but hand-me-downs until she got married.
My father never had 3 meals in the same day until he joined the army.
They both tried to explain what life was like to us many times, but every story ended with, "Never mind. You just wouldn't understand."
They were so determined to escape their situations, almost every decision they made as adults was shaped by growing up with nothing. They worked hard almost every day of their lives so that none of us would ever have to experience what they went through. There was never any discussion or debate about what life would be like in our house: we were all going to finish high school, go to college, and build lives of our own. None of us has ever missed a meal or gone without anything essential.
I realize many people are just as determined as my parents were, but still don't escape poverty. There are no guarantees.
I just don't know how anyone can reverse the cycle without imagining that they can. Having no money is bad. Having no hope is worse.
This is so very true. I grew up sleeping 3 to a bed, no food, no clothing, and no utilities more often than not. I'd never wish it on my worst enemy's kids. But I would not trade my upbringing at all.
Thankfully that was long ago, but those memories give me the determination, and humility,that i need to advance myself each day.
This is similar to how my parents grew up. My mother shared a bed with all her sisters at one point, but as they got older I think they were forced to be 2 to one bed and 3 to another until the eldest married.
My dad didn't graduate highschool, he dropped out at 15 to start work and move out of his home (because they had more problems than a lack of money), literally at the first chance he got. He worked around to become a mechanic and eventually opened his own shop. He got into fuel injector programming, which got him a job at Ford, which when me and my brother were little meant we had 3 meals a day (literally sometimes 4), got almost everything we wanted but already had everything we needed. We had family vacations to places even my friends didn't get to go to.
I think what he taught me most was to not give up and just keep trying. He said he had over a dozen jobs in a half-dozen years while paying his way to get qualified as a mechanic. He's had 3 companies, all successful in their time before he moved on to bigger and better to get solidly middle-class from not even a working class upbringing.
My family migrated to Canada when I was 3 years old, my mom came with 60 cents in her pocket, my dad just a little more than that. One thing my Mom has that my Dad could not find was faith, and a hell of a lot. She always had faith that she could escape poverty, fast forward to the present, she now has a wonderful government job and she is well on her way to starting her own business. I can't say the same about my dad, he is still buying those $800 cars, living in shitty apartments and has been working at the same barber shop since we first came here. My parents split up about 7 - 8 years ago and to be honest, I was happy. My dad was bringing us down with his mentality, my mom has always sheltered me from it, so even though I was growing up in poverty, I never felt poor.
You can always leave. They're called feet: use them.
I have been very, very poor. And I've made a million bucks in a short amount of time. In fact, I've flopped back and forth about as many times as anybody I know, so I know both sides of this.
I would not idolize poverty as some kind of state of nobility, and I would't spend a lot of time agonizing over it either. It is a thing that happens to you, like cancer. You get to make choices in life, no matter where you are or what your situation. The last day of your life, if you were lying in a ditch somewhere, you can still choose how to confront the end of your existence. These choices are all we own. The only person that can stop you making choices is yourself. It is extremely possible to dwell on all the bad things in life and despair.
If you are poor and reading this, whatever you do, please don't despair. Make some different choices. The only way you're not making a difference in the world is if you've decided that you're not. Don't let others -- no matter how well meaning -- give that to you.
> You can always leave. They're called feet: use them.
I'm not sure. I've never been poor, so I can't speak from personal experience, but being poor is not necessarily about choice. Certainly I can start off rich, and make bad decisions. Perhaps that's my fault, perhaps I got unlucky. But if you start off in poverty, it's not easy, as I understand, to get yourself out of poverty. If you had a crap education, and a rough home life, you probably didn't leave school with good grades, so you can't get a decent job etc etc. There's a whole life-defining set of knock-on effects. And if you're trapped in debt, struggling to pay the rent and keep yourself warm, how easy is it to get out of that? If an opportunity does come along, will you have the cash to leverage it (think train ride to job interview).
I don't know how you got out of your fix, I'd be really interested to know.
How have you made a million bucks in a short amount of time?
I agree there are always options, the problem is knowing them. For example, I suppose at any time there is a stock I could buy for little money that would make me a millionaire over night. The problem is I don't know which one.
Of course other options are maybe simpler to judge than stock prospects, but the general problem still holds. In fact, if markets are efficient, wouldn't it imply that choosing anything in life is as difficult as picking the right stocks? Because making a choice (on actions) is an economical decision, hence it is subject to the efficient markets theorem.
Me too, man. That's a very compassionate and honest comment you just wrote. I tend to be shorter and less patient with people who self-pity, and especially people who come from more who treat poor people like helpless children. But I should be friendlier, more compassionate, less short tempered, more steadfastly guiding. Very nice comment by you - you managed to be patient and kind while still being strong and emphasizing responsibility and choice. I should emulate this, this was a great comment.
Let's be real though -- sometimes "shit happens." I'm not saying the majority of poor people are pure victims of circumstance, but there is also significant evidence that being poor and dealing with those struggles is permanently damaging to the human psyche. One has to look no further than an abused animal to see that this emotional baggage is a very deep part of the mind. It takes much longer to undo the damage than it does to inflict it.
You make a good point that poverty isn't something we should obsess over or try to make ourselves feel guilty about. If we are successful, we should feel good about that and have a healthy sense of empathy towards those that are less fortunate.
The key question, then, is whether you were _born and raised_ poor, or did you become poor in your later life. There is a ingrained mental barrier of hopelessness being born into poverty, especially in America where the cycle of poverty consumes communities and perpetuates all manner of things that are easily contested by people on the outside looking in, but is palpable to those trapped within it.
The difference, interestingly enough, can be found in a line in the song "Common People" by the English band Pulp, which follows the story of a rich girl who "slums it" with the poor narrator:
"But still you'll never get it right
cos when you're laid in bed at night
watching roaches climb the wall
if you just called your Dad, he could stop it all
You'll never live like common people"
I was born and raised poor. Like, picking cockroaches out of my cereal box poor. Like, magic block of cheese appearing on the doorstep poor. Like qualifying for free lunch at school poor. Like pink bicycle with sissy bar bought from the thrift shop and handed down from eldest daughter to two youngest sons poor (I broke the cycle of shame with black electrical and silver duct tape).
I never blamed my parents; they were immigrants fleeing an oppressive regime with nothing but a suitcase of hastily gathered clothes, papers, and photos. But, to say it's "just a thing that happens to you, like cancer" doesn't really speak to how stifling poverty can truly be.
My family pulled themselves out of the cycle, but millions don't. MOST don't. Getting out has less to do with "using your feet" and more like pulling an entire base of people out of a mindset that they can't succeed even if they tried their damndest. It's not only cultural, it's systemic.
"The only person that can stop you making choices is yourself.
Not always the case. My wife's family came to this country in 1978. Her father's job for the first five years was to mop the floors and clean toilets at schools, for which he was (legally) paid less than minimum wage because of his immigrant status. Then, the church that promised the family free admittance to their school in exchange for Dad's reduced salary rescinded it upon his offer to take ESL classes by day and cleaning the schools by night. So, he pulled them from that school and into public school, which, because of redistricting and rezoning, was among the poorest and most dangerous in their state. I guess it is about choices, but don't think there aren't people out there who disincentivize you from making them.
Hell, it wasn't that long ago that some people couldn't eat at the same counter equally as others. I mean, could you even make a clear-headed choice in that scenario?
Choices to pull oneself up from a cycle of poverty is as risky as entrepreneurship, perhaps even more so. If you fail at business, you have your firm footing of educational background and network of employees, peers, investors, and family to watch over you and give support. If you fail at pulling yourself from the ghetto, the next stop could be homelessness and the soup kitchen. And, if you have a family, they'll suffer doubly so.
You get to make choices in life, no matter where you are or what your situation.
Let's say there's been a rash of home invasions in a town, a criminal gang ripping people off, holding them at gun point, that sort of thing. Would you say that society shouldn't increase police protection because this is ultimately about the victims making good choices? What if the victims complain that the criminals need to brought to justice? Maybe the victims should be dusting for fingerprints, collecting evidence and investigating leads themselves, trying to recover their property themselves. If they can't, this just shows that they lack good morals and strong character traits like hard work and determination.
This is wrong because it doesn't matter whether you're a hard worker, you have the unconditional right to police protection and justice. We don't say that some groups of people are excluded from those rights because they haven't earned them - those are part of human dignity and you get them for free.
The argument that society ought to address poverty is argument about justice, that the suffering endured by the poor is a violation of their basic human dignity. When one of us is deprived of justice, all of us are deprived of justice, and the question of whether they can make choices to change their situation or whether they are morally worthy is irrelevant to this argument. The counter-argument is either that human dignity doesn't exist, or that the horrors and suffering endured by the majority of humanity so that a few can enjoy luxury doesn't constitute a deprivation of human dignity and justice.
> Being poor is discovering that that letter from Duke University, naming you as one of three advanced students in your class invited to test out of HS early into their scholarship program, is just so much firestarter because the $300 it costs to take the test may as well be $3 million.
Despair is finally realizing, at nearly 36 and with a barely-afforded AA in English from a community college, just where you could have been by now had you had $300, and what that missed opportunity has truly cost you.
>Being poor is a heater in only one room of the house.
No... this is being "poor", i.e. still in the top third or more of humanity as far as living standards.
Being poor is what the people I visited in barrios in Ecuador do - living in huts made of corrugated aluminum and scraps of wood, with a dirt floor, no plumbing or electricity, access to education, healthcare or clean water. Oh, and also having almost no way of changing your situation, no matter how hard you try. Surprisingly, these people were in general happier than well-off people in America, because they had a strong faith, strong families, strong relationships with others in their community, and were just plain tough.
I guess after visiting a third world country and seeing how hard the truly poor work every day, how much they care for what little they have, and how thankful they are for everything, I feel a little less sympathy for the "poor" in America. I wish they could spend a few weeks in a truly poor country, and then realize what an amazing land of opportunity they live in.
Edit: re-reading the nlavezzo's comment, it really isn't as dismissive as I had initially read it, and the reply below is more because this topic really touches a nerve for me. I'm leaving it here because I don't want it un-said, but I don't want to target someone who doesn't deserve it. Sorry.
This encompasses a lot of my reaction when I first read this article a few years back, and before I spent some time volunteering with charities in the US. I was, frankly, angry. Most of the time, being poor in the US is not a matter of sheer survival (except for health care), but simply a very deep hole which is hard to climb out of. But possible, right? So why not just do it?
But these days, this reaction is what really angers me. It's still a fucking deep hole. And the psychological effect of being raised in these circumstances is what doesn't get acknowledged a lot. A lot of the time you have to be taught that it's even possible to dig out of it, let alone how. This is especially true if you were raised in poverty, by parents who were also raised in poverty, in a place where the schools are a joke and you don't know anyone who has been successful. It's very easy to simply despair in these conditions, and not even realize it might be possible for things to change, because as far as you know it's not. And while the rare person might be able to summon the willpower to escape this, I'd like to know how many people truly think they could if they had never even seen what success looked like, except on TV.
Hell, I was raised in an area which was simply rural middle class, not poor by any definition; and almost no one there could imagine that good schools, good health care, or a substantially better life were in reach. The idea of attending any private university, let alone an Ivy, was a joke. And we were luckier than 99% of the world, and knew it! For some... I simply can't imagine.
The dismissive attitude exhibited in so many tech forums towards the poor is just infuriating, both in the "lazy poor" category and the "it's not as bad as elsewhere!" type. If you're in that situation, it doesn't matter that there's someone out there worse-off. What does matter is if you were brought up to think success isn't possible, you despair of making anything better, and you've lost hope. I won't argue back and forth about "handouts" because a lot of the time that's used to be dismissive too. But making it known that it's actually possible to have a better life--that is what needs to be done.
(Tangentially, it's worth pointing out that Scalzi acknowledges the difference between being poor in the US and in the Third World, as in his followup post here: http://whatever.scalzi.com/2005/09/04/quick-followups/ .)
It's an easy argument to make but it isn't quite that simple. I'm sure the poor of the US would love to take a trip abroad, then come back and realise things aren't so bad & make a start on getting themselves out of their situation.
Telling someone to be grateful that they have a roof over their head since most of the world doesn't won't make them any happier about shivering under a blanket because they can't pay the gas bill for heating. Yes, it could be worse, but it could also be a lot effing better, From my own experience, the whole thing tends to dull the mind to an extent where opportunities are no longer so obvious - or so easy to pursue (£5 for a domain name that may not pay off, or £5 to eat for a week and I'm bloody hungry).
True, absolute poverty is horrific and all efforts should be made to ensure that no one has to endure this through no fault of their own, but that doesn't make relative poverty a non-issue where people need to man-up. Of course, you weren't so extreme as to say that, but it gets side quite a lot and I don't really think it helps much tbh.
There's always someone worse off than you. There are people living in sub-saharan africa that would probably trade places with anyone in Ecuador given half a chance.
Being poor is miserable because you look around you, and see how other people have it better. Poor people in America don't see Ecuadorians living in shacks, they see people driving to their big house in a Lexus, and relaxing by taking a dip in the pool.
You're missing a big piece of the puzzle here, though.
In third world countries, there is an infrastructure to support expectations. You aren't the only poor person, there is direct feedback that "we're all in this together".
However, in the first world, there is a great amount of isolation that can be crippling. We have very fragmented communities, especially in the suburbs.
Poverty is real, and dismissing it because it doesn't seem as "legitimate" as some other place and different social context doesn't help anything. It's very naive to assume that because we've got access to "better tools" we should be grateful.
Read the Bell Curve. See how IQ is affecting the utility of the workforce in the United States. Imagine being born below the magical IQ to be effective in modern American society.
Imagine being useless to the world around you. Imagine waking up every day feeling hopeless.
Poverty has nothing to do with dirt huts. It has everything to do with feeling as though you can control the situation of your life. It has everything to do with not feeling like a net drain on the world.
This is why I don't like the article. Being poor in America means you might have to take a $8 an hour job working in a fast food restaurant flipping burgers. At least you get enough money to live off of (granted, living at a low standard), and all the junk food you can eat at work for half price. If you work there long enough you'll probably even get health care benefits. Being poor in another country means not even having the ability to find a job.
He is complaining about having heat in only one room of the house, when people in other countries don't even have 4 walls and a roof. In the US we have heating assistance that will pay your gas bill if you can't afford it. You just have to have 2 brain cells to rub together and enough literary skills to fill out a piece of paper and apply for it.
So the folks in the barrios live in makeshift shelters, assembled from whatever materials they have available; they have to worry about where they're going to get clean water and food from one day to the next, etc.
How is this any different from how all of humanity lived for millennia, up until about ten thousand years ago?
I don't mean to sound condescending or dismissive, I'm just wondering why more people don't see these circumstances as an opportunity to develop mature, self-reliant communities, and instead presume that some external catalyst is necessary to improve the situation.
Surprisingly, this is the first time this article was submitted to HN.
It's quite interesting. Some of these things happen in all developed nations, but quite a significant number of them only happen in the US. For example, it did not realize just how fucked up health care is in the US prior to reading this article.
Being poor is stealing meat from the store, frying it up before your mom gets home and then telling her she doesn’t have make dinner tonight because you’re not hungry anyway.
In the US, being poor is eating the meat, the potato chips, the bacon and the ice cream. But it might be a quart of Krasdale rather than a pint of Ben & Jerry's.
[Edit: I'm speculating that the poor get fat off a broad sampling of typical American fatty foods. I could be getting specific food items wrong. Thanks krschultz for pointing out that my comment was unclear.]
Being poor is having to live with choices you didn’t know you made when you were 14 years old.
Plus knowing that your kids are likely to ignore your guidance and follow your example, making the same mistakes you did, no matter how much they know it's a bad idea, and that it will be your influence at fault when they do. I mean, everybody deals with this, but I imagine the worse off your situation, the worse the fear is.
Being poor is knowing exactly how much everything costs.
I still have this now!
Of course I was never poor for any real hardcore definition of the word, Third World-style, but I spent a good few years totally flat broke. Money coming in only occasionally covering the rent, utility payments never paid as I couldn't justify spending that much money when I couldn't afford to eat, living off dry bread and instant mash etc etc. It was an experience for sure, and one I never, ever want to repeat! It's only relatively recently that I've stopped dreading the arriving of mail or jumping when there's a knock at the door, or even keeping the curtains closed so no one can see I'm in.
But yeah, I still buy the cheap brands if they are there out of habit. I'll walk down the road to save 10p on a bottle of milk and so on.
"We think sometimes that poverty is only being hungry, naked and homeless. The poverty of being unwanted, unloved and uncared for is the greatest poverty. We must start in our own homes to remedy this kind of poverty."
- Mother Teresa
What can we do to help people who are this kind of poor? Having given a decent bit to charities in the past, I somtimes feel a bit odd not knowing where it really went, or even if it really helped anyone. Or is this just me?
I've never been anything near poor.
I was wondering how really hard it is to get out of poverty in today's society, and if people really wants it (i'm NOT implying that they don't want, i'm really just asking myself).
This is more for homeless-poor than just poor:
I would really like to try taking someone homeless, let him shave and dress him nicely, get him to an interview even for a shitty manual job, that'd make me feel really useful in this society, I could probably host him in small building we own in the city (no heating but still it's a shelter and it's not that cold here) UNTIL he finds something else.
"Unfortunately" I can't find any homeless guy in my city (smallish northern italy town), let alone the ones that truly wants to change their situation which i suppose are a % of the homeless people
I don't deny the reality of poverty, but this discussion leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
The world is full of pain and nastiness, but this particular list accentuates and celebrates it. Can you imagine a similar piece writing about the woes of Terminal Cancer or Business Failure or Having An Autistic Child?
Everyone's got problems, but people who are actually suffering don't write this way. Nobody defines themselves by their problems; ask a poor person if he's poor, and he'll probably say, "Oh no, I'm not that poor, I have an X." Or maybe, "Oh, I'm poor all right, but I'm not unhappy." Or perhaps even, "Yeah, I'm poor, and it is kind of miserable, but X makes it okay."
What you won't get is, "Oh, I'm so poor and miserable, and you have no idea what poverty is like, let me list the ways I suffer, and let me drive home how very impossible it is for you, from your life of privelege, to ever comprehend how much I suffer every minute."
Well, unless you ask an angsty teenager. ;)
Just about everybody has problems, but nobody defines themselves by their troubles. Everyone thinks of himself as a complex person, with some miseries and some joys, some problems and some opportunities, some strengths and some weaknesses.
Think over your own life; you could almost certainly write a piece like this about some problem you've had. Something has been miserable and unjust for you, in a way people who haven't been there would have a hard time identifying with.
But do you define yourself by it? Neither do The Poor.
That gets at the heart of what I find troubling about this piece.
This is not about a particular person's or a particular community's experience of poverty. This is about The Poor, as a monolithic, mythical entity. And anytime you see someone cast a community of people, who are inherently diverse and complex by virtue of being people, as a simple, mythical stereotype, you're seeing intellectual dishonesty in action. Leftists are socialists, Christians are stupid or evil, Hacker News readers are well off, Iraqis approve the occupation, Americans are arrogant. These things can only be said from a distance; those who have spent time with these communities up close and personal would be hard pressed to say anything was true of all of them. People are diverse.
Let me call these sentiments what they are: bigotry. They divide the population into "us" and "them", and say we are this way, and they are that way.
(That's not to say you can't make useful generalizations. You can. But an honest generalization acknowledges that it is a simplification of a complex reality, and welcomes statistics and counterexamples that heighten the clarity of the image. Bigotry says reality is simple, and don't argue with me, dammit.)
Step back a moment and you know that poverty is complex, and poverty is relative. There are transient homeless and chronic homeless. There are ambitious immigrants without a dollar to their names, there are musicians living the bohemian life, there are barely-profitable-but-proud startup founders living on ramen, there are third generation prostitutes who will never know their fathers, there are children sold into sexual slavery before they're even teens, there are women trapped in polygamous, fundamentalist Mormon communities, there are parents who helplessly watch their children starve to death. So what "is poverty"? By what authority does this author say, "Poverty is..."?
This is not a rational attempt to characterize poverty. This is not a reference to studies which say "67% of households in XX neighborhood in 2008 had to go without a meal at least once a week for lack of funds." This is a series of emotional statements. This says, "Poverty is having to hunt squirrels in the park for food and being so hungry that you'll even eat the nasty bits."
And if someone comes back and says, "Actually, poverty isn't that bad," is their diverse viewpoint into a complex problem welcomed? No, the response is, "Clearly you've never experienced true poverty, you insensitive bastard."
What's going on here?
Emotional, self-serving bigotry. These are not poor people talking about contemporary problems, looking for practical solutions. These are people who know what Poverty Is one-upping those who Don't Know What Poverty Is with their superior Social Awareness. It's a race to see who can be the most heartbroken by this emotional Reality of Poverty, criticizing nothing, adding to the tales of woe, acknowledging that yes, by God, it's true, it's all true.
I have no doubt that the anecdotes are true, that they have roots in real experience. People really do suffer despair, hunger, and degrading treatment. But an emotional characterization without any roots in reason, a construction of a mythology of The Poor as objects of pity? I think that's actually destructive.
Impersonal pity is degrading and infuriating. You see it in some of the experiences recounted in the original post and comments. People would anonymously leave us food or presents, one commenter says, and even though we needed them it provoked us to white-hot rage. We were not that poor.
Kindness and compassion are encouraging and uplifting, whether you are going out to lunch with a poor friend or complimenting a rich friend on his poetry. It doesn't matter how miserable or happy a person is; he can be made happier by love, by personal kindness. But depersonalized pity is always degrading. If you do not think of yourself as The Poor, how insulting is it that your neighbor does, that he thinks your life is so unbearable that you would rather have a few crumbs from his table than keep your sense of dignity?
There is a subtle art to being kind. It's all about treating people with dignity, respecting their personhood.
Kindness is your friend, the rich professor, treating you to an extravagent dinner at the best club in town as a thank you for your hard work helping him grade papers. Pity is an anonymous millionaire giving you $200 for the same dinner just so you can "feel like a human being for a night." Kindness is your neighbor, the fit, poor, stay at home mom, offering to help her elderly and disabled neighbor with some chores after chatting over lunch. Pity is $50 in an envelope taped to your door with a note that says, "I can see your living room from the street and feel sorry for you; this is to hire a housekeeper for a day."
The original post provokes pity, and I find that degrading. Here, for comparison, is what compassion sounds like:
Poverty is real, complex, and generally miserable, but even the poor are human. Treat them with human dignity and kindness, not with self-righteous pity.
this particular list accentuates and celebrates it.
It doesn't do that in any objective way: that's your interpretation, which you use as a stool to easily climb on a hobbyhorse.
Can you imagine a similar piece writing about the woes of
Terminal Cancer or Business Failure or Having An Autistic
Child?
Yes I can. Actually, I think I've read those and they were equally inspiring as a reminder of my wealth and health and how small my problems really are. What of it?
people who are actually suffering don't write this way.
But people who have suffered may. Survivors of any traumatic experience can reflect on their experiences in a wide variety of ways. Your typification of the author in this way is not supported by any evidence.
As to the rest of this piece: I find several of the viewpoints commendable, but you're conflating them by interpreting this list as 'self-serving bigotry'. The problems of generalisations, pity and lack of understanding really don't need to have anything to do with this list. Only the author can tell.
I think there's many things to take away from the post given the way it is written, all of which are valid interpretations. I got the exact opposite of you. The end take-away I read from it was "The destitute are people. There are real problems and real situations that cause it. They don't want pity, they don't want handouts, they want to be in a better place but there is no hope left of that so they just make do and try to be happy like everyone else." I may be biased and read more into it than was intended given my personal past, but I got the message from the post that you ended with, "Treat them with human dignity and kindness, not with self-righteous pity."
You hit on what I don't like about this post better than I could, so I'll mention something else.
Yesterday was Anthony Bourdain hammering home the message that if you aren't young, fit, talented and working in the top 10 restaurants in the world you are nobody and may as well not bother trying.
Today it's this essay harping on about how if you haven't below his arbitrary level of poorness then you arent worth bothering with and how dare you think to have an opinion.
This seems a common enough attitude around - that only the top few or the extreme failures are real people and everyone else is a schmuck, and it's mechanistic, compasionless and unhelpful.
Not that I disagree with you. I've been poor and would never had thought along the lines of this piece in that present tense. But looking back now, I certainly do in the past-tense.
Many people once where poor. My father grew up poor in the US and missed many a meal. The closest he ever came to describing it was "15 pounds in basic training from actually having enough to eat." However, after he started making 6 figures he could joke about being poor. It's not really complaining so much as saying, relative to that things are great.
Being poor is wanting as much stuff as the people around you.
The article came across to me as a whiny. Being poor is having a car (but not a nice one), having toys (but not nice ones), having shoes, shelter, food (but...).
Interesting looking at the Australian minimum wage of $15/hr ($14.21 USD atm). Whereas from what I have seen of the US one it seems really hard to get by at all with the Australian one you could rent out a nice 2 or 3 bedroom house in an outer suburb but nice area which would only take up about half your weekly wage.
I believe the U.S. federal minimum wage is $7.25/hr before taxes are taken out (and it can be less than that if you work in a job that expects to collect tips, like waiting tables), or about $15k/yr for a full-timer. In my area, which is a suburban area, 600 sq ft. single bedroom apartments go for around $900-$1200/mo. Significantly more if you live closer into the city. For reasons of transportation, many poor people live in the city.
Keep in mind most apartment complexes won't let you have the apartment if your credit is bad, or the rent is more than 1/3 monthly income.
You can rent bedrooms or basements though for $500-700/mo.
Supposing you got the $900/mo apartment. That leaves you with around $100/wk to feed yourself and cover all other expenses. Once taxes are taken out, that can leave you with significantly less. No amount of budgeting can turn that into night school + transport + clothes + utilities + anything else you need like furniture or medical insurance or dental care.
Most people trying to get a leg up work two full-time jobs which, while getting you more money (and enough money to qualify for the cheapest apartment possible), it doesn't leave any time for life advancement plans like night school. So it's a vicious cycle and you can only break out of it by being lucky in many areas simultaneously. You have to find the job that pays more than minimum wage, and compete with all the other poor people trying to get that same slot...so you can work only one job...so you can have time to take one class a semester at community college (so long as they happen to offer the classes you need at time that don't interfere with your work schedule and your work schedule doesn't change during the semester to interfere with your classes)...so in 5 or 6 years you can get an Associates degree, which isn't really worth much, but can be transfered to many state schools in lieu of the first two years of a 4-year degree (at much less cost).
Of course many people stop at this point because they can't afford the last two years of school, and the A.A. or A.S. didn't really help them get a better job. So they feel like they've just wasted 5 or 6 years of their life scraping for every penny they had to put themselves through school.
Escaping this kind of life requires so much luck and so many people in so many places to turn a blind eye, or offer a meaningful helping hand, that a person simply can't do it on their own. It's numerically impossible in the U.S. Most immigrants who come here with nothing never escape it themselves, but end up in a better life through their children.
My grandmother grew up during the great depression. She still hoards food in nooks and crannies throughout the house and when let loose on a piece of chicken will eat every last scrap of digestible item on the bone. She habitually makes soup with boiled beef bones to get every last ounce of nutrition.
My father grew up just post-depression in a very rural area. While he never missed a meal, many meals consisted of only a few slices of bread as a filler and maybe some soup and not much else. I've never seen him eat a meal without eating some bread with it, he said it makes him feel uncomfortable.
My family was pretty low-end middle class growing up, and a couple of unlucky business decisions set us homeless for the better part of a year, with my entire family of 4 living in a single room subsidized motel room (rent 5 days, get the weekends for free) followed by two years of living out of two rented rooms in somebody's basement. We also never missed a meal, but I can tell you that I, to this day, cannot eat a cup of noodles meal without thinking about drug addicts banging at our motel room door thinking we were the room down the hall. We did better after that, and then later in life, as an adult, I found myself in not-quite-so-bad-but-not-great circumstances. A time when I used to decide if I could buy lunch at McDonald's or Taco Bell by counting how many hours extra I would have to work to pay for McDonald's.
Some of the things Scalzi mentions, would have been luxuries at certain moments in my life...like having toys. I've spent time as a child with no toys at all.
People who have never been poor, have absolutely no understanding, cannot fathom, why people are poor and why they stay poor. Being poor is not about having a lack of money, it's about having a lack of wealth. It's a way of life. A person who has never been poor cannot understand why you can't "just go to night school" to improve your lot in life because they don't understand that between two 40 hour a week jobs, and 2 or 3 hours a day of walking between jobs, home, the day-old-baked goods store and the salvation army, you have maybe 4 or 5 hours that night for sleep...every night. And what intense sleep deprivation coupled with intense, dangerous and stressful jobs can do to a person after decades. We worry about soldiers deployed for 18 months, imagine that type of life for 18 years solid.
"Being poor is picking the 10 cent ramen instead of the 12 cent ramen because that’s two extra packages for every dollar." This is the type of calculation one has to make all day every day when one is poor. It's very easy to be critical when you see a poor person buy a pack of cigs or a 6-pack of beer instead of a head of lettuce or that month's electricity bill. But I dare anybody to live that kind of life and not be so stressed and so damaged from the constancy of it, that you seek any kind of escape possible and that desire for escape infects all of your decisions. When your eating decisions are down to decisions about pennies, there's really not much worse things can get. Having the lights turned off because you didn't pay the bill does not really make things all that much worse in your day to day.
"Being poor is four years of night classes for an Associates of Art degree." The prime question asked by those who have never been poor, and are unable to empathize with those who are, is this..."why don't you just go to school and make your lot in life better?" There are lots of reasons to be poor in the first place. If you are lucky like I was, it's not because you have a mental disease or a severe learning disability, or are crippled or in some other way handicapped or not raised in a generational environment of poverty where you honestly don't understand that going to class can translate into a house in the suburbs because you have absolutely no life experience for you to understand that. Just in the same way some people don't understand what it's like to be poor, poor people can't understand what life is like to be not poor.
I was able to spend the 6 years in night school to get my 2 year A.S., which brought me up a step in life so that I could spend another 3 years getting the last two years of my B.S. which brought up a step in life so I could spend another 4 years getting my M.S. But at each step, if I hadn't had a person at that time to help me up that step, and give me an opportunity, I'd still be comparing Ramen prices, or figuring out how many meals a 10-pack of tacos from Taco Bell would last. And if I hadn't had the emotional support from good friends, or people who believed in me...well, 10 years is a terribly long time to keep motivated to change your lot in life while also doing all the other things people do in their day-to-day, like keeping down full-time jobs, career advancement, marriage, etc. Basically, being poor is a full-time job on top of your other full-time jobs. But I don't think that every poor peer I knew while I was poor could do the same. I got lucky and had great opportunity, and I worked hard to seize those opportunities when they came along. If nobody ever opens the door for you, you can't ever go through it and nobody is strong enough to carve their path in life to success all on their own.
My friend, who was born with the after-effects of an alcoholic and drug addicted mother, was unable to keep passing grades in his 6 year quest for a 2 year associate's degree and has never held a salaried position. That means he's never had health insurance, which means he's lost 3 jobs because he spent 14 hours in an ER getting basic medical care. It means he's had cars repossessed because somebody hit him and he had no auto-insurance and couldn't pay the repair bill out of pocket. It means that sometimes, to escape the shitty life he has to live every day, he sometimes buys a used book to escape into instead of a head of lettuce. It also means that sometimes, at the beginning of the month, he's just paid his rent, and he has $12 left in his bank account to stretch out till his next paycheck.
And then, after you've been poor for a long time, it shows. There's an aura about a poor person that no amount of hair product and tailored suits can shake. It sits on them in how they walk, how they talk, how they sit, how their skin hangs, what their build looks like, how the hold themselves, where they look in a room, how they behave at a meal. Because of this, no matter how hard they've worked to "make it", they'll always have that stigma attached to them, even by people that never knew they were poor. They'll present like a poor person so they'll interview worse, they'll get promoted less frequently, they'll get scored lower on yearly reviews.
Going from poor to not poor, is not about climbing a ladder. It's about being on the front of a seige engine attacking a fortress while arrows and bullets and hot oil rains down on you.
Or not... actually I - AM - fortunate, and I've never been poor, but I can identify with many of the points in the article (many are too US-centric as someone pointed out), and U$ 8 an hour sounds like a good deal even today for me.
Of course, I live in Uruguay, South America, and mostly by choice (I was born here, but I've had my opportunities to emigrate).
It's funny, but many of the "being poor" points, would not be considered "being poor" here in Uruguay (I should write a similar article about "being poor" from the Uruguay point of view - let's say it would be much worse in several parts, a bit better on the healthcare bit.
Being poor is buying only Oatmeal and Mac & Cheese because they don't require electric refrigeration, can be purchased in bulk inexpensively, and you just add water to eat.
That brings back bad memories. Granted, compared to many parts of the world it's a walk in the park.
[+] [-] edw519|15 years ago|reply
Both of my parents grew up with absolutely nothing.
My mother shared a bed with her sisters and wore nothing but hand-me-downs until she got married.
My father never had 3 meals in the same day until he joined the army.
They both tried to explain what life was like to us many times, but every story ended with, "Never mind. You just wouldn't understand."
They were so determined to escape their situations, almost every decision they made as adults was shaped by growing up with nothing. They worked hard almost every day of their lives so that none of us would ever have to experience what they went through. There was never any discussion or debate about what life would be like in our house: we were all going to finish high school, go to college, and build lives of our own. None of us has ever missed a meal or gone without anything essential.
I realize many people are just as determined as my parents were, but still don't escape poverty. There are no guarantees.
I just don't know how anyone can reverse the cycle without imagining that they can. Having no money is bad. Having no hope is worse.
[+] [-] poppysan|15 years ago|reply
Thankfully that was long ago, but those memories give me the determination, and humility,that i need to advance myself each day.
[+] [-] electromagnetic|15 years ago|reply
My dad didn't graduate highschool, he dropped out at 15 to start work and move out of his home (because they had more problems than a lack of money), literally at the first chance he got. He worked around to become a mechanic and eventually opened his own shop. He got into fuel injector programming, which got him a job at Ford, which when me and my brother were little meant we had 3 meals a day (literally sometimes 4), got almost everything we wanted but already had everything we needed. We had family vacations to places even my friends didn't get to go to.
I think what he taught me most was to not give up and just keep trying. He said he had over a dozen jobs in a half-dozen years while paying his way to get qualified as a mechanic. He's had 3 companies, all successful in their time before he moved on to bigger and better to get solidly middle-class from not even a working class upbringing.
[+] [-] HiroshiSan|15 years ago|reply
My family migrated to Canada when I was 3 years old, my mom came with 60 cents in her pocket, my dad just a little more than that. One thing my Mom has that my Dad could not find was faith, and a hell of a lot. She always had faith that she could escape poverty, fast forward to the present, she now has a wonderful government job and she is well on her way to starting her own business. I can't say the same about my dad, he is still buying those $800 cars, living in shitty apartments and has been working at the same barber shop since we first came here. My parents split up about 7 - 8 years ago and to be honest, I was happy. My dad was bringing us down with his mentality, my mom has always sheltered me from it, so even though I was growing up in poverty, I never felt poor.
[+] [-] DanielBMarkham|15 years ago|reply
You can always leave. They're called feet: use them.
I have been very, very poor. And I've made a million bucks in a short amount of time. In fact, I've flopped back and forth about as many times as anybody I know, so I know both sides of this.
I would not idolize poverty as some kind of state of nobility, and I would't spend a lot of time agonizing over it either. It is a thing that happens to you, like cancer. You get to make choices in life, no matter where you are or what your situation. The last day of your life, if you were lying in a ditch somewhere, you can still choose how to confront the end of your existence. These choices are all we own. The only person that can stop you making choices is yourself. It is extremely possible to dwell on all the bad things in life and despair.
If you are poor and reading this, whatever you do, please don't despair. Make some different choices. The only way you're not making a difference in the world is if you've decided that you're not. Don't let others -- no matter how well meaning -- give that to you.
[+] [-] retube|15 years ago|reply
I'm not sure. I've never been poor, so I can't speak from personal experience, but being poor is not necessarily about choice. Certainly I can start off rich, and make bad decisions. Perhaps that's my fault, perhaps I got unlucky. But if you start off in poverty, it's not easy, as I understand, to get yourself out of poverty. If you had a crap education, and a rough home life, you probably didn't leave school with good grades, so you can't get a decent job etc etc. There's a whole life-defining set of knock-on effects. And if you're trapped in debt, struggling to pay the rent and keep yourself warm, how easy is it to get out of that? If an opportunity does come along, will you have the cash to leverage it (think train ride to job interview).
I don't know how you got out of your fix, I'd be really interested to know.
[+] [-] Tichy|15 years ago|reply
I agree there are always options, the problem is knowing them. For example, I suppose at any time there is a stock I could buy for little money that would make me a millionaire over night. The problem is I don't know which one.
Of course other options are maybe simpler to judge than stock prospects, but the general problem still holds. In fact, if markets are efficient, wouldn't it imply that choosing anything in life is as difficult as picking the right stocks? Because making a choice (on actions) is an economical decision, hence it is subject to the efficient markets theorem.
[+] [-] lionhearted|15 years ago|reply
Me too, man. That's a very compassionate and honest comment you just wrote. I tend to be shorter and less patient with people who self-pity, and especially people who come from more who treat poor people like helpless children. But I should be friendlier, more compassionate, less short tempered, more steadfastly guiding. Very nice comment by you - you managed to be patient and kind while still being strong and emphasizing responsibility and choice. I should emulate this, this was a great comment.
[+] [-] rbranson|15 years ago|reply
You make a good point that poverty isn't something we should obsess over or try to make ourselves feel guilty about. If we are successful, we should feel good about that and have a healthy sense of empathy towards those that are less fortunate.
[+] [-] muhfuhkuh|15 years ago|reply
The key question, then, is whether you were _born and raised_ poor, or did you become poor in your later life. There is a ingrained mental barrier of hopelessness being born into poverty, especially in America where the cycle of poverty consumes communities and perpetuates all manner of things that are easily contested by people on the outside looking in, but is palpable to those trapped within it.
The difference, interestingly enough, can be found in a line in the song "Common People" by the English band Pulp, which follows the story of a rich girl who "slums it" with the poor narrator:
"But still you'll never get it right
cos when you're laid in bed at night
watching roaches climb the wall
if you just called your Dad, he could stop it all
You'll never live like common people"
I was born and raised poor. Like, picking cockroaches out of my cereal box poor. Like, magic block of cheese appearing on the doorstep poor. Like qualifying for free lunch at school poor. Like pink bicycle with sissy bar bought from the thrift shop and handed down from eldest daughter to two youngest sons poor (I broke the cycle of shame with black electrical and silver duct tape).
I never blamed my parents; they were immigrants fleeing an oppressive regime with nothing but a suitcase of hastily gathered clothes, papers, and photos. But, to say it's "just a thing that happens to you, like cancer" doesn't really speak to how stifling poverty can truly be.
My family pulled themselves out of the cycle, but millions don't. MOST don't. Getting out has less to do with "using your feet" and more like pulling an entire base of people out of a mindset that they can't succeed even if they tried their damndest. It's not only cultural, it's systemic.
"The only person that can stop you making choices is yourself.
Not always the case. My wife's family came to this country in 1978. Her father's job for the first five years was to mop the floors and clean toilets at schools, for which he was (legally) paid less than minimum wage because of his immigrant status. Then, the church that promised the family free admittance to their school in exchange for Dad's reduced salary rescinded it upon his offer to take ESL classes by day and cleaning the schools by night. So, he pulled them from that school and into public school, which, because of redistricting and rezoning, was among the poorest and most dangerous in their state. I guess it is about choices, but don't think there aren't people out there who disincentivize you from making them.
Hell, it wasn't that long ago that some people couldn't eat at the same counter equally as others. I mean, could you even make a clear-headed choice in that scenario?
Choices to pull oneself up from a cycle of poverty is as risky as entrepreneurship, perhaps even more so. If you fail at business, you have your firm footing of educational background and network of employees, peers, investors, and family to watch over you and give support. If you fail at pulling yourself from the ghetto, the next stop could be homelessness and the soup kitchen. And, if you have a family, they'll suffer doubly so.
It's almost never cut and dry.
[+] [-] teraflop|15 years ago|reply
Context is important. This was posted about a week after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans.
[+] [-] kenjackson|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alsomike|15 years ago|reply
Let's say there's been a rash of home invasions in a town, a criminal gang ripping people off, holding them at gun point, that sort of thing. Would you say that society shouldn't increase police protection because this is ultimately about the victims making good choices? What if the victims complain that the criminals need to brought to justice? Maybe the victims should be dusting for fingerprints, collecting evidence and investigating leads themselves, trying to recover their property themselves. If they can't, this just shows that they lack good morals and strong character traits like hard work and determination.
This is wrong because it doesn't matter whether you're a hard worker, you have the unconditional right to police protection and justice. We don't say that some groups of people are excluded from those rights because they haven't earned them - those are part of human dignity and you get them for free.
The argument that society ought to address poverty is argument about justice, that the suffering endured by the poor is a violation of their basic human dignity. When one of us is deprived of justice, all of us are deprived of justice, and the question of whether they can make choices to change their situation or whether they are morally worthy is irrelevant to this argument. The counter-argument is either that human dignity doesn't exist, or that the horrors and suffering endured by the majority of humanity so that a few can enjoy luxury doesn't constitute a deprivation of human dignity and justice.
[+] [-] wallflower|15 years ago|reply
> Being poor is discovering that that letter from Duke University, naming you as one of three advanced students in your class invited to test out of HS early into their scholarship program, is just so much firestarter because the $300 it costs to take the test may as well be $3 million.
Despair is finally realizing, at nearly 36 and with a barely-afforded AA in English from a community college, just where you could have been by now had you had $300, and what that missed opportunity has truly cost you.
[+] [-] nlavezzo|15 years ago|reply
>Being poor is a heater in only one room of the house.
No... this is being "poor", i.e. still in the top third or more of humanity as far as living standards.
Being poor is what the people I visited in barrios in Ecuador do - living in huts made of corrugated aluminum and scraps of wood, with a dirt floor, no plumbing or electricity, access to education, healthcare or clean water. Oh, and also having almost no way of changing your situation, no matter how hard you try. Surprisingly, these people were in general happier than well-off people in America, because they had a strong faith, strong families, strong relationships with others in their community, and were just plain tough.
I guess after visiting a third world country and seeing how hard the truly poor work every day, how much they care for what little they have, and how thankful they are for everything, I feel a little less sympathy for the "poor" in America. I wish they could spend a few weeks in a truly poor country, and then realize what an amazing land of opportunity they live in.
[+] [-] ajdecon|15 years ago|reply
This encompasses a lot of my reaction when I first read this article a few years back, and before I spent some time volunteering with charities in the US. I was, frankly, angry. Most of the time, being poor in the US is not a matter of sheer survival (except for health care), but simply a very deep hole which is hard to climb out of. But possible, right? So why not just do it?
But these days, this reaction is what really angers me. It's still a fucking deep hole. And the psychological effect of being raised in these circumstances is what doesn't get acknowledged a lot. A lot of the time you have to be taught that it's even possible to dig out of it, let alone how. This is especially true if you were raised in poverty, by parents who were also raised in poverty, in a place where the schools are a joke and you don't know anyone who has been successful. It's very easy to simply despair in these conditions, and not even realize it might be possible for things to change, because as far as you know it's not. And while the rare person might be able to summon the willpower to escape this, I'd like to know how many people truly think they could if they had never even seen what success looked like, except on TV.
Hell, I was raised in an area which was simply rural middle class, not poor by any definition; and almost no one there could imagine that good schools, good health care, or a substantially better life were in reach. The idea of attending any private university, let alone an Ivy, was a joke. And we were luckier than 99% of the world, and knew it! For some... I simply can't imagine.
The dismissive attitude exhibited in so many tech forums towards the poor is just infuriating, both in the "lazy poor" category and the "it's not as bad as elsewhere!" type. If you're in that situation, it doesn't matter that there's someone out there worse-off. What does matter is if you were brought up to think success isn't possible, you despair of making anything better, and you've lost hope. I won't argue back and forth about "handouts" because a lot of the time that's used to be dismissive too. But making it known that it's actually possible to have a better life--that is what needs to be done.
(Tangentially, it's worth pointing out that Scalzi acknowledges the difference between being poor in the US and in the Third World, as in his followup post here: http://whatever.scalzi.com/2005/09/04/quick-followups/ .)
[+] [-] kingofspain|15 years ago|reply
Telling someone to be grateful that they have a roof over their head since most of the world doesn't won't make them any happier about shivering under a blanket because they can't pay the gas bill for heating. Yes, it could be worse, but it could also be a lot effing better, From my own experience, the whole thing tends to dull the mind to an extent where opportunities are no longer so obvious - or so easy to pursue (£5 for a domain name that may not pay off, or £5 to eat for a week and I'm bloody hungry).
True, absolute poverty is horrific and all efforts should be made to ensure that no one has to endure this through no fault of their own, but that doesn't make relative poverty a non-issue where people need to man-up. Of course, you weren't so extreme as to say that, but it gets side quite a lot and I don't really think it helps much tbh.
[+] [-] pavel_lishin|15 years ago|reply
Being poor is miserable because you look around you, and see how other people have it better. Poor people in America don't see Ecuadorians living in shacks, they see people driving to their big house in a Lexus, and relaxing by taking a dip in the pool.
[+] [-] burningion|15 years ago|reply
In third world countries, there is an infrastructure to support expectations. You aren't the only poor person, there is direct feedback that "we're all in this together".
However, in the first world, there is a great amount of isolation that can be crippling. We have very fragmented communities, especially in the suburbs.
Poverty is real, and dismissing it because it doesn't seem as "legitimate" as some other place and different social context doesn't help anything. It's very naive to assume that because we've got access to "better tools" we should be grateful.
Read the Bell Curve. See how IQ is affecting the utility of the workforce in the United States. Imagine being born below the magical IQ to be effective in modern American society.
Imagine being useless to the world around you. Imagine waking up every day feeling hopeless.
Poverty has nothing to do with dirt huts. It has everything to do with feeling as though you can control the situation of your life. It has everything to do with not feeling like a net drain on the world.
[+] [-] illumin8|15 years ago|reply
He is complaining about having heat in only one room of the house, when people in other countries don't even have 4 walls and a roof. In the US we have heating assistance that will pay your gas bill if you can't afford it. You just have to have 2 brain cells to rub together and enough literary skills to fill out a piece of paper and apply for it.
[+] [-] Gormo|15 years ago|reply
How is this any different from how all of humanity lived for millennia, up until about ten thousand years ago?
I don't mean to sound condescending or dismissive, I'm just wondering why more people don't see these circumstances as an opportunity to develop mature, self-reliant communities, and instead presume that some external catalyst is necessary to improve the situation.
[+] [-] die_sekte|15 years ago|reply
It's quite interesting. Some of these things happen in all developed nations, but quite a significant number of them only happen in the US. For example, it did not realize just how fucked up health care is in the US prior to reading this article.
[+] [-] yummyfajitas|15 years ago|reply
Being poor is knowing you work as hard as anyone, anywhere.
This is definitely not the US. Most of our poor don't work at all (and are not trying to work), and about 90% don't work full time.
http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpswp2008.pdf
Being poor is not enough space for everyone who lives with you.
In the US, 67% of poor households have 2 rooms per person (compared to 70.2% of non-poor households).
http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2004/01/understandi...
Being poor is stealing meat from the store, frying it up before your mom gets home and then telling her she doesn’t have make dinner tonight because you’re not hungry anyway.
In the US, being poor is eating the meat, the potato chips, the bacon and the ice cream. But it might be a quart of Krasdale rather than a pint of Ben & Jerry's.
[Edit: I'm speculating that the poor get fat off a broad sampling of typical American fatty foods. I could be getting specific food items wrong. Thanks krschultz for pointing out that my comment was unclear.]
http://www.ers.usda.gov/AmberWaves/February06/Features/featu...
I really don't know what part of the world he is talking about.
[edit: changed secondary source to original source on obesity. ]
[+] [-] ido|15 years ago|reply
Where I'm from poor people take the bus, as they could afford neither a car nor the gas.
[+] [-] bd|15 years ago|reply
It was already discussed here before (with many comments), but it was submitted as a comment:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=619197
[+] [-] dkarl|15 years ago|reply
Plus knowing that your kids are likely to ignore your guidance and follow your example, making the same mistakes you did, no matter how much they know it's a bad idea, and that it will be your influence at fault when they do. I mean, everybody deals with this, but I imagine the worse off your situation, the worse the fear is.
[+] [-] kingofspain|15 years ago|reply
I still have this now!
Of course I was never poor for any real hardcore definition of the word, Third World-style, but I spent a good few years totally flat broke. Money coming in only occasionally covering the rent, utility payments never paid as I couldn't justify spending that much money when I couldn't afford to eat, living off dry bread and instant mash etc etc. It was an experience for sure, and one I never, ever want to repeat! It's only relatively recently that I've stopped dreading the arriving of mail or jumping when there's a knock at the door, or even keeping the curtains closed so no one can see I'm in.
But yeah, I still buy the cheap brands if they are there out of habit. I'll walk down the road to save 10p on a bottle of milk and so on.
[+] [-] tome|15 years ago|reply
Most of them are about being financially poor, but this one is about emotional poverty and can happen to the richest of us.
[+] [-] baddspellar|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fsipie|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iamwil|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paolomaffei|15 years ago|reply
This is more for homeless-poor than just poor: I would really like to try taking someone homeless, let him shave and dress him nicely, get him to an interview even for a shitty manual job, that'd make me feel really useful in this society, I could probably host him in small building we own in the city (no heating but still it's a shelter and it's not that cold here) UNTIL he finds something else.
"Unfortunately" I can't find any homeless guy in my city (smallish northern italy town), let alone the ones that truly wants to change their situation which i suppose are a % of the homeless people
[+] [-] Dove|15 years ago|reply
The world is full of pain and nastiness, but this particular list accentuates and celebrates it. Can you imagine a similar piece writing about the woes of Terminal Cancer or Business Failure or Having An Autistic Child?
Everyone's got problems, but people who are actually suffering don't write this way. Nobody defines themselves by their problems; ask a poor person if he's poor, and he'll probably say, "Oh no, I'm not that poor, I have an X." Or maybe, "Oh, I'm poor all right, but I'm not unhappy." Or perhaps even, "Yeah, I'm poor, and it is kind of miserable, but X makes it okay."
What you won't get is, "Oh, I'm so poor and miserable, and you have no idea what poverty is like, let me list the ways I suffer, and let me drive home how very impossible it is for you, from your life of privelege, to ever comprehend how much I suffer every minute."
Well, unless you ask an angsty teenager. ;)
Just about everybody has problems, but nobody defines themselves by their troubles. Everyone thinks of himself as a complex person, with some miseries and some joys, some problems and some opportunities, some strengths and some weaknesses.
Think over your own life; you could almost certainly write a piece like this about some problem you've had. Something has been miserable and unjust for you, in a way people who haven't been there would have a hard time identifying with.
But do you define yourself by it? Neither do The Poor.
That gets at the heart of what I find troubling about this piece.
This is not about a particular person's or a particular community's experience of poverty. This is about The Poor, as a monolithic, mythical entity. And anytime you see someone cast a community of people, who are inherently diverse and complex by virtue of being people, as a simple, mythical stereotype, you're seeing intellectual dishonesty in action. Leftists are socialists, Christians are stupid or evil, Hacker News readers are well off, Iraqis approve the occupation, Americans are arrogant. These things can only be said from a distance; those who have spent time with these communities up close and personal would be hard pressed to say anything was true of all of them. People are diverse.
Let me call these sentiments what they are: bigotry. They divide the population into "us" and "them", and say we are this way, and they are that way.
(That's not to say you can't make useful generalizations. You can. But an honest generalization acknowledges that it is a simplification of a complex reality, and welcomes statistics and counterexamples that heighten the clarity of the image. Bigotry says reality is simple, and don't argue with me, dammit.)
Step back a moment and you know that poverty is complex, and poverty is relative. There are transient homeless and chronic homeless. There are ambitious immigrants without a dollar to their names, there are musicians living the bohemian life, there are barely-profitable-but-proud startup founders living on ramen, there are third generation prostitutes who will never know their fathers, there are children sold into sexual slavery before they're even teens, there are women trapped in polygamous, fundamentalist Mormon communities, there are parents who helplessly watch their children starve to death. So what "is poverty"? By what authority does this author say, "Poverty is..."?
This is not a rational attempt to characterize poverty. This is not a reference to studies which say "67% of households in XX neighborhood in 2008 had to go without a meal at least once a week for lack of funds." This is a series of emotional statements. This says, "Poverty is having to hunt squirrels in the park for food and being so hungry that you'll even eat the nasty bits."
And if someone comes back and says, "Actually, poverty isn't that bad," is their diverse viewpoint into a complex problem welcomed? No, the response is, "Clearly you've never experienced true poverty, you insensitive bastard."
What's going on here?
Emotional, self-serving bigotry. These are not poor people talking about contemporary problems, looking for practical solutions. These are people who know what Poverty Is one-upping those who Don't Know What Poverty Is with their superior Social Awareness. It's a race to see who can be the most heartbroken by this emotional Reality of Poverty, criticizing nothing, adding to the tales of woe, acknowledging that yes, by God, it's true, it's all true.
I have no doubt that the anecdotes are true, that they have roots in real experience. People really do suffer despair, hunger, and degrading treatment. But an emotional characterization without any roots in reason, a construction of a mythology of The Poor as objects of pity? I think that's actually destructive.
Impersonal pity is degrading and infuriating. You see it in some of the experiences recounted in the original post and comments. People would anonymously leave us food or presents, one commenter says, and even though we needed them it provoked us to white-hot rage. We were not that poor.
Kindness and compassion are encouraging and uplifting, whether you are going out to lunch with a poor friend or complimenting a rich friend on his poetry. It doesn't matter how miserable or happy a person is; he can be made happier by love, by personal kindness. But depersonalized pity is always degrading. If you do not think of yourself as The Poor, how insulting is it that your neighbor does, that he thinks your life is so unbearable that you would rather have a few crumbs from his table than keep your sense of dignity?
There is a subtle art to being kind. It's all about treating people with dignity, respecting their personhood.
Kindness is your friend, the rich professor, treating you to an extravagent dinner at the best club in town as a thank you for your hard work helping him grade papers. Pity is an anonymous millionaire giving you $200 for the same dinner just so you can "feel like a human being for a night." Kindness is your neighbor, the fit, poor, stay at home mom, offering to help her elderly and disabled neighbor with some chores after chatting over lunch. Pity is $50 in an envelope taped to your door with a note that says, "I can see your living room from the street and feel sorry for you; this is to hire a housekeeper for a day."
The original post provokes pity, and I find that degrading. Here, for comparison, is what compassion sounds like:
http://jmchoul.spaces.live.com/Blog/cns!F04579021E6249A3!143... http://www.delanceystreetfoundation.org/grads.php
Poverty is real, complex, and generally miserable, but even the poor are human. Treat them with human dignity and kindness, not with self-righteous pity.
[+] [-] Confusion|15 years ago|reply
As to the rest of this piece: I find several of the viewpoints commendable, but you're conflating them by interpreting this list as 'self-serving bigotry'. The problems of generalisations, pity and lack of understanding really don't need to have anything to do with this list. Only the author can tell.
[+] [-] ismarc|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jodrellblank|15 years ago|reply
Yesterday was Anthony Bourdain hammering home the message that if you aren't young, fit, talented and working in the top 10 restaurants in the world you are nobody and may as well not bother trying.
Today it's this essay harping on about how if you haven't below his arbitrary level of poorness then you arent worth bothering with and how dare you think to have an opinion.
This seems a common enough attitude around - that only the top few or the extreme failures are real people and everyone else is a schmuck, and it's mechanistic, compasionless and unhelpful.
[+] [-] elblanco|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Retric|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brudgers|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] te_platt|15 years ago|reply
The article came across to me as a whiny. Being poor is having a car (but not a nice one), having toys (but not nice ones), having shoes, shelter, food (but...).
[+] [-] robryan|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] elblanco|15 years ago|reply
Keep in mind most apartment complexes won't let you have the apartment if your credit is bad, or the rent is more than 1/3 monthly income.
You can rent bedrooms or basements though for $500-700/mo.
Supposing you got the $900/mo apartment. That leaves you with around $100/wk to feed yourself and cover all other expenses. Once taxes are taken out, that can leave you with significantly less. No amount of budgeting can turn that into night school + transport + clothes + utilities + anything else you need like furniture or medical insurance or dental care.
Most people trying to get a leg up work two full-time jobs which, while getting you more money (and enough money to qualify for the cheapest apartment possible), it doesn't leave any time for life advancement plans like night school. So it's a vicious cycle and you can only break out of it by being lucky in many areas simultaneously. You have to find the job that pays more than minimum wage, and compete with all the other poor people trying to get that same slot...so you can work only one job...so you can have time to take one class a semester at community college (so long as they happen to offer the classes you need at time that don't interfere with your work schedule and your work schedule doesn't change during the semester to interfere with your classes)...so in 5 or 6 years you can get an Associates degree, which isn't really worth much, but can be transfered to many state schools in lieu of the first two years of a 4-year degree (at much less cost).
Of course many people stop at this point because they can't afford the last two years of school, and the A.A. or A.S. didn't really help them get a better job. So they feel like they've just wasted 5 or 6 years of their life scraping for every penny they had to put themselves through school.
Escaping this kind of life requires so much luck and so many people in so many places to turn a blind eye, or offer a meaningful helping hand, that a person simply can't do it on their own. It's numerically impossible in the U.S. Most immigrants who come here with nothing never escape it themselves, but end up in a better life through their children.
[+] [-] bhjodokast|15 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] elblanco|15 years ago|reply
My father grew up just post-depression in a very rural area. While he never missed a meal, many meals consisted of only a few slices of bread as a filler and maybe some soup and not much else. I've never seen him eat a meal without eating some bread with it, he said it makes him feel uncomfortable.
My family was pretty low-end middle class growing up, and a couple of unlucky business decisions set us homeless for the better part of a year, with my entire family of 4 living in a single room subsidized motel room (rent 5 days, get the weekends for free) followed by two years of living out of two rented rooms in somebody's basement. We also never missed a meal, but I can tell you that I, to this day, cannot eat a cup of noodles meal without thinking about drug addicts banging at our motel room door thinking we were the room down the hall. We did better after that, and then later in life, as an adult, I found myself in not-quite-so-bad-but-not-great circumstances. A time when I used to decide if I could buy lunch at McDonald's or Taco Bell by counting how many hours extra I would have to work to pay for McDonald's.
Some of the things Scalzi mentions, would have been luxuries at certain moments in my life...like having toys. I've spent time as a child with no toys at all.
People who have never been poor, have absolutely no understanding, cannot fathom, why people are poor and why they stay poor. Being poor is not about having a lack of money, it's about having a lack of wealth. It's a way of life. A person who has never been poor cannot understand why you can't "just go to night school" to improve your lot in life because they don't understand that between two 40 hour a week jobs, and 2 or 3 hours a day of walking between jobs, home, the day-old-baked goods store and the salvation army, you have maybe 4 or 5 hours that night for sleep...every night. And what intense sleep deprivation coupled with intense, dangerous and stressful jobs can do to a person after decades. We worry about soldiers deployed for 18 months, imagine that type of life for 18 years solid.
"Being poor is picking the 10 cent ramen instead of the 12 cent ramen because that’s two extra packages for every dollar." This is the type of calculation one has to make all day every day when one is poor. It's very easy to be critical when you see a poor person buy a pack of cigs or a 6-pack of beer instead of a head of lettuce or that month's electricity bill. But I dare anybody to live that kind of life and not be so stressed and so damaged from the constancy of it, that you seek any kind of escape possible and that desire for escape infects all of your decisions. When your eating decisions are down to decisions about pennies, there's really not much worse things can get. Having the lights turned off because you didn't pay the bill does not really make things all that much worse in your day to day.
"Being poor is four years of night classes for an Associates of Art degree." The prime question asked by those who have never been poor, and are unable to empathize with those who are, is this..."why don't you just go to school and make your lot in life better?" There are lots of reasons to be poor in the first place. If you are lucky like I was, it's not because you have a mental disease or a severe learning disability, or are crippled or in some other way handicapped or not raised in a generational environment of poverty where you honestly don't understand that going to class can translate into a house in the suburbs because you have absolutely no life experience for you to understand that. Just in the same way some people don't understand what it's like to be poor, poor people can't understand what life is like to be not poor.
I was able to spend the 6 years in night school to get my 2 year A.S., which brought me up a step in life so that I could spend another 3 years getting the last two years of my B.S. which brought up a step in life so I could spend another 4 years getting my M.S. But at each step, if I hadn't had a person at that time to help me up that step, and give me an opportunity, I'd still be comparing Ramen prices, or figuring out how many meals a 10-pack of tacos from Taco Bell would last. And if I hadn't had the emotional support from good friends, or people who believed in me...well, 10 years is a terribly long time to keep motivated to change your lot in life while also doing all the other things people do in their day-to-day, like keeping down full-time jobs, career advancement, marriage, etc. Basically, being poor is a full-time job on top of your other full-time jobs. But I don't think that every poor peer I knew while I was poor could do the same. I got lucky and had great opportunity, and I worked hard to seize those opportunities when they came along. If nobody ever opens the door for you, you can't ever go through it and nobody is strong enough to carve their path in life to success all on their own.
My friend, who was born with the after-effects of an alcoholic and drug addicted mother, was unable to keep passing grades in his 6 year quest for a 2 year associate's degree and has never held a salaried position. That means he's never had health insurance, which means he's lost 3 jobs because he spent 14 hours in an ER getting basic medical care. It means he's had cars repossessed because somebody hit him and he had no auto-insurance and couldn't pay the repair bill out of pocket. It means that sometimes, to escape the shitty life he has to live every day, he sometimes buys a used book to escape into instead of a head of lettuce. It also means that sometimes, at the beginning of the month, he's just paid his rent, and he has $12 left in his bank account to stretch out till his next paycheck.
And then, after you've been poor for a long time, it shows. There's an aura about a poor person that no amount of hair product and tailored suits can shake. It sits on them in how they walk, how they talk, how they sit, how their skin hangs, what their build looks like, how the hold themselves, where they look in a room, how they behave at a meal. Because of this, no matter how hard they've worked to "make it", they'll always have that stigma attached to them, even by people that never knew they were poor. They'll present like a poor person so they'll interview worse, they'll get promoted less frequently, they'll get scored lower on yearly reviews.
Going from poor to not poor, is not about climbing a ladder. It's about being on the front of a seige engine attacking a fortress while arrows and bullets and hot oil rains down on you.
[+] [-] wallflower|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pistoriusp|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] GFischer|15 years ago|reply
Of course, I live in Uruguay, South America, and mostly by choice (I was born here, but I've had my opportunities to emigrate).
It's funny, but many of the "being poor" points, would not be considered "being poor" here in Uruguay (I should write a similar article about "being poor" from the Uruguay point of view - let's say it would be much worse in several parts, a bit better on the healthcare bit.
[+] [-] shaunfs|15 years ago|reply
That brings back bad memories. Granted, compared to many parts of the world it's a walk in the park.
[+] [-] erikstarck|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] known|15 years ago|reply