You accumulate wealth out of what you can set aside out of the flow.
Some of us immigrants do not come to this country with an existing stock of wealth either back home or here. We are also not in the favored group of immigrants. We have human capital which we are trying to convert to financial capital for the next generation.
Then, when we sort of "make it" here, people who have family homes worth close to million and up (you can draw on that home equity, you know), people who know people (either family or others) who can "help" them with down-payments etc label us rich based on the flow we are receiving right now. These people tend to themselves make in the $150K range, in my experience and do not realize that the wealth they have was already accumulated in the less punitive environment of the 80s and the 90s.
I do not begrudge anyone for what they have. But I do find people who got a "hand-me down" apartment in Manhattan after growing up in a nice house in Westchester lecturing me about "the rich" and "the poor".
Except that my ability to make it in today's corporate environment depends on their political sensibilities.
I think this is an excellent comment. What makes me very sad is that during the past 14 months the divide between those who own assets and those who don't has reached gargantuan proportions.
I mean, in my raging inferno of a housing market, over the past couple of years home prices have easily doubled. So a 400k house from 2018 now sells for 800k. Yes, if I want to move to another house in my area I'll pay similarly astronomical prices, but that just means it's about a wash for me, and of course I have many more options like moving to a cheaper locale or a cash out refi.
But if I (or my parents) don't already own a home, it means my chances of ever owning a home in my area just went to about zero. People made vastly more money just sitting around in their houses in the past couple years than I made in my job as an "essential" worker over the past decade.
I understand what you mean; my parents, my sister & I came to Canada in late 90's. We went through normal "new immigrant" jobs - newspaper delivery, cleaning, etc; but eventually my dad got an IT job again.
5-7 years after arriving, our income was nominal. But having arrived to Canada with literally a suitcase of clothes each, the prospects, in particularly retirement, were substantially different.
It works both ways sometimes though - not only is it difficult for those born here to understand the difference, we too have to mentally remind ourselves - just because I make as much money as my best friends, I should not indulge in quite the same lifestyle; when it comes to "wealth", they are WAY ahead (some got an apartment as gift from parents, others had their university education paid for, trusts and RESP/RRSPs, etc etc).
The effect of multi-generational wealth cannot be overstated really. I live in the UK and earn a very good salary (£60k), but I'm far from being "rich". I do feel rich, which is great, but I can walk ten minutes down the road and see multi-million pound houses that, barring some extremely fortuitous event, someone like me will never, ever be able to own.
It doesn't get my down, though. Those people with those houses rarely know what they have. It doesn't make them any happier. I'm happy knowing that everything I have has been earnt by me. I'm not sure I would be so happy if I didn't earn a very good salary, though.
> Some of us immigrants do not come to this country with an existing stock of wealth either back home or here. We are also not in the favored group of immigrants. We have human capital which we are trying to convert to financial capital for the next generation.
And this is where the idea (now myth?) of the American Dream came from.
When America was young, no one really had much capital. Also true for periods of large scale immigration: most folks were 'equal' in the sense of not having much of anything.
Over time wealth got concentrated, but with the Great Depression and the WW2 war economy, capital was generally became more equalized in the early- and mid-20th century.
Of course in the last 50+ years there have been no 'equalization events', and so the concentration of wealth has managed to run for a while without interruption with the obvious results.
Piketty has a lot of historical data that shows this process for number of countries:
There are a couple things to understand about being poor.
It's not about lack of money (though obviously having lots of money means you're not poor). It's about insecurity. I grew up in farm country in the 1980s. Nobody had money, but I didn't feel poor. When I moved to other parts of the country, that's when I encountered poor people. They had to worry about crime, schools for their kids, and being homeless.
When you skip meals because you have to put two gallons of gas in the car so you can get to work the rest of the week, that's when you're poor. Or when you're under constant stress because you're worried about what's going to go wrong next, and when you spend all your time on stuff like where you'll spend your last $12 because that's all you've got. It's hard to understand what it's like to be poor because you don't even realize that's part of the deal.
The other thing is that there's a saying along the lines of getting wealthy being mostly the same for everyone, but every poor person is poor for different reasons. One example is a guy I knew in the 1990s that worked hard at a low-wage job. He got hit by a car while walking across the street. The driver got away and left him laying there. He couldn't work for months. The non-poor person's solution is to move in with their parents or to have their parents send them money. Maybe put things on the credit card. Maybe take money out of savings. He didn't have those options. How do you financially recover from something like this if once you go back to work, you're making the same low wage?
Growing up poor affects your brain for life and you will be less resilient to stress, you'll make worse financial decisions. This has been studied and it's proven. I guess it's an effect of living under constant stress, worrying about basic needs while your brain is very receptive and malleable.
Poverty is relative but those who are not poor tend to view it as absolute. So anyone who has any apparent trappings of being well-off, such as a car, mobile phone or a big TV, obviously isn't poor and is a scammer or criminal. Never mind that, in this day and age, a car and a cellphone are pretty much essential for getting work and a TV (big, small or in between) is the cheapest form of entertainment for filling your non-work time.
Seems like the solution to this problem is to figure out ways to have stronger networks of friends and family.
It’s like trying to build a robot to love me when the simplest thing is just to form relationships.
Stronger community bonds seem like the only long term solution to the problem of being taken care of when a hit and run driver knocks me out for a bit.
Of course short term disability insurance is effective for this specific instance, but loving parents, sibs, kids, cousins, etc is probably more robust.
Oh man this resonates in a weird way... I don't know jack shit about being poor. I grew up extremely well-off in the late 80s and 90s. My college education was paid 100% by my parents without a loan. We had nice cars and belonged to country clubs. Even in my first job where I was only making 35K/yr my parents gave me quite a bit of help so it was easy.
I have a few friends that are poor... I feel for their issues, I always try and help out when asked, but I also know to keep my mouth shut about problems the poor face or how I think they should solve the problem because my solutions are usually so detached from the reality of their grinding life that it comes off as patronizing and unempathetic.
My dad gets it, he grew up as a poor kid in an Italian immigrant household. First kid to college and then he did really well after that in business. He understands it in ways I'll never know. He mostly keeps his opinions to himself on the matter but I've never heard him rattle off any easy solutions or tropes like "they just need to work harder" because he knows his mother and father busted their butts and never stopped being poor. It was only when he became an adult and started making money that he could help them live comfortably.
My mother (love her) she grew up middle class during the American Dream years of the 50's and 60's and has never known poverty either, but she has strong opinions on it... always of the variety of they are "lazy" or need to "work harder", or the solutions are impractical or grounded in a reality that hasn't existed since the early 70s. I think my Dad has given up at this point changing her mind as they're both well into their 70s, but yea I never want to be like my mother.
Volunteer & serve on the board of a non-profit that focuses on meeting a community need. Did you know that diapers are not covered in the United States by government assistance? So the current setup is that we have a lot of diaper banks across the United States that provide diapers to those in need.
Diapers are sold as single items in corner stores in low income areas at extreme markups, and sometimes parents can only afford one a day. If the baby poops or pees right after the change… Well. Yeah.
I serve on the board of one [1], and we’ve had events that have given out 100k diapers to those in need in a day. The frustrating thing is that there is no sustainable model here - the diaper banks get donations from companies and and we can buy them using donated money / grants for a discount, but we obviously don’t charge those who need them for the diapers (and I do not believe we can sell them as a bank).
I think there are two main pain points for people who do not have a lot of money:
1) There are economies of scale as you “level up” in income - cost per diaper gets much cheaper when you can buy from Sam’s club vs. paying $1 per at the corner store. Even shopping at Sam’s is out the window because it assumes you have a car to get there…
2) the “fixed costs” of life are fairly standard. It takes a salary of $85K for the happiness to have marginal returns, and I think this is because you hit the point where your basic needs are met for an American lifestyle and everything else is gravy. It covers medical (within reason), insurance, transportation, some fun thing, housing, food, etc. and gets you to the level where you can finally get ahead.
If you don’t mind me asking, what’s your perspective on your purpose in life? I always wondered if the outlook is different for someone starting from Boardwalk instead of Baltic Avenue, so to speak.
I had a co-worker who thought he had a typical american childhood because he didn't consider his family wealthy, even though they had millions of dollars of networth over 30 years ago. Him and his 3 bothers went to a very exclusive private school that was 50k a year per child, but since his classmates were mostly "old money" that were from family worth 10s to 100s of millions of dollars, he was picked on for being the "poor" kid, so still thinks of himself as having a middle class family.
He was also the only person I've seen who made me consider that "afluenza" might be a real thing. He would get super bad stomach aches and diarrhea any time he ate fast food because he was mentally conditioned to believe it was disgusting. He even went to the doctor about it, and was told it's all in his head, it's just the thought of eating poor people food made him ill.
No, fast food is actually just disgusting lab-made pseudo-food, if you’re accustomed to fresh, whole, real food.
I loved fast food growing up, but after a couple year stint eating only fresh foods, I went back and literally couldn’t stomach it anymore. It tastes good going down. (At the time) I had no conditioning or preconceived beliefs that it was disgusting, but within an hour my stomach felt queasy and I threw it up. After half a dozen times experiencing that, I gave up on fast food entirely.
A former coworker whose parents are rich told me once she didn't understand why young people in our country are not so eager to have kids anymore. I replied that most young people are unemployed and skint including most of my friends, which makes it difficult for obvious reasons. She replied that she did not even have €50000 (about $61000) in her bank account when she had her first kid.
I agree that there are rich people who know little about what it's like to be poor or even middle class. But not all rich people were always rich.
I grew up poor, and was poor as a young adult. After working 2 jobs, going to school and trying to keep my family together on next to nothing, I was able to climb my way up and get to "middle class".
Despite being poor for a while, my kids were happy and they didn't know anything different. When we were able to finally afford cable, my oldest daughter couldn't believe she could watch cartoon network. It was the best feeling knowing that I was able to provide some level of comfort to my family without struggling every month to know how we were going to afford basic utilities and food.
We moved to an apartment near an affluent area where my kids would be able to go to a good school. There we met some very wealthy people. Casual conversations with these people regularly included topics such as going on vacation to Hawaii for a month, going to a ritzy steakhouse for dinner regularly, etc. I was surprised at how these people just expected others to be able to afford the same luxuries.
At the same time, I also met some wealthy people who didn't talk like that. After getting to know some of them, I learned that some actually earned their way there. They grew up poor, worked hard, went to school, worked harder, had some luck by being in the right place at the right time with the right set of skills, and eventually became wealthy.
What I learned during this time is that rich people are not always rich because someone handed it all to them. Some are very much in that category though. You can always tell by their conversations. Rich people who have never been poor or even middle class will converse about things casually that poor people can only dream about, while those who did not grow up rich reserve those conversation topics and are sensitive to other financial situations. This is why I think the 1% is a sliding scale to some extent. It's not a static group of people so we have to stop demonizing all rich people.
I have both my father and my uncle who became dirt poor just by making terribly poor life choices so I've got a very different take on this. They had good jobs but couldn't help screwing it up by: gambling, buying sportcars, overall trying to bite more than they could swallow (houses too big, with monthly mortgage too expensive), etc.
In both cases it ended up with foreclosures / lawyers etc. My brother and I are now sending monthly money to our father because of his bad lifechoices.
And by poor I mean: living in a rusty, broken, RV hidden behind trees, illegally hooked up to electricity (not paying for it) and dumpster diving to find food for his dogs (because of course he was dirt poor but he had to have dogs and rabbits).
I've got friends who have serious issues meeting month's ends yet they buy 5x what I buy online. Every single time I arrive at their home they've got new pointless gadgets bought on Amazon.
There are people spending a fortune, compared to what they make, on packs of cigarettes and daily booze.
When you don't have enough money you don't have a ghetto dog, you don't buy cheap gadgets on Amazon, you don't drink your daily bottle of vodka/whiskey/packs of beer, you don't smoke a pack a day. You don't take a mortgage on a car from a category you can't afford just to keep up with the Joneses when a smaller car would do.
Well, you can... But there are choices and I refuse to accept that there are zero choices. You'll simply never convince me because I've seen it firsthand.
Now I don't tell those around me how they should handle their personal finances but I cannot but think about the many poor decisions I see being made.
And I'm not saying everybody has lots of room: but there are many poor people out there who are poor simply because of their dumb life choices (like my father).
A more distant but very wealthy family member once said that people wouldn't be so poor if they just saved up money. That perfectly illustrated the difficulty rich people have understanding poor people to me.
I was really young, but that really stuck with me.
I grew up poor. We were on food stamps. Most of my adult life I have been making an upper-middle class salary. I have forgotten what it is like to be poor other than some unpleasant memories.
I remember anxiet of all situations were unexpected costs might come up. Car driving- better not get stopped by a cop.Car better not fail. Car better not run out of gas before end of week.
Turning all things around, going bulk cheap over "I-want-this".
Even though I just wrote in another comment about how growing up poor has shaped me, I feel this too. I try to remember, and to pass on what I remember because I think those lessons are important, but I'm also keenly aware that it was a long time ago in a different place. In a way, the most important thing I know and that many around me don't is that there's something to be learned about what it's like to be poor in this time and place. Knowing that a particular piece of knowledge exists at all is the first step to learning it.
A couple of weeks ago, I found myself on a ladder in a basement, doing a bit of plumbing. And I thought, “Isn’t this odd? Here I am, rather well-off, cleaning out the drain for an elderly black gentleman.” And it was more satisfying than most of what I’ve done at a keyboard.
To elaborate, for quite a few years I’ve owned rental property in poor-to-working class parts of town, first houses and then apartments. If you’re a hands-on landlord, you will learn more than you ever wanted to know about money in America. Sure, some tenants are total flakes who would be late on rent after a PowerBall win. Most of my tenants have worked hard, gotten by with little, and struggled to make ends meet. Many of them hesitate to tell me when something needs to be fixed in their home. Often they’re concerned that I am too busy. I tell them they have every right to expect stuff to work, that it’s a part of what they’re paying for. And it makes me wonder how bad things are with other landlords.
Going back to the plumbing story, I think every wealthy hedge-fund manager, etc, ought to get their hands dirty this way. It’ll either teach some humility, or let us see who the real jerks are. The latter can be first up against the wall…
That's an example of seen versus unseen bias. The drain was directly in front of you, and you talked to the person who owned it, so it's easy to understand that someone benefits from it. If you do a job that indirectly makes things 1% better for ten million people, it's hard to have an example you can look at. You may be improving the world more, yet feel like you're improving it less, because humans don't really understand indirect effects except intellectually, and that isn't very satisfying.
> [I]t makes me wonder how bad things are with other landlords.
Pretty darn bad. One landlord I had was constantly playing musical chairs with appliances (stoves, refrigerators, air-conditioners) that were replaced with ones that never stayed working for very long before having to be swapped out and repaired (shoddily) again.
Another got rid of tenants at the end of their lease (never longer than a year) no matter what in order to raise rents to whatever (they thought) the market would bear. They preferred having half of their units empty over not raising rates.
Another considered anyone complaining about another tenant or being complained about to be a 'problem' necessitating removal ASAP, and forget about your security deposit.
In that experiment, one of the players would get more initial money and two dice rolls per turn (instead of one). Then, even though it was clear that the game was rigged in their favor, they would act as if it was their own superior game skills that allowed them to win, mocking the other players at the same time.
I think that this is true.
This is also true that you can't understand what it is of being powerful or rich when you're not.
In a general way, it is very difficult to imagine living in other people's shoes, we live on the same planet, breathing the same air, we have 99.9% the same DNA, but our experience of life and our environment can be widely different.
As a parent, it seems teaching empathy without direct experience, is difficult, if not impossible.
One solution that can work if forcing a person into direct contact with someone experiencing the problem. I see this class politics, and I see this in my job as a Product Designer.
Poor people in the U.S. are not really poor. This is the irony in the article and a lot of comments I see. You are acting out the same headline, but in perspective of real poverty.
Did you grow up in a town with dirt roads? Did your neighbors live in cardboard and aluminum self-made housing? Did your family struggle to eat and everyone around you is so skinny that fat people are a rare sight? These are some markers of being poor, and most "poor" people in the U.S. cannot imagine this life. People talking how they are poor because of their stock wealth... poor people won't even have this on their horizon.
Also, yes, my family was very poor in Latin America, and that is why I had no childhood and worked literally all my life, having little friends and romantic life. There are just not enough resources to even do what "poor" people in America take for granted.
You don't even have to be rich to have trouble understanding the poor. I am middle to upper-middle class, and I once found myself in a delicate situation: my desktop's PSU had given up the ghost and I urgently needed a new one. My savings were illiquid at the moment and I had to pay a building contractor a few days before, almost emptying out my checking account, so I had to literally calculate how much I could spend on a PSU to afford groceries until my next paycheck without dipping into any form of credit.
That was a completely alien feeling, and I still can't imagine how taxing it must be to budget everything, to juggle expenses and loans, to knowingly miss due payments, to be one speeding ticket away from literally not having enough money to feed your family and to be in that state not just for one week or one month, but for years and years.
I grew up working poor, then struck it rich in the software biz and became a millionaire, then got sick and became homeless. My take on it is the rich and poor both struggle with money anxieties. A significant difference between being rich and being poor is the way other people treat you. When I was rich everyone wanted to be my friend and help me out. When I was poor I suffered judgements of all types from people; scorn, contempt, pity, avoidance and generally being considered a person no one wanted to associate with. I thought it was interesting and said more about my fellow Americans than myself, but it did hurt all the same.
I definitely attribute people's actions to their own willful choices. But I think a corollary is that the more intelligent you are, the more you see how objectively bad people's choices really are, regardless of their class. Taking everyone's bad decisions as serious character flaws would be untenable, so I have to give up and just be tolerant.
As such, it's easier for me to sympathize with a poor person who makes bad decisions due to inescapable financial stress (even though I've never been there myself), than someone upper middle class who has mortgaged their entire life to keep up with the Joneses. The latter seems to have much more opportunity to slow down and choose differently.
[+] [-] nanis|4 years ago|reply
You accumulate wealth out of what you can set aside out of the flow.
Some of us immigrants do not come to this country with an existing stock of wealth either back home or here. We are also not in the favored group of immigrants. We have human capital which we are trying to convert to financial capital for the next generation.
Then, when we sort of "make it" here, people who have family homes worth close to million and up (you can draw on that home equity, you know), people who know people (either family or others) who can "help" them with down-payments etc label us rich based on the flow we are receiving right now. These people tend to themselves make in the $150K range, in my experience and do not realize that the wealth they have was already accumulated in the less punitive environment of the 80s and the 90s.
I do not begrudge anyone for what they have. But I do find people who got a "hand-me down" apartment in Manhattan after growing up in a nice house in Westchester lecturing me about "the rich" and "the poor".
Except that my ability to make it in today's corporate environment depends on their political sensibilities.
[+] [-] hn_throwaway_99|4 years ago|reply
I mean, in my raging inferno of a housing market, over the past couple of years home prices have easily doubled. So a 400k house from 2018 now sells for 800k. Yes, if I want to move to another house in my area I'll pay similarly astronomical prices, but that just means it's about a wash for me, and of course I have many more options like moving to a cheaper locale or a cash out refi.
But if I (or my parents) don't already own a home, it means my chances of ever owning a home in my area just went to about zero. People made vastly more money just sitting around in their houses in the past couple years than I made in my job as an "essential" worker over the past decade.
I just don't see how this ends well.
[+] [-] NikolaNovak|4 years ago|reply
5-7 years after arriving, our income was nominal. But having arrived to Canada with literally a suitcase of clothes each, the prospects, in particularly retirement, were substantially different.
It works both ways sometimes though - not only is it difficult for those born here to understand the difference, we too have to mentally remind ourselves - just because I make as much money as my best friends, I should not indulge in quite the same lifestyle; when it comes to "wealth", they are WAY ahead (some got an apartment as gift from parents, others had their university education paid for, trusts and RESP/RRSPs, etc etc).
[+] [-] globular-toast|4 years ago|reply
It doesn't get my down, though. Those people with those houses rarely know what they have. It doesn't make them any happier. I'm happy knowing that everything I have has been earnt by me. I'm not sure I would be so happy if I didn't earn a very good salary, though.
[+] [-] throw0101a|4 years ago|reply
And this is where the idea (now myth?) of the American Dream came from.
When America was young, no one really had much capital. Also true for periods of large scale immigration: most folks were 'equal' in the sense of not having much of anything.
Over time wealth got concentrated, but with the Great Depression and the WW2 war economy, capital was generally became more equalized in the early- and mid-20th century.
Of course in the last 50+ years there have been no 'equalization events', and so the concentration of wealth has managed to run for a while without interruption with the obvious results.
Piketty has a lot of historical data that shows this process for number of countries:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_in_the_Twenty-First_Ce...
[+] [-] kazinator|4 years ago|reply
In an electronic circuit, if you have an unlimited supply of current, you don't need to hoard electrons in big capacitors.
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] eplanit|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] christiansakai|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Juntu|4 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] bachmeier|4 years ago|reply
It's not about lack of money (though obviously having lots of money means you're not poor). It's about insecurity. I grew up in farm country in the 1980s. Nobody had money, but I didn't feel poor. When I moved to other parts of the country, that's when I encountered poor people. They had to worry about crime, schools for their kids, and being homeless.
When you skip meals because you have to put two gallons of gas in the car so you can get to work the rest of the week, that's when you're poor. Or when you're under constant stress because you're worried about what's going to go wrong next, and when you spend all your time on stuff like where you'll spend your last $12 because that's all you've got. It's hard to understand what it's like to be poor because you don't even realize that's part of the deal.
The other thing is that there's a saying along the lines of getting wealthy being mostly the same for everyone, but every poor person is poor for different reasons. One example is a guy I knew in the 1990s that worked hard at a low-wage job. He got hit by a car while walking across the street. The driver got away and left him laying there. He couldn't work for months. The non-poor person's solution is to move in with their parents or to have their parents send them money. Maybe put things on the credit card. Maybe take money out of savings. He didn't have those options. How do you financially recover from something like this if once you go back to work, you're making the same low wage?
[+] [-] flavius29663|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spzb|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zepto|4 years ago|reply
What does this mean?
[+] [-] prepend|4 years ago|reply
It’s like trying to build a robot to love me when the simplest thing is just to form relationships.
Stronger community bonds seem like the only long term solution to the problem of being taken care of when a hit and run driver knocks me out for a bit.
Of course short term disability insurance is effective for this specific instance, but loving parents, sibs, kids, cousins, etc is probably more robust.
[+] [-] voidfunc|4 years ago|reply
I have a few friends that are poor... I feel for their issues, I always try and help out when asked, but I also know to keep my mouth shut about problems the poor face or how I think they should solve the problem because my solutions are usually so detached from the reality of their grinding life that it comes off as patronizing and unempathetic.
My dad gets it, he grew up as a poor kid in an Italian immigrant household. First kid to college and then he did really well after that in business. He understands it in ways I'll never know. He mostly keeps his opinions to himself on the matter but I've never heard him rattle off any easy solutions or tropes like "they just need to work harder" because he knows his mother and father busted their butts and never stopped being poor. It was only when he became an adult and started making money that he could help them live comfortably.
My mother (love her) she grew up middle class during the American Dream years of the 50's and 60's and has never known poverty either, but she has strong opinions on it... always of the variety of they are "lazy" or need to "work harder", or the solutions are impractical or grounded in a reality that hasn't existed since the early 70s. I think my Dad has given up at this point changing her mind as they're both well into their 70s, but yea I never want to be like my mother.
[+] [-] mlac|4 years ago|reply
Diapers are sold as single items in corner stores in low income areas at extreme markups, and sometimes parents can only afford one a day. If the baby poops or pees right after the change… Well. Yeah.
I serve on the board of one [1], and we’ve had events that have given out 100k diapers to those in need in a day. The frustrating thing is that there is no sustainable model here - the diaper banks get donations from companies and and we can buy them using donated money / grants for a discount, but we obviously don’t charge those who need them for the diapers (and I do not believe we can sell them as a bank).
I think there are two main pain points for people who do not have a lot of money:
1) There are economies of scale as you “level up” in income - cost per diaper gets much cheaper when you can buy from Sam’s club vs. paying $1 per at the corner store. Even shopping at Sam’s is out the window because it assumes you have a car to get there…
2) the “fixed costs” of life are fairly standard. It takes a salary of $85K for the happiness to have marginal returns, and I think this is because you hit the point where your basic needs are met for an American lifestyle and everything else is gravy. It covers medical (within reason), insurance, transportation, some fun thing, housing, food, etc. and gets you to the level where you can finally get ahead.
[1] https://www.wpadiaperbank.org/
[2] https://www.businessinsider.com/personal-finance/money-buys-...
[+] [-] 9dev|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hn8788|4 years ago|reply
He was also the only person I've seen who made me consider that "afluenza" might be a real thing. He would get super bad stomach aches and diarrhea any time he ate fast food because he was mentally conditioned to believe it was disgusting. He even went to the doctor about it, and was told it's all in his head, it's just the thought of eating poor people food made him ill.
[+] [-] renewiltord|4 years ago|reply
Doctors aren’t infallible.
[+] [-] benttoothpaste|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Simon_says|4 years ago|reply
I loved fast food growing up, but after a couple year stint eating only fresh foods, I went back and literally couldn’t stomach it anymore. It tastes good going down. (At the time) I had no conditioning or preconceived beliefs that it was disgusting, but within an hour my stomach felt queasy and I threw it up. After half a dozen times experiencing that, I gave up on fast food entirely.
[+] [-] mkl95|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jonnylynchy|4 years ago|reply
I grew up poor, and was poor as a young adult. After working 2 jobs, going to school and trying to keep my family together on next to nothing, I was able to climb my way up and get to "middle class".
Despite being poor for a while, my kids were happy and they didn't know anything different. When we were able to finally afford cable, my oldest daughter couldn't believe she could watch cartoon network. It was the best feeling knowing that I was able to provide some level of comfort to my family without struggling every month to know how we were going to afford basic utilities and food.
We moved to an apartment near an affluent area where my kids would be able to go to a good school. There we met some very wealthy people. Casual conversations with these people regularly included topics such as going on vacation to Hawaii for a month, going to a ritzy steakhouse for dinner regularly, etc. I was surprised at how these people just expected others to be able to afford the same luxuries.
At the same time, I also met some wealthy people who didn't talk like that. After getting to know some of them, I learned that some actually earned their way there. They grew up poor, worked hard, went to school, worked harder, had some luck by being in the right place at the right time with the right set of skills, and eventually became wealthy.
What I learned during this time is that rich people are not always rich because someone handed it all to them. Some are very much in that category though. You can always tell by their conversations. Rich people who have never been poor or even middle class will converse about things casually that poor people can only dream about, while those who did not grow up rich reserve those conversation topics and are sensitive to other financial situations. This is why I think the 1% is a sliding scale to some extent. It's not a static group of people so we have to stop demonizing all rich people.
[+] [-] TacticalCoder|4 years ago|reply
In both cases it ended up with foreclosures / lawyers etc. My brother and I are now sending monthly money to our father because of his bad lifechoices.
And by poor I mean: living in a rusty, broken, RV hidden behind trees, illegally hooked up to electricity (not paying for it) and dumpster diving to find food for his dogs (because of course he was dirt poor but he had to have dogs and rabbits).
I've got friends who have serious issues meeting month's ends yet they buy 5x what I buy online. Every single time I arrive at their home they've got new pointless gadgets bought on Amazon.
There are people spending a fortune, compared to what they make, on packs of cigarettes and daily booze.
When you don't have enough money you don't have a ghetto dog, you don't buy cheap gadgets on Amazon, you don't drink your daily bottle of vodka/whiskey/packs of beer, you don't smoke a pack a day. You don't take a mortgage on a car from a category you can't afford just to keep up with the Joneses when a smaller car would do.
Well, you can... But there are choices and I refuse to accept that there are zero choices. You'll simply never convince me because I've seen it firsthand.
Now I don't tell those around me how they should handle their personal finances but I cannot but think about the many poor decisions I see being made.
And I'm not saying everybody has lots of room: but there are many poor people out there who are poor simply because of their dumb life choices (like my father).
[+] [-] FriedrichN|4 years ago|reply
I was really young, but that really stuck with me.
[+] [-] fnord77|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DayDollar|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] notacoward|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] allenrb|4 years ago|reply
To elaborate, for quite a few years I’ve owned rental property in poor-to-working class parts of town, first houses and then apartments. If you’re a hands-on landlord, you will learn more than you ever wanted to know about money in America. Sure, some tenants are total flakes who would be late on rent after a PowerBall win. Most of my tenants have worked hard, gotten by with little, and struggled to make ends meet. Many of them hesitate to tell me when something needs to be fixed in their home. Often they’re concerned that I am too busy. I tell them they have every right to expect stuff to work, that it’s a part of what they’re paying for. And it makes me wonder how bad things are with other landlords.
Going back to the plumbing story, I think every wealthy hedge-fund manager, etc, ought to get their hands dirty this way. It’ll either teach some humility, or let us see who the real jerks are. The latter can be first up against the wall…
[+] [-] Jiro|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] webmaven|4 years ago|reply
Pretty darn bad. One landlord I had was constantly playing musical chairs with appliances (stoves, refrigerators, air-conditioners) that were replaced with ones that never stayed working for very long before having to be swapped out and repaired (shoddily) again.
Another got rid of tenants at the end of their lease (never longer than a year) no matter what in order to raise rents to whatever (they thought) the market would bear. They preferred having half of their units empty over not raising rates.
Another considered anyone complaining about another tenant or being complained about to be a 'problem' necessitating removal ASAP, and forget about your security deposit.
[+] [-] nceqs3|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ta1234567890|4 years ago|reply
In that experiment, one of the players would get more initial money and two dice rolls per turn (instead of one). Then, even though it was clear that the game was rigged in their favor, they would act as if it was their own superior game skills that allowed them to win, mocking the other players at the same time.
[+] [-] stephc_int13|4 years ago|reply
In a general way, it is very difficult to imagine living in other people's shoes, we live on the same planet, breathing the same air, we have 99.9% the same DNA, but our experience of life and our environment can be widely different.
[+] [-] nipponese|4 years ago|reply
One solution that can work if forcing a person into direct contact with someone experiencing the problem. I see this class politics, and I see this in my job as a Product Designer.
[+] [-] proc0|4 years ago|reply
Did you grow up in a town with dirt roads? Did your neighbors live in cardboard and aluminum self-made housing? Did your family struggle to eat and everyone around you is so skinny that fat people are a rare sight? These are some markers of being poor, and most "poor" people in the U.S. cannot imagine this life. People talking how they are poor because of their stock wealth... poor people won't even have this on their horizon.
Also, yes, my family was very poor in Latin America, and that is why I had no childhood and worked literally all my life, having little friends and romantic life. There are just not enough resources to even do what "poor" people in America take for granted.
[+] [-] orthoxerox|4 years ago|reply
That was a completely alien feeling, and I still can't imagine how taxing it must be to budget everything, to juggle expenses and loans, to knowingly miss due payments, to be one speeding ticket away from literally not having enough money to feed your family and to be in that state not just for one week or one month, but for years and years.
[+] [-] okareaman|4 years ago|reply
Edit: Scrapper Blackwell - Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=626pNZB8xXE
[+] [-] stephc_int13|4 years ago|reply
By all means, the opposite is true, and I bet this can be theoretically proven.
Wealth (and power) naturally trickles up. (not down!)
[+] [-] mindslight|4 years ago|reply
As such, it's easier for me to sympathize with a poor person who makes bad decisions due to inescapable financial stress (even though I've never been there myself), than someone upper middle class who has mortgaged their entire life to keep up with the Joneses. The latter seems to have much more opportunity to slow down and choose differently.
[+] [-] jheriko|4 years ago|reply
we even do this to ourselves when remembering our pasts.