Coming from poverty, I work with plenty of talented people, but nowhere as talented as the people I've studied in shitty schools.
Now most of those people from my poverty times continue to be poor, because of many problems poverty brought to them. I can clearly see that, and that I was the lucky one to find a way up many times.
Yet, my new social circle believe that I'm talented because of my DNA and efforts, and blame others for their poverty.
But I know that those people making "poor" decisions in the view of riches are actually just trying to survive. With themselves, with the baggage they carry, and to the fact that they weren't as lucky as me.
Talent, intelligence is literally everywhere. People that are awesome and ambitious is abundant.
Nobody is really much better than others, but America post-ww2 managed to sell this idea to everyone, including many really smart and talented folks, that think they are gifted.
To sum up, nobody chooses to be poor and humanity could progress faster if we focused instead in eliminating poverty, creating more possibilities for everyone...
Than believing almost trillionaries will guide us to where we need it.
Some people are indeed much better. Anyone who played sports as a kid understands this. Huge differences are immediately apparent in small children. But generally, I agree that, for most life tasks, the differences between people are not enormous. Humanity could do a much better job eliminating poverty. In the future, we may view enormous disparities in wealth as evil as we do racism today.
A university professor's personal observations about how a typical city college student faces myriad obstacles to success with little support, whereas a typical student at an elite college must practically struggle to fall through all the safety nets and actually fail. The article should be required reading for anyone who is or has been in any way involved with a higher-tier university in the United States.
The correlation of IQ with income is 0.30[0]. Educational attainment is 0.32. So if you are intelligent (talented) or educated then you are statistically likely to have above average income. If you have both even more so.
I agree with you, talent's abundant. Something is very badly wrong with our societies and economic systems if so much of that talent is in the mud and unusable.
> I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.
Strongly disagree. I went to an average school in Russia where I was from one of the poorest families, then hung out a few times with people from a selective maths focused school where I was invited but didn't go to because I was lazy, then later lived for a few years in a worse neighborhood and hung out with my neighbors (ranging from ex cons to people working construction and loading dock), and I've worked in tech obviously.
Sure there are better and worse people everywhere, but on average the more meritocratic the system, the more poor people suck! With the exception of immigrants who start from 0.
In completely non-meritocratic system like Soviet Union you could have people living next door to each other in similar conditions, who went to the same schools and had the same opportunities, and one would be a Physics professor and the other a raging alcoholic. A system where equality is not forced just sorts them better.
Many people are really much better than others at most things, including merely being a decent worker/friend/partner. And many are worse
I have a similar experience but have a different opinion.
I am 100% lucky that I was in the right place at the right time so that I could be offered the opportunities that I had.
But I think you have to be disciplined in that you must try and try and try to do everything in your power to put yourself in the right place. Of course, even if you do this, you might never be given the opportunity. But if you don't try, you _definitely_ won't.
Many of the people I grew up with did not do this. They had the ability to do it, but they lacked initiative or the ambition. They were complacent with what they had, even though it was very little.
Not everyone comes from an unbroken home, or had a support network to do these things - I get that. But I see many people that could do better and just don't do it for what I'd guess is because it's hard. Instead they make bad decisions that are easy and increase quality of life on the short term: racking up debt, having kids at a young age without a career, etc.
Do people not shoulder some of the blame in today's information age?
To anyone interested in how poverty (and scarcity in general) affects our mental state, and thus our ability to function well and improve our lives, I'd highly recommend the book _Scarcity_ by Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir. I've found it quite illuminating and interesting. It's written from an academic perspective, so it has plenty of research behind it, and the narrative flow is not bad.
If you want something more concise and to the point, the article "The Science of Scarcity" [0] in Harvard Magazine provides a pretty good summary of the book.
The themes from the book complement those in the article fairly well.
It's hard to explain what life is like as a formerly very poor™ person to people who have never experienced it.
Like, every once in a while I get a craving for poverty comfort foods like ramen with frozen veggies, a slice of American cheese, and a sliced up microwaved hotdog.
Or trying to explain why it's so hard for me to let go of a 20 year old pickup truck that still works because I used to sleep in it.
Or how no matter how much money I earn now I always feel poor and one step away from homelessness.
How I won't go and buy new clothes, why I shop at thrift stores and pawn shops when I can afford new, how I don't feel like I own anything, why I always plan for and expect the worst out of every event and encounter I have, how I dedicate my self to working hard so that the places I work at can't "afford" to fire me, so much so that I have been accused of being an overworker and a slave driver.
On an income basis I'm probably at the top for my entire family right now, but years of homelessness and over a decade of extreme poverty have made their marks on my life and I don't know if it will ever get better. I could win the lottery and I'd still be cutting coupons and searching deal sites for discount codes, wearing discount clothes and shopping in pawn shops.
The conservative worldview, the strict father model, assumes that the world is dangerous and difficult and that children are born bad and must be made good. The strict father is the moral authority who supports and defends the family, tells his wife what to do, and teaches his kids right from wrong. The only way to do that is through painful discipline - physical punishment that by adulthood will become internal discipline. The good people are the disciplined people. Once grown, the self-reliant, disciplined children are on their own. Those children who remain dependent (who were spoiled, overly willful, or recalcitrant) should be forced to undergo further discipline or be cut free with no support to face the discipline of the outside world.
So, project this onto the nation and you see that to the right wing, the good citizens are the disciplined ones - those who have already become wealthy or at least self-reliant - and those who are on the way. Social programs, meanwhile, "spoil" people by giving them things they haven't earned and keeping them dependent. The government is there only to protect the nation, maintain order, administer justice (punishment), and to provide for the promotion and orderly conduct of business. In this way, disciplined people become self-reliant. Wealth is a measure of discipline. Taxes beyond the minimum needed for such government take away from the good, disciplined people rewards that they have earned and spend it on those who have not earned it.
I think plenty of people are well aware of this. That's why parents insist for the best possible education for their children - they know that it's the credentials carried by the diploma, and not the child's actual talents (or lack or thereof) will decide the future quality of life of the child. Cue in tutoring, extensive paid college exam/SAT prep etc.
This took me several decades to grasp and then "forgive" myself for not being the person I wanted to be. I also think it is a message that is worth spreading, particularly among young folks.
It's quite easy to amalgamate the concept of meritocracy with that of success, such that a lack of the latter implies a lack of the former. This is (or, at least for me, it was) an endless supply of anxiety of pain, which is completely unfounded.
Everyone fails dozens of times before hitting on something good, it's just the nature of things. Some lucky people can just fail as much as they need to, while some other's can't even afford to try even once. I read this somewhere else and stuck with me, "people don't make better choices, they just have better choices".
> humanity could progress faster if we focused instead in eliminating poverty, creating more possibilities for everyone...
Those with the wealth and the power to change this, don't have an interest in spreading out welfare and therefore making themselves less wealthy and powerful in the process, but enriching themselves or at least maintaining the status quo, and that usually comes at the expense of keeping those less fortunate where they are.
A lot of goods and services that we take for granted in the west, like commodities in our daily lives: cheap cocoa, cheap coffee, cheap exotic fruits, cheap sneakers and clothing, cheap electronic gadgets, all rely on an underclass of less fortunate people who have no choice in life but be prisoners in a neo-slavery system where they have to work in their given conditions for the give pay, with no way up or out.
Please google and check out the human exploitations going on in cocoa and coffee farming at your own discretion.
Do you think the kids and adults working on those farms for pennies in the beating sun and bitten by mosquitos, wouldn't rather do something else with their lives than picking coffee beans, like go to school/university and work in an office? But if we would spread welfare for them to have that choice, who would then choose work in those bad conditions for nothing to provide western consumers with cheap commodities? Robots aren't even remotely there yet. Same with mining minerals to make iPhones, PlayStations and EVs.
If we were to make their lives and jobs fair while also watching over the environment, then the price of commodities would explode, so the mega conglomerates who own these markets, like Nestle or Apple for example, would have to take a missive hit on their profits, or the western consumers would have to stomach the explosion in prices, or both simultaneously, neither of which are acceptable trade-offs in the west, so we keep the status quo of having to rely on perpetual underclasses of people slaving away in poverty for us, while pretending we're great humanitarians and benefactors.
I said "we" here, because it's not just the great evil billionaires like Bezos, Jobs, Saudis, and so many others who profit from and enable this exploitation, but also the western governments like US, Switzerland, Netherlands, etc. where they're HQ but have the audacity to lecture them on human rights and environment concerns, plus the individual shareholders, employees, taxpayers and consumers who enable them as well.
Sure, a lot of people in poor nations got out of poverty "thanks" to globalization and mega conglomerates outsourcing of less desirable manufacturing and services there, but let's not forget they didn't do this out of the goodness of their hearts, but to extract even more profits. People getting out of poverty was just a happy side effect.
Coming from the middle class, I've never met anybody talented coming from a shitty school who didn't also get filtered into a gifted program at a good school. Maybe your school system just wasn't competent at filtering people?
Those that I know who have made bad life decisions (kids too early, dropping out of college, leaving extremely supportive parents) could totally have been expected to based off looking at GPA/SAT signals.
Reading this, I kept feeling a sense that something was missing. It wasn't until later in the blog that I hit me.
"Where is her community?"
To a 3rd world immigrant, the idea of being this isolated in your the country you were born in, feels unfathomable.
Back home, It's common for kids to live with their parents until the kids are ready, often until age 25-30. Alternatively, people will stuff themselves like sardines in a large house, to save money; but even more importantly, to find an accidental community among your fellow poor.
Among poor people, a rotating-rep would buy in bulk for the whole community and then distribute among themselves. Saving money and time.
The father sounds like a deadbeat too, given his curious omission from the whole blog.
Jack really did suffer alone. As someone who has moved from a 3rd world nation to the US, this part of the west scares me. The lack of assistance from your local and blood community is one of the west's greatest short comings. I for one, hope never to give that part of my 3rd world self up.
Individuality and Independance, should not mean distancing yourself from your support system. Or so I hope.
> Before long, Monroe was using a food bank. “It had taken me four or five weeks to pluck up the courage to go. The first time, one of the women looked at me and I looked at her. She went to church with my mum. She said, ‘Your mum will be devastated.’ And I said, ‘You can’t tell anyone. You haven’t seen me.’ She said, ‘Your parents will help you,’ and I said, ‘They can’t know.’”
> That’s what I don’t understand, I say. Why didn’t you tell your parents when they were in a position to help? “Because … ” For once, she slows down. “I was ashamed. I was ashamed that I had had a good job and I’d fucked it. I was embarrassed that I’d ended up not being able to provide for my son, and I was worried that if I told a soul, the walls would come crumbling down. Because my parents had fostered for most of my childhood, I’d grown up with this fear that if I ever had a child, he would be taken into care. That I would be an unfit mother. I’d grown up with almost 100 children revolving through my childhood home. So in my head, nearly every kid went into care because nearly every kid I came across was in the care system. I was terrified that if I told anyone, my son would be taken into care.”
So the shame itself was one of the biggest obstacles - compounded by the idea that poverty is evidence of personal inadequacy or moral weakness.
There is a problem with lack of community there: the feeling that really struggling means that you don't deserve help, because that's the message you get from your society. (And it certainly doesn't help that lack of money excludes you from all kinds of normal social activities, as she mentions in the article.)
> The father sounds like a deadbeat too, given his curious omission from the whole blog.
Maybe he passed away. Maybe she left him because she just wanted the kid. I don't know why you assume wrongdoing while, as you pointed out, no details is given.
You could ask the same of homeless people, drug addicts, people with mental issues, people from foster care, criminals, the elderly. Some people lose their community, and don't have the tools or capacity to build a new one. Single mothers are one of those groups that can quickly be kicked out of, or need to escape from, their community, and have a hard time building a new one.
Growing up in the USA, I don't think it's the West that has a problem with community - I think it's the Caucasian West. Latin/Hispanic families are highly connected, as are Asian, Indian, Middle Eastern, etc. Some cultures are highly collective and have strong support structures for extended family. Immigrant communities also tend to have stronger bonds as they may depend more on each other in a new land. OTOH some cultures are more individualist, having expanded the concept of the "nuclear family" in the early 20th century, weakening extended family bonds. In the conservative caucasian West, the nuclear family is now seen as the "traditional" family structure, which is odd, because everywhere else in the world it's non-traditional.
Not due to the lack of others help. Sure, one of her brothers didn’t help, but her parents fed her and helped her during her pregnancy. The father of the son shares responsibility. See the below Guardian article[1].
I get the feeling she is one of those people who is an exceptionally brilliant narrator, knows how to captivate and truly reach their audience. Like a lot of politicians and public figures.
“Sometimes I just want to run back home and live with my parents, at the age of 32, and beg them to take care of me. I’ll be very quiet. I can cook, and I promise not to say f*ck in front of the children, Mum.”
This seems spoken as a cry of desperation, but outside of the anglosphere it would be quite normal. If I were living as desperately as this person seems to be, and with a child to take care of, my (elderly, immigrant) parents would be begging me to come home so they could help me get back on my feet. Not because they are wealthy, but because in most of the world family is the most important thing.
This keeps happening to me. I read a feelgood story, visit the wiki page and then realize how muddy the water is:
>> Monroe has been described as an "austerity celebrity". In a January 2023 interview with Simon Hattenstone in The Guardian, Monroe acknowledged that she had recklessly spent money given by backers; she claimed "I'd go online absolutely shitfaced and buy nice furniture."
Granted most poor people do stupid stuff after getting monies, but the charm of the tale is diminished.
Good heavens, this is some writing. Deeply relatable as someone who has also lived in not so nice circumstances in the UK for much of my life. I like to think i'm on the way to escaping it but we'll see.
Especially the pics of rice with various vegetables. I'll always have a bag of rice and a bag of frozen veg just in case, even if I become a billionaire somehow.
This is a great article. How it ended up on HN I don't know, but can somebody please start submitting more like this, and fewer techno-babble thinkpieces by junior javascript contractors who host their own mail?
Humm, I have a feeling part of the story is missing here, even though i can relate as i was myself a minimum wage worker in the hospitality industry in Britain for a while (back in 1999, my annual wage was something like 8500 pounds). Long odd hours, not so pleasant interfacing with customers, 7 people sharing a flat in London, so broke at the end of the month that walking from Mayfair to Canada Water was reality because no money for public transport....
Yet, as a foreigner, I (We, as a matter of fact, since all my friends and colleagues were either german, italian, spanish, chinese...) had no real social safety net to rely on. We couldn't go back to our family (500 miles away) with our tail between our legs in case we really fucked up.
Something isn't clear in this writer's account of the reason of her living in poverty, whether it is a story of mental illness, child abuse... things i witnessed years later when i bought a flat in Barking (poor white area of greater London) and this i feel would need to be clarified for me to be able to accept the conclusion that "poverty is largely accidental", especially coming from someone quite so articulate.
The first portion of this had me thinking constantly “this person must have ADHD”. It was almost a relief when it was mentioned.
I feel like this is the dark side of the condition that isn’t talked about as much. If you have adhd, you are far more likely to wind up suicidal, in poverty, abusing drugs, etc. But these things occur on a spectrum. That is to say, far more of us still might not be in abject poverty, but the same tendencies and deficiencies hold us down and cause disproportionate suffering. It’s a constant struggle not to let it pull you even further down. You might not be in the suicide/poverty/drug abuse part of the statistic, but you might be working pretty hard not to be. It’s not a great way to exist, sometimes.
Although I own a nice home and have a good job now, I don’t think I’ll ever have a sense of security or safety, or even stop having the internal sense that I’m still living in poverty. It’s hard to shake that.
Yes I thought this too. Perhaps because it mirrored my experience of similar situations. I glad to see a comment like yours because it could mean we’re starting to recognise this condition in adult women a little more than we have been over the last few decades. That gives me hope! Not least because i have seen the horrible impact it can have if left untreated.
Would it not be better if they spent more money on wholesome things
like oranges and wholemeal bread or if they even, like the
writer of the letter to the New Statesman, saved on fuel and
ate their carrots raw? Yes, it would, but the point is that
no ordinary human being is ever going to do such a thing.
The ordinary human being would sooner starve than live on
brown bread and raw carrots. And the peculiar evil is this,
that the less money you have, the less inclined you feel to
spend it on wholesome food. A millionaire may enjoy breakfasting off orange juice and Ryvita biscuits; an unemployed
man doesn’t. When you are unemployed,
which is to say when you are underfed, harassed, bored,
and miserable, you don’t want to eat dull wholesome food.
You want something a little bit ’tasty’. There is always some
cheaply pleasant thing to tempt you. Let’s have three pennorth of chips! Run out and buy us a twopenny ice-cream!
Put the kettle on and we’ll all have a nice cup of tea! That
is how your mind works when you are at the P.A.C. level.
White bread-and-marg and sugared tea don’t nourish you to
any extent, but they are nicer (at least most people think so)
than brown bread-and-dripping and cold water. Unemployment is an endless misery that has got to be constantly palliated, and especially with tea, the English-man’s opium. A cup of tea or even an aspirin is much better as a temporary
stimulant than a crust of brown bread.
'The Road to Wigan Pier' and 'Down and Out in Paris and London' (also by Orwell) are the starkest accounts of poverty and what it does to you I have ever read.
>> Sometimes I just want to run back home and live with my parents, at the age of 32, and beg them to take care of me.
Well this doesn't sound like someone who is destitute and with no safety net whatsoever.
What's so wrong living with your parents? For most of human history it was the normal thing to do. Parents will take care of kids and one of them will inherit the parent's house and take care of the old parents. Have his own kids and have the grandparents helping with raising them.
Also I'm not so sure about UK but around here there's quite a significant rural population. Not everyone can or wants to make it in the big city. Life in the countryside is a lot cheaper, everything's cheaper. House prices are a joke compared to big cities and still villages get slow but steady depopulated.
On the other hand I do know people, excluding the homeless, who really have nothing. Father lost the apartment to gambling then disappeared, mother died, kid got evicted in the street in the middle of the winter, worked heavy construction jobs until got sick and had to file for disability and now all his income is a miserable pension that can't even pay for food let alone a rent in the city. And he's better off than the homeless or the gypsies who live off the city's garbage dump.
So I'm not saying the author has it easy but rather than some of it is a deliberate choice.
I dunno why people who clearly, viscerally project that they are from the “unfortunates” outgroup so insist that it is their “choices” that landed them there. Clearly they look down on them and don’t feel that their status is going to improve by haranguing them. It’s easier to understand the social proof chasers who easily adapt to the milieu of privilege-speak; then they fall over themselves to insist that they are from an even more disenfranchised background than the previous speaker—and certainly that they are humble too, oh so humble, because they might be in the top income bracket but right over there gestures to old friends for the Grace of God go I.
One if the worst parts of poverty is that it steals all of your time!
All your time is devoted to just surviving, so you can never really better you situation.
You want to improve your situation? Not happening, you gotta work 60 hours this week so you cant study for that AWS cert or medical coding cert.
Then the job you work is most likely dead end with no advancement or fake advancement.
So you live pay check to paycheck with no hope of escape.
Then if you dont have parents or luck... to help one catastrophe and youre doomed.
And luck is not a strategy.
You literally are trapped by capitalism.
Then even if youre able to scrape together some time every week to better yourself... so many artificial walls have been erected to prevent smart hardworking people from entering professions.
That includes jacking prices on universities and industries requiring university education for licenses instead of a test/apprenticeship.
Things you used to be able to do without formal schooling: law, cpa, PE, teaching, hair dressing, and more.
Basically massive friction has been added to smart hard working people trying to skill up instead of supporting people skilling up to their potential.
Tech is one of the few actually meritocratic middle class industries left but is now getting watered down by the entire world entering the industry.
As a side note, think of all the wasted potential that could be bettering the human race who are trapped in the cycle of poverty.
There could be a Mozart out there whose parents can't afford a fucking keyboard.
Before reading this essay, it may be useful to get some biographical background on the author, as she talks a lot about isolated snippets but otherwise provides no context for her life and how she got where she did: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Monroe
Part of this frustrates me, gives me ill thoughts, about the many various dysfunctions. But I think it kind of won me over anyways, gave me some connection to long hard trauma that starts to explain trauma response. Amid a system with collapsed safety nets.
But speaking of connection, the humble beginnings story, of how she wrote her way towards something somewhat better makes me somewhat swell with pride, that people have these devices & are connected & can speak as we do:
> I wrote the majority of A Girl Called Jack by email on a Nokia E72. I still have it in my desk drawer, and every now and then I just stare at it, and its tiny awful buttons, and wonder how the f*ck I did it. Because I had no other choice but to. It was my one chance at escape, my yellow brick road, my shiny red slippers, and I took it.
> still don’t have contents insurance (a hangover from poverty, I just wasn’t in the habit of insuring things and now keep putting it off, because paperwork terrifies me)
The author seems to be from UK. Is contents insurance a thing in UK? How many renters really do buy contents insurance? Genuinely interested to know how many think that contents insurance is worth it?
I've had content insurance as a renter before, and it was useful (my flat was burgled; my flatmate did not have insurance).
That was a while ago, when things like CDs were still targetted by theives, and I got everything replaced, which would have cost me thousands.
I still keep contents insurance; haven't claimed on it more than once in a couple decades though - it's there for the case where my appartment is destroyed (I live in a block of flats), and it's nice to have the lost property/damaged devices cover for travel and general use.
The author suggests her work applies to "obesity", but she is not obese. The obesity rate in the UK is 27%; the poverty rate is 17%, and I doubt the overlap is that strong (the link below supports me). Many of her examples in fact deal with people who can't afford things that aren't food, like a kitchen, or free time.
On the one hand, it's certainly true that the support for the poor is insufficient, but the price of food, being perhaps the lowest it has been in thousands of years in real terms, is probably the wrong lever to pull. Consequently, "food poverty" is a misclassification, since, while spending £7 per week on food, she probably spent more on transportation, housing and possibly clothing (which can be essential to actually getting work), and it would make more of a difference to tackle that. (She recounts severe problems getting a home!)
If she had been able to spend half as much on food, would that meaningfully improve her life? An extra £3.5 per week isn't yanking anyone out of poverty.
In fact, there is more evidence that obesity causes poverty than that poverty contributes to obesity! See:
There are some suggestions that deficiencies in certain minerals, particularly zinc, which is most concentrated in relatively expensive foods like beef and oysters, are correlated with obesity and disordered eating. A bottle of zinc gluconate makes potatoes look like matsutake (at least at wholesale prices), but the safe and effective use of the supplements (avoiding overuse) is not well established or normally recommended.
The point I guess I want to make is that we should have compassion for the author, but that compassion should ignite the best faculties of our minds — the desire to really understand the problem, because that is where solutions come from.
> The obesity rate in the UK is 27%; the poverty rate is 17%, and I doubt the overlap is that strong
US, not the UK:
Counties with poverty rates of >35% have obesity rates 145% greater than wealthy counties.
Back to Europe:
The Paradox of Poverty and Obesity
Among the reasons for the growing obesity in the population of poor people are: higher unemployment, lower education level, and irregular meals. Another cause of obesity is low physical activity, which among the poor is associated with a lack of money for sports equipment.
[+] [-] thiago_fm|2 years ago|reply
Coming from poverty, I work with plenty of talented people, but nowhere as talented as the people I've studied in shitty schools.
Now most of those people from my poverty times continue to be poor, because of many problems poverty brought to them. I can clearly see that, and that I was the lucky one to find a way up many times.
Yet, my new social circle believe that I'm talented because of my DNA and efforts, and blame others for their poverty.
But I know that those people making "poor" decisions in the view of riches are actually just trying to survive. With themselves, with the baggage they carry, and to the fact that they weren't as lucky as me.
Talent, intelligence is literally everywhere. People that are awesome and ambitious is abundant.
Nobody is really much better than others, but America post-ww2 managed to sell this idea to everyone, including many really smart and talented folks, that think they are gifted.
To sum up, nobody chooses to be poor and humanity could progress faster if we focused instead in eliminating poverty, creating more possibilities for everyone...
Than believing almost trillionaries will guide us to where we need it.
[+] [-] dcist|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] elmomle|2 years ago|reply
A university professor's personal observations about how a typical city college student faces myriad obstacles to success with little support, whereas a typical student at an elite college must practically struggle to fall through all the safety nets and actually fail. The article should be required reading for anyone who is or has been in any way involved with a higher-tier university in the United States.
[+] [-] fngjdflmdflg|2 years ago|reply
[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01602... (https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.intell.2007.02....) page 5 table 1.
[+] [-] squidbeak|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AlexandrB|2 years ago|reply
> I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.
[+] [-] sershe|2 years ago|reply
Sure there are better and worse people everywhere, but on average the more meritocratic the system, the more poor people suck! With the exception of immigrants who start from 0.
In completely non-meritocratic system like Soviet Union you could have people living next door to each other in similar conditions, who went to the same schools and had the same opportunities, and one would be a Physics professor and the other a raging alcoholic. A system where equality is not forced just sorts them better.
Many people are really much better than others at most things, including merely being a decent worker/friend/partner. And many are worse
[+] [-] webdood90|2 years ago|reply
I am 100% lucky that I was in the right place at the right time so that I could be offered the opportunities that I had.
But I think you have to be disciplined in that you must try and try and try to do everything in your power to put yourself in the right place. Of course, even if you do this, you might never be given the opportunity. But if you don't try, you _definitely_ won't.
Many of the people I grew up with did not do this. They had the ability to do it, but they lacked initiative or the ambition. They were complacent with what they had, even though it was very little.
Not everyone comes from an unbroken home, or had a support network to do these things - I get that. But I see many people that could do better and just don't do it for what I'd guess is because it's hard. Instead they make bad decisions that are easy and increase quality of life on the short term: racking up debt, having kids at a young age without a career, etc.
Do people not shoulder some of the blame in today's information age?
[+] [-] jack2312|2 years ago|reply
If you want something more concise and to the point, the article "The Science of Scarcity" [0] in Harvard Magazine provides a pretty good summary of the book.
The themes from the book complement those in the article fairly well.
[0]: https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2015/04/the-science-of-scarc...
[+] [-] BizarroLand|2 years ago|reply
Like, every once in a while I get a craving for poverty comfort foods like ramen with frozen veggies, a slice of American cheese, and a sliced up microwaved hotdog.
Or trying to explain why it's so hard for me to let go of a 20 year old pickup truck that still works because I used to sleep in it.
Or how no matter how much money I earn now I always feel poor and one step away from homelessness.
How I won't go and buy new clothes, why I shop at thrift stores and pawn shops when I can afford new, how I don't feel like I own anything, why I always plan for and expect the worst out of every event and encounter I have, how I dedicate my self to working hard so that the places I work at can't "afford" to fire me, so much so that I have been accused of being an overworker and a slave driver.
On an income basis I'm probably at the top for my entire family right now, but years of homelessness and over a decade of extreme poverty have made their marks on my life and I don't know if it will ever get better. I could win the lottery and I'd still be cutting coupons and searching deal sites for discount codes, wearing discount clothes and shopping in pawn shops.
[+] [-] andrei_says_|2 years ago|reply
Per George Lakoff (full interview: https://newsarchive.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2003/10... )
The conservative worldview, the strict father model, assumes that the world is dangerous and difficult and that children are born bad and must be made good. The strict father is the moral authority who supports and defends the family, tells his wife what to do, and teaches his kids right from wrong. The only way to do that is through painful discipline - physical punishment that by adulthood will become internal discipline. The good people are the disciplined people. Once grown, the self-reliant, disciplined children are on their own. Those children who remain dependent (who were spoiled, overly willful, or recalcitrant) should be forced to undergo further discipline or be cut free with no support to face the discipline of the outside world.
So, project this onto the nation and you see that to the right wing, the good citizens are the disciplined ones - those who have already become wealthy or at least self-reliant - and those who are on the way. Social programs, meanwhile, "spoil" people by giving them things they haven't earned and keeping them dependent. The government is there only to protect the nation, maintain order, administer justice (punishment), and to provide for the promotion and orderly conduct of business. In this way, disciplined people become self-reliant. Wealth is a measure of discipline. Taxes beyond the minimum needed for such government take away from the good, disciplined people rewards that they have earned and spend it on those who have not earned it.
[+] [-] jacquesm|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] badpun|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] moralestapia|2 years ago|reply
This took me several decades to grasp and then "forgive" myself for not being the person I wanted to be. I also think it is a message that is worth spreading, particularly among young folks.
It's quite easy to amalgamate the concept of meritocracy with that of success, such that a lack of the latter implies a lack of the former. This is (or, at least for me, it was) an endless supply of anxiety of pain, which is completely unfounded.
Everyone fails dozens of times before hitting on something good, it's just the nature of things. Some lucky people can just fail as much as they need to, while some other's can't even afford to try even once. I read this somewhere else and stuck with me, "people don't make better choices, they just have better choices".
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] FirmwareBurner|2 years ago|reply
Those with the wealth and the power to change this, don't have an interest in spreading out welfare and therefore making themselves less wealthy and powerful in the process, but enriching themselves or at least maintaining the status quo, and that usually comes at the expense of keeping those less fortunate where they are.
A lot of goods and services that we take for granted in the west, like commodities in our daily lives: cheap cocoa, cheap coffee, cheap exotic fruits, cheap sneakers and clothing, cheap electronic gadgets, all rely on an underclass of less fortunate people who have no choice in life but be prisoners in a neo-slavery system where they have to work in their given conditions for the give pay, with no way up or out.
Please google and check out the human exploitations going on in cocoa and coffee farming at your own discretion.
Do you think the kids and adults working on those farms for pennies in the beating sun and bitten by mosquitos, wouldn't rather do something else with their lives than picking coffee beans, like go to school/university and work in an office? But if we would spread welfare for them to have that choice, who would then choose work in those bad conditions for nothing to provide western consumers with cheap commodities? Robots aren't even remotely there yet. Same with mining minerals to make iPhones, PlayStations and EVs.
If we were to make their lives and jobs fair while also watching over the environment, then the price of commodities would explode, so the mega conglomerates who own these markets, like Nestle or Apple for example, would have to take a missive hit on their profits, or the western consumers would have to stomach the explosion in prices, or both simultaneously, neither of which are acceptable trade-offs in the west, so we keep the status quo of having to rely on perpetual underclasses of people slaving away in poverty for us, while pretending we're great humanitarians and benefactors.
I said "we" here, because it's not just the great evil billionaires like Bezos, Jobs, Saudis, and so many others who profit from and enable this exploitation, but also the western governments like US, Switzerland, Netherlands, etc. where they're HQ but have the audacity to lecture them on human rights and environment concerns, plus the individual shareholders, employees, taxpayers and consumers who enable them as well.
Sure, a lot of people in poor nations got out of poverty "thanks" to globalization and mega conglomerates outsourcing of less desirable manufacturing and services there, but let's not forget they didn't do this out of the goodness of their hearts, but to extract even more profits. People getting out of poverty was just a happy side effect.
[+] [-] CPUstring|2 years ago|reply
Those that I know who have made bad life decisions (kids too early, dropping out of college, leaving extremely supportive parents) could totally have been expected to based off looking at GPA/SAT signals.
[+] [-] screye|2 years ago|reply
Reading this, I kept feeling a sense that something was missing. It wasn't until later in the blog that I hit me.
"Where is her community?"
To a 3rd world immigrant, the idea of being this isolated in your the country you were born in, feels unfathomable.
Back home, It's common for kids to live with their parents until the kids are ready, often until age 25-30. Alternatively, people will stuff themselves like sardines in a large house, to save money; but even more importantly, to find an accidental community among your fellow poor.
Among poor people, a rotating-rep would buy in bulk for the whole community and then distribute among themselves. Saving money and time. The father sounds like a deadbeat too, given his curious omission from the whole blog.
Jack really did suffer alone. As someone who has moved from a 3rd world nation to the US, this part of the west scares me. The lack of assistance from your local and blood community is one of the west's greatest short comings. I for one, hope never to give that part of my 3rd world self up.
Individuality and Independance, should not mean distancing yourself from your support system. Or so I hope.
[+] [-] cipheredStones|2 years ago|reply
> Before long, Monroe was using a food bank. “It had taken me four or five weeks to pluck up the courage to go. The first time, one of the women looked at me and I looked at her. She went to church with my mum. She said, ‘Your mum will be devastated.’ And I said, ‘You can’t tell anyone. You haven’t seen me.’ She said, ‘Your parents will help you,’ and I said, ‘They can’t know.’”
> That’s what I don’t understand, I say. Why didn’t you tell your parents when they were in a position to help? “Because … ” For once, she slows down. “I was ashamed. I was ashamed that I had had a good job and I’d fucked it. I was embarrassed that I’d ended up not being able to provide for my son, and I was worried that if I told a soul, the walls would come crumbling down. Because my parents had fostered for most of my childhood, I’d grown up with this fear that if I ever had a child, he would be taken into care. That I would be an unfit mother. I’d grown up with almost 100 children revolving through my childhood home. So in my head, nearly every kid went into care because nearly every kid I came across was in the care system. I was terrified that if I told anyone, my son would be taken into care.”
So the shame itself was one of the biggest obstacles - compounded by the idea that poverty is evidence of personal inadequacy or moral weakness.
There is a problem with lack of community there: the feeling that really struggling means that you don't deserve help, because that's the message you get from your society. (And it certainly doesn't help that lack of money excludes you from all kinds of normal social activities, as she mentions in the article.)
[+] [-] dudul|2 years ago|reply
Maybe he passed away. Maybe she left him because she just wanted the kid. I don't know why you assume wrongdoing while, as you pointed out, no details is given.
[+] [-] 0xbadcafebee|2 years ago|reply
You could ask the same of homeless people, drug addicts, people with mental issues, people from foster care, criminals, the elderly. Some people lose their community, and don't have the tools or capacity to build a new one. Single mothers are one of those groups that can quickly be kicked out of, or need to escape from, their community, and have a hard time building a new one.
Growing up in the USA, I don't think it's the West that has a problem with community - I think it's the Caucasian West. Latin/Hispanic families are highly connected, as are Asian, Indian, Middle Eastern, etc. Some cultures are highly collective and have strong support structures for extended family. Immigrant communities also tend to have stronger bonds as they may depend more on each other in a new land. OTOH some cultures are more individualist, having expanded the concept of the "nuclear family" in the early 20th century, weakening extended family bonds. In the conservative caucasian West, the nuclear family is now seen as the "traditional" family structure, which is odd, because everywhere else in the world it's non-traditional.
[+] [-] yardstick|2 years ago|reply
Not due to the lack of others help. Sure, one of her brothers didn’t help, but her parents fed her and helped her during her pregnancy. The father of the son shares responsibility. See the below Guardian article[1].
I get the feeling she is one of those people who is an exceptionally brilliant narrator, knows how to captivate and truly reach their audience. Like a lot of politicians and public figures.
1. https://amp.theguardian.com/society/2023/jan/07/jack-monroe-...
[+] [-] lwhi|2 years ago|reply
It's been wrecked by the current right-wing government.
[+] [-] titanomachy|2 years ago|reply
This seems spoken as a cry of desperation, but outside of the anglosphere it would be quite normal. If I were living as desperately as this person seems to be, and with a child to take care of, my (elderly, immigrant) parents would be begging me to come home so they could help me get back on my feet. Not because they are wealthy, but because in most of the world family is the most important thing.
[+] [-] _mh56|2 years ago|reply
>> Monroe has been described as an "austerity celebrity". In a January 2023 interview with Simon Hattenstone in The Guardian, Monroe acknowledged that she had recklessly spent money given by backers; she claimed "I'd go online absolutely shitfaced and buy nice furniture."
Granted most poor people do stupid stuff after getting monies, but the charm of the tale is diminished.
Edit: I meant touching not feelgood.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Monroe
[+] [-] RugnirViking|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] corobo|2 years ago|reply
Especially the pics of rice with various vegetables. I'll always have a bag of rice and a bag of frozen veg just in case, even if I become a billionaire somehow.
Survived for literal years on that combo, lol.
[+] [-] 0xbadcafebee|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Mainan_Tagonist|2 years ago|reply
Yet, as a foreigner, I (We, as a matter of fact, since all my friends and colleagues were either german, italian, spanish, chinese...) had no real social safety net to rely on. We couldn't go back to our family (500 miles away) with our tail between our legs in case we really fucked up.
Something isn't clear in this writer's account of the reason of her living in poverty, whether it is a story of mental illness, child abuse... things i witnessed years later when i bought a flat in Barking (poor white area of greater London) and this i feel would need to be clarified for me to be able to accept the conclusion that "poverty is largely accidental", especially coming from someone quite so articulate.
[+] [-] steve_adams_86|2 years ago|reply
I feel like this is the dark side of the condition that isn’t talked about as much. If you have adhd, you are far more likely to wind up suicidal, in poverty, abusing drugs, etc. But these things occur on a spectrum. That is to say, far more of us still might not be in abject poverty, but the same tendencies and deficiencies hold us down and cause disproportionate suffering. It’s a constant struggle not to let it pull you even further down. You might not be in the suicide/poverty/drug abuse part of the statistic, but you might be working pretty hard not to be. It’s not a great way to exist, sometimes.
Although I own a nice home and have a good job now, I don’t think I’ll ever have a sense of security or safety, or even stop having the internal sense that I’m still living in poverty. It’s hard to shake that.
[+] [-] PuffinBlue|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 3dprintscanner|2 years ago|reply
George Orwell - The Road to Wigan Pier
[+] [-] lb1lf|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lostmsu|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MichaelRo|2 years ago|reply
>> Sometimes I just want to run back home and live with my parents, at the age of 32, and beg them to take care of me.
Well this doesn't sound like someone who is destitute and with no safety net whatsoever.
What's so wrong living with your parents? For most of human history it was the normal thing to do. Parents will take care of kids and one of them will inherit the parent's house and take care of the old parents. Have his own kids and have the grandparents helping with raising them.
Also I'm not so sure about UK but around here there's quite a significant rural population. Not everyone can or wants to make it in the big city. Life in the countryside is a lot cheaper, everything's cheaper. House prices are a joke compared to big cities and still villages get slow but steady depopulated.
On the other hand I do know people, excluding the homeless, who really have nothing. Father lost the apartment to gambling then disappeared, mother died, kid got evicted in the street in the middle of the winter, worked heavy construction jobs until got sick and had to file for disability and now all his income is a miserable pension that can't even pay for food let alone a rent in the city. And he's better off than the homeless or the gypsies who live off the city's garbage dump.
So I'm not saying the author has it easy but rather than some of it is a deliberate choice.
[+] [-] jonatron|2 years ago|reply
It included a section about modified starches being used to save ingredient cost, as well as the more obvious reduction in meat content. https://twitter.com/hwallop/status/1734687477347254678
[+] [-] avgcorrection|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] easytiger|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] hasty_pudding|2 years ago|reply
All your time is devoted to just surviving, so you can never really better you situation.
You want to improve your situation? Not happening, you gotta work 60 hours this week so you cant study for that AWS cert or medical coding cert.
Then the job you work is most likely dead end with no advancement or fake advancement.
So you live pay check to paycheck with no hope of escape.
Then if you dont have parents or luck... to help one catastrophe and youre doomed.
And luck is not a strategy.
You literally are trapped by capitalism.
Then even if youre able to scrape together some time every week to better yourself... so many artificial walls have been erected to prevent smart hardworking people from entering professions.
That includes jacking prices on universities and industries requiring university education for licenses instead of a test/apprenticeship.
Things you used to be able to do without formal schooling: law, cpa, PE, teaching, hair dressing, and more.
Basically massive friction has been added to smart hard working people trying to skill up instead of supporting people skilling up to their potential.
Tech is one of the few actually meritocratic middle class industries left but is now getting watered down by the entire world entering the industry.
As a side note, think of all the wasted potential that could be bettering the human race who are trapped in the cycle of poverty.
There could be a Mozart out there whose parents can't afford a fucking keyboard.
[+] [-] gwern|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jauntywundrkind|2 years ago|reply
But speaking of connection, the humble beginnings story, of how she wrote her way towards something somewhat better makes me somewhat swell with pride, that people have these devices & are connected & can speak as we do:
> I wrote the majority of A Girl Called Jack by email on a Nokia E72. I still have it in my desk drawer, and every now and then I just stare at it, and its tiny awful buttons, and wonder how the f*ck I did it. Because I had no other choice but to. It was my one chance at escape, my yellow brick road, my shiny red slippers, and I took it.
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] distcs|2 years ago|reply
The author seems to be from UK. Is contents insurance a thing in UK? How many renters really do buy contents insurance? Genuinely interested to know how many think that contents insurance is worth it?
[+] [-] coremoff|2 years ago|reply
That was a while ago, when things like CDs were still targetted by theives, and I got everything replaced, which would have cost me thousands.
I still keep contents insurance; haven't claimed on it more than once in a couple decades though - it's there for the case where my appartment is destroyed (I live in a block of flats), and it's nice to have the lost property/damaged devices cover for travel and general use.
[+] [-] dontlaugh|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ska|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scythe|2 years ago|reply
On the one hand, it's certainly true that the support for the poor is insufficient, but the price of food, being perhaps the lowest it has been in thousands of years in real terms, is probably the wrong lever to pull. Consequently, "food poverty" is a misclassification, since, while spending £7 per week on food, she probably spent more on transportation, housing and possibly clothing (which can be essential to actually getting work), and it would make more of a difference to tackle that. (She recounts severe problems getting a home!)
If she had been able to spend half as much on food, would that meaningfully improve her life? An extra £3.5 per week isn't yanking anyone out of poverty.
In fact, there is more evidence that obesity causes poverty than that poverty contributes to obesity! See:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5781054/
There are some suggestions that deficiencies in certain minerals, particularly zinc, which is most concentrated in relatively expensive foods like beef and oysters, are correlated with obesity and disordered eating. A bottle of zinc gluconate makes potatoes look like matsutake (at least at wholesale prices), but the safe and effective use of the supplements (avoiding overuse) is not well established or normally recommended.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12011-020-02060-8
The point I guess I want to make is that we should have compassion for the author, but that compassion should ignite the best faculties of our minds — the desire to really understand the problem, because that is where solutions come from.
[+] [-] bluedino|2 years ago|reply
US, not the UK:
Counties with poverty rates of >35% have obesity rates 145% greater than wealthy counties.
Back to Europe:
The Paradox of Poverty and Obesity
Among the reasons for the growing obesity in the population of poor people are: higher unemployment, lower education level, and irregular meals. Another cause of obesity is low physical activity, which among the poor is associated with a lack of money for sports equipment.