The more I speak about being poor, the more I realize how fundamentally other folks misunderstand what it means to be poor versus being broke.
The more I speak about being poor, the more I realize how fundamentally other folks misunderstand what it means to be poor versus being broke. The advice folks will give comes from a good place. However, I would like to give some examples to help everyone understand most advice from non-poor folks isn’t helpful.
Everyone has experienced being broke. Being broke sucks. You are watching every dollar spent, finding ways to trim or make things stretch until the next payday. The difference is when you are broke you have some money. You can afford to put gas in your car, but not enough to do that repair. Money is tight, but you can get the basics at the grocery store. You can’t afford to go to the movies, but will stay home and watch what’s new on Netflix.
When you are poor that next payday brings no relief. It is like an endless runner game. No matter how fast you run or how high you jump you can never see the finish line. No matter how tired you are the ground keeps moving. There is no room for errors as the punishment for mistakes is astronomical. When you hit an obstacle you don’t restart from the last checkpoint, you go back to the beginning.
There is this mindset from folks that poor people must not be smart. I mean, you’re smart and you’re not poor! The problem must be a skill issue! Learn the skills to do it yourself and you’ll be able to pull yourself up.
The other mindset is poor people are lazy. Quit complaining and do it yourself! Just get a better job! Get a second job! There’s money out there, you just have to go get it.
The last is these folks think they understand what it is like to be poor. Hey, I was a broke college student and I get being poor! I had a rough patch, it will pass.
Let’s start at the top.
I have a van that is falling apart. It needs a lot of work that we cannot afford to do. In the mindset that poor people are unskilled, it appears that I should watch some YouTube videos, get the parts, and do it myself. The misunderstanding is that being poor means you have tons and tons of skills. You have to fix everything yourself. There is never, I mean never, a time you can pay someone to fix it for you.
In this example folks think, “If the repair at the shop costs $1,000, but the parts cost $300, you can save a lot of money doing it yourself.” You are absolutely correct. Yet, I still need to be able to afford the $300 in parts.
Do you see the misunderstanding? I can’t make $300 appear out of thin air. I have the skills, I’ve had to fix all my cars myself. I’ve done complete engine rebuilds, I’ve replaced transmissions, I do all my own regular maintenance. The problem isn’t skills, its money. When you are broke, spending $300 instead of $1,000 sounds like a win because you can’t afford the $1,000. When you’re poor $300 might as well be $1,000 or $10,000, you will never afford it.
This is not a matter of time, either. I can’t put aside money each month and then get it. There is never money to put aside. I can’t put it on the credit card as I know I will never be able to pay it. I’ll just have this $300 debt looming over me, increasing with interest every month, mocking how much of a loser I am.
The second mindset: Being lazy.
How do I have the time to work multiple jobs when I’m doing all this extra work? How do I have the time when in my extra time I’m fixing cars, appliances, the roof, and cooking every meal from scratch?
Should I work a second job and never see my wife? My kids? Should I never have any personal time? Should my entire life revolve around money? Should I kill myself for capitalism?
Folks who say things like this have only ever experienced being broke. It is a temporary situation and a few months of extra income will solve the problem. Being poor is not missing $1,000 or $10,000 in the short term. It’s missing $40,000 a year, every year, forever. There is no short term relief. This isn’t a rough patch. It is The Pit in The Dark Knight Rises.
“There’s a reason why this prison is the worst hell on earth… Hope. Every man who has rotted here over the centuries has looked up to the light and imagined climbing to freedom. So easy… So simple… And like shipwrecked men turning to sea water from uncontrollable thirst, many have died trying. I learned here that there can be no true despair without hope.”
Yes, it is possible to escape. Hell, two people have done it! Why can’t you do it! But you are completely ignoring how many people have fallen to their death trying.
All of the general guidance to escape being poor is actually advice for getting through being broke.
- Cancel Netflix
- Make food at home
- Stop going to Starbucks
- Fix it yourself
- Don’t upgrade your phone
These are all things that will help you temporarily. It will help you get through a short period of being broke. Or it will help you get your spending under control. You have enough money, you just don’t spend it wisely.
Being poor is you already did all those things. You cancelled all your streaming services years ago. You make all your food from scratch all the time. You never go to fucking Starbucks. You fix everything yourself. You already stretch everything to the limit. That is how you have to live every day of your life, for eternity, with no relief in sight.
Last example and is pertinent to our times in the US. A lot of poor folks are having to stand in line for hours and hours to get food at a food bank due to goverment ineptitude. The advice to simply cook at home doesn’t fix that there isn’t any food at home.
Do you honestly think people standing in line at a food bank could fix their situation if they stopped getting DoorDash? Going to Starbucks? Fuck off. They weren’t doing that already.
How are they to get another job or put in extra hours if they have to stand in line for 3 hours to get food? Should they go without food until they get that job and the paycheck?
You need to step aside and think about the differences between being broke and being poor.
- - - - -
Thank you for reading! If you would like to comment on this post you can start a conversation on the Fediverse. Message me on Mastodon at @cinimodev@masto.ctms.me. Or, you may email me at blog.discourse904@8alias.com. This is an intentionally masked email address that will be forwarded to the correct inbox.
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Comments
Even this does a poor job of explaining being poor.
The constant open loop on everything you own, terrified to discard anything even if its broken because there are components that might be useful to fix something else; the constant churn of second-hand (and cheap/disposable) things that are already close to death before they come into your possession and- crucially: the crushing weight of knowing that any financial roadbump is existential.
As the author mentions, a £50 fine might as well be £50,000- its unpayable, and leads to a sort of doom-spiral of lending to avoid worse consequences. Easily you can end up in unmanageable debt, in rare cases prison, its not uncommon to have the few worthwhile items you own being seized by bailifs to recoup debts, treasured heirlooms that cannot be replaced and have little monetary value so they do no impact to your debt. The hoarding of canned goods to avoid being unable to eat.
It’s hard to convey this, and what it does to your mentality- I am now built mentally to think quite fiscally conservative and do not take debts or put savings into investments like my peers. I am well off but a fraction of what I could have been had I not has this mentality.
You have to live it to understand it, but I wouldn’t wish it on anyone, its a tarpit and getting out of it without someone handing you a branch (and if you no longer have the strength to pull yourself out) then you’ll be stuck in it forever.
> its not uncommon to have the few worthwhile items you own being seized by bailifs to recoup debts, treasured heirlooms that cannot be replaced and have little monetary value so they do no impact to your debt. The hoarding of canned goods to avoid being unable to eat.
As a teenager I worked at a bailiffs in the office typing up the paperwork. One case that stuck was me was where the debtor owed somewhere around £400. The bailiff took a motorbike (or scooter) that could easily have covered the debt. It was sold at auction for £50. £35 bailiff fees for taking it there and £15 auctioneer fees, £0 off the debt. It was so unfair it should have been criminal.
By throwaway173738 2025-11-152:303 reply It’s like a bunch of apes took over our society and worked as hard as possible to make everything as cruel as possible for no particular reason.
By Vera_Wilde 2025-11-157:071 reply Hah!
Yeah, the bonobo/chimp contrast shows it’s not an inevitability. We just optimized for the wrong equilibrium.
The difference between bonobos and chimps are genetics and not culture, you can't train chimps to live like bonobos and vice versa.
Us humans still has the genes that made us conquer and enslave the whole world, every single human culture that has ever existed enslave and murder animals, as we needed to do that to survive. You ain't gonna change those genes, so we just have to do the best we can with the genes we have and our genes are like Chimpanzees in that we want to murder and eat and exploit others, without that humans didn't get b12 and died out, so all our ancestors lived that way.
By dijit 2025-11-159:46 Farming is an invention, the majority of human history was spent without farming of any kind, something like 80% of human history was in the hunter/gatherer phase.
We should not underestimate the fact that where we excel is that we are better at passing off information to our offspring. This makes improvement over long periods possible as we can build off the backs of our ancestors.
By computerthings 2025-11-1515:14 [dead]
By y0eswddl 2025-11-155:05 you can convince people to give up anything as long as it's in service of punishing "the bad ones"
By Eddy_Viscosity2 2025-11-1513:432 reply Speaking with conservatively minded friends on this subject, they just shrug it off, smug in the knowledge that if they were in that situation they would immediately be able to pull themselves out of it. The fact that other people don't just do that is because they make poor decisions and therefore its all about 'personal responsibility'. There really is no convincing them otherwise.
I was chatting with a buddy about this. Older, libertarian fellow. He was in this situation, several times. And he was able to pull himself out of it.
That was all the "proof" he needed to be against helping the poor, because if he could do it, anyone could do it.
By qingcharles 2025-11-194:19 I was talking to a conservative chap the other day during the SNAP crisis and he was foaming at the mouth that SNAP needed to be abolished. I asked him what to do about the people with disabilities who couldn't work. He told me he knew personally of two people born without arms or legs who have factory jobs earning $45/hour and have no need of SNAP and therefore anyone disabled who was claiming SNAP was a scammer. And if they really are that disabled, he went on, then their family should be taking care of them and not the state.
p.s. this person has also never paid taxes in his entire life because "government is a scam"
By abnercoimbre 2025-11-153:033 reply HN folks ought to watch Good Fortune ft. Keanu Reeves [0]. Still out in theaters.
It looks like a good movie and in looking forward to its arrival on streaming but I'm curious the relevance of it to parent comment.
By abnercoimbre 2025-11-1522:22 Curiosity denied; it would spoil the plot!
By GPurePro 2025-11-1513:18 Not even on my radar. Thanks looks like a good time
By the-mitr 2025-11-1516:59 Thanks for the reco
By kstrauser 2025-11-151:42 I don’t make it a habit to curse out loud at my phone as I read things, but this did it for me.
I don't think you've even thought about this for 30 seconds.
> If it could easily fetch more money, it would have been bid higher than £50.
Have you ever been to one of these auctions? I haven't. If I want a used vehicle, I go to a trusted dealership. Few people attend auctions, hence demand is low, hence prices are low. When there's no incentive to sell something for what it's worth, the seller will put in less effort and sell it below market price.
> Then did the debtor not sell the motorbike to pay the debt?
They probably needed it. You try doing food deliveries without a vehicle. Now their job's gone.
> it seems that people always assume they're totally incapable of helping themselves.
Well obviously. Being poor is excruciating; nobody would choose to be poor. The ones who are capable of helping themselves do—in fact, they help themselves when they're broke, and they never become truly poor in the first place (per the article's definitions).
The point is that, before the bike was collected and put up for auction, the debtor could have sold the bike to pay the debts. Then, once the bike was put up for auction, buyers could have bid on it if it was really worth more.
Multiple people in this story had a financial incentive to profit from the bike, yet no one did. The only evidence we have of the bike's value is OP's claim. Does it not seem more likely that OP is simply wrong about the bike's value?
> the debtor could have sold the bike to pay the debts
…so clearly the bike was worth more to them than its cash value.
Again: They probably needed that bike for work. Losing their job will easily cost them more than $400.
> yet no one did.
The bailiff did, and the buyer did, and they were the only parties with agency in the situation. Doesn't surprise me.
By hippo22 2025-11-1516:12 [flagged]
By Survived 2025-11-1523:37 Dude, some skeezy used car salesman type bought the bike and made a 350 pound profit.
Literally no one involved cared about getting the best price except the bottom-feeders attending the auction.
By smallmancontrov 2025-11-154:362 reply > If it could easily fetch more money, it would have been bid higher than £50.
You know that isn't true. Auctions are noisy and poorly conducted auctions are worse. This is about some combination of sadism and negligence.
By djtango 2025-11-156:55 Oh hohoho but that would imply that the auction is inefficient and so surely rational actors would descend upon these auctions thereby converging this discount onto the true fair value of things.
Heaven forbid we admit that markets are not comprised of spherical chickens and that disconnects exist...
Again, the debtor could have sold the bike themselves and they didn't. Bidders could have recognized the bike's value but they didn't. This is a story about OP overvaluing a bike and nothing else.
I get your point but there are more factors at play here that you might not be aware of.
The debt in question was council tax, every household in the UK pays this at a monthly rate, something like £140 a month. But what most people don't know is that these monthly payments are technically a "gesture of goodwill" from the council, and if you are late for a payment they will really quickly take it to court and send bailiffs for the full yearly amount so you're looking at £1500 plus court fees plus bailiff fees for attending immediately. Easily £2000 from missing £150.
Next another little known fact - if you don't let the bailiffs in, they can't take anything. They can come back with the police if you let them in once. However they can levy on things that are outside, like a vehicle.
So that's what happened here, and once they levy on the vehicle you are not legally allowed to sell it if you sign the levy.
So the debtor in all likelihood ended up in this situation very quickly and could not sell the motorbike himself once the bailiff visited. As for the over valuation, I give you that but only in a very specific scenario - for the market where they sold it.
Now as for why they sold it so cheap, why would they care? They only care about their fees. It they can visit three times by only pretending to knock on the door and charge three times, they will. When it came to this motorbike, they got paid the fees for selling it, the auctioneer got their fee, and nobody involved had motivation to market it. We're not talking ebay or well marketed property auctions here.
In fact, the bailiff now gets to go back to tell them the debt isn't cleared and charge them for this visit as well.
By hippo22 2025-11-167:58 That sounds absolutely draconian and horrible. But the issue doesn’t seem to be the debt collection. Rather, the issue seems to be a total lack of due process.
By wiseowise 2025-11-157:32 > Whenever "the poor" are debated, it seems that people always assume they're totally incapable of helping themselves.
The point isn’t that you’re incapable of helping yourself, it is disproportionately harder to help yourself when you’re poor.
If you don't have a vehicle you can't do anything, if this person was anywhere other than a large east coast city losing your vehicle is death. Have you ever tried to go somewhere in the south without a car? Pick two points even a couple miles away from each other around Kansas City, Kansas and genuinely think about how you would physically do it. You can't go anywhere so you can't work so you can't pay rent, you can't do anything. What is even the point of not going to prison except the fact you would have to stay in jail for a few months and you might be literally devoured by bedbugs?
> Whenever "the poor" are debated, it seems that people always assume they're totally incapable of helping themselves.
You just argued the bike wouldn’t have been sufficient to pay the debt. How would the owner have helped himself by selling it?
OP's central claim was that the bike should have been able to cover the debt, but, due to systemic malice on the bailiff's part, the bike only covered small fraction of the debt. My point is that OP is simply over-valuing the bike. If you change OP's story to: the bailiff got a decent price for the bike and took a small fee for the service, it becomes a lot less outrageous.
The OP wrote that:
> [The bike] was sold at auction for £50. £35 bailiff fees for taking it there and £15 auctioneer fees, £0 off the debt.
If this claim is true, then I think most people will still find this conduct outrageous: How is it in the public interest for the baliff to take actions that harm both the debtor (by taking the personally valuable bike) and the public (by wasting from $15 to $50 of the public's money) to the benefit of only the baliff ($35) and auctioneer ($15)?
Those fees don’t seem unreasonably high to me. I wouldn’t be surprised if the bailiff was operating at a loss given the time it takes to take possession and bring the goods to auction.
It’s in the public’s interest to have mechanisms to quickly process insolvency in a way that attempts to fairly value property. Auctions solve that. If debtors don’t like the outcome, then they should sell the good themselves before it comes to that. Having others sell your property for you is always going to incur an additional cost.
By tmoertel 2025-11-1519:14 The point is that, regardless of whether the bailiff’s and auctioneer’s fees are eminently reasonable, it will always result in net-negative benefit to society (excepting the bailiff and auctioneer) whenever the bailiff confiscates property whose auction proceeds are less than the sum of those fees. It is therefore contrary to the public interest for the bailiff to confiscate property unless it can reasonably be expected to substantially clear those fees when auctioned.
By jjav 2025-11-1510:19 > Then did the debtor not sell the motorbike to pay the debt?
Because (it seems from OP story) that the court blatantly stole it from them, so they never had a chance.
1. The debtor probably need the motorbike, badly. He probably should have sold it to cover the debt but didn't think of that as an option. Not the smartest choice but again, he's there probably because of another set of similar choices.
2. The parent seems from the UK and I am not sure how things work there. But many auctions are "closed off" in shady ways. In one of the countries I (and some friends) have contemplated going, gangs with knives were putting people off. The gov. employees involved knew about it and do nothing.
> Whenever "the poor" are debated, it seems that people always assume they're totally incapable of helping themselves.
3. Many of the times, they are not exactly bad or lazy people but they might not have made the optimal choices. They should, probably, be penalized for it; but not by completely wrecking their life and sodomizing them for a good many years. Also back to 2, and the parent you are replying to, many times the system is designed to over-screw them in the process.
By monooso 2025-11-1512:27 This is one of the more patronising comments I've ever read on HN, which is saying something.
Yea my partner grew up genuinely poor and it’s interesting seeing how it impacts their mentality. The simplest but clear example is they never finish low-perishable food they like until they have more of it. There is always a few potato chips left in the bag. One cookie left waiting till it’s necessary to get through a rough day or more are purchased. They are the best saver I’ve ever met. But it wasn’t until they got lucky and got a break that it mattered because they never had anything to save but cookies.
A close friend grew up in first-world poverty (meaning, warm house, state-supported education, health care) but experienced no luxuries. To this day, they will buy themselves a tub of ice-cream or chocolate and eat it all completely alone, almost hoarding it, because growing up they had to share everything with the many siblings. It's crazy how weird pathologies we humans have.
By steveBK123 2025-11-150:071 reply Money psychology is interesting in that people often end up being traumatized by their parents into behaving identically when the circumstances no longer warrant it, OR have a knee-jerk reaction living their life completely the opposite way because growing up that way drove them insane.
By andrewl 2025-11-152:55 A similar thing happens with children of parents who came out of war zones or famines. Sometimes the children are explicitly taught that violence or starvation can come at any moment. Often they learn to feel under threat implicitly by picking up their parents’ affect, without any message or lesson being clearly stated.
By patrick451 2025-11-153:271 reply I wonder how much of this is "I'm saving it for a rainy day" vs "I was conditioned that eating the last one of a treat leads to conflict".
By y0eswddl 2025-11-155:09 Yes.
I find myself doing that. I'm not sure if it's just a silly habit I have because I don't like to run out of anything even if it is not important or if I picked it up from my dad who lived through the "great" depression as a child.
By ASalazarMX 2025-11-1419:063 reply Conversely, I had an acquaintance that grew poor, and would finish 95% of the cookies in a bag, but always leave the almost empty bag to the next person to find out, even if it had to stay that way for months.
Strangely, she did that only with comfort foods.
By throwaway173738 2025-11-152:32 My wife grew up very poor and does the same stuff. And then she’ll get mad at me if I finish the stale cookie from 6 months ago.
By roxolotl 2025-11-1419:08 Yea this is exactly what I’m describing
By washadjeffmad 2025-11-1420:044 reply The 'blank in the firing squad' technique of snacking is a pretty typical girl thing.
Eating cookies? Perfectly fine. Eating an entire bag of cookies? Gross. Unthinkable.
But how many cookies is really fine to eat? The safest best is not to know, either by breaking them into uncountable pieces or leaving some in the bag for someone else to finish (meaning, you ate less than a bag of cookies and are safe).
By novavex 2025-11-152:45 Additional anecdata, and also a woman:
I do this for any or all of the following reasons:
* (culture) it is polite to leave something for the next person
* (I have roommates) I don't want to be the last person who finished something. I would be obliged to replace it.
For the typical girl thing, I haven't seen this behavior in real life with my family members or friends. I have heard of the concept on social media.
By duskdozer 2025-11-157:02 I do this, but it's not really about if it's "gross" to eat a whole bag or not. I don't feel like doing that anyway. It's mostly that if you share food, I think it's considerate to leave one if there's more than one left. Someone else might be having a really bad day, but a small consolation could be that they didn't get home to discover there aren't any cookies left.
By mghackerlady 2025-11-1420:371 reply I do it to avoid being blamed, I don't know what you're on about. I've never cared that much about the semantics of how many cookies I ate (then again, I'm on hacker news so I might not be the best representation of the female populace)
By washadjeffmad 2025-11-1422:31 I tend to do the cookie baking, so it'd be a little silly for me to be mad over someone eating them.
And for what it's worth, no one deserves blame for their cookie habits.
By potato3732842 2025-11-1420:32 Gotta maintain that figure if you ever wanna escape poverty. Reba McEntire wrote a whole song about it.
(joking, but not nearly as much as I wish I was)
By physicsguy 2025-11-1421:352 reply I remember watching something on BBC about minimalism years ago when I was doing my PhD and earning £13k a year and thinking that I just couldn’t do it because it relies on you having the money to repurchase something you need that you threw away
By neilv 2025-11-155:23 Exactly. And there's a complicating related situation that, if you have housing instability, there can also be pressure not to own anything more than you need, in terms of difficulty and cost having to move it or lose it on short notice.
By inamberclad 2025-11-152:19 Absolutely. Our disposable society is a privilege for those who can afford it and an absolute curse for those who can't.
Keeping stuff around and refusing to fix things are not necessarily correlated to being poor.
Both my parents have been in the top 15-10% income bracket, yet they pile up all kind of useless garbage, very often refuse to invest in proper stuff because "it's too expensive", always try to find ways to get things "cheaper" and will haggle artisans to get the cheapest job possible (and then complain when the work is done poorly).
They do not come from poor family and were never really in need. Their brothers and sisters do not show the same behaviors and have built more desirable lives/legacies on half the income. It all comes from mental issues.
I largely disagree on the narrative of poor people doom loop. If you are around those long enough you will understand that they really do make stupid decisions and cannot figure out things correctly. Giving them more money do not really fix the problem, they just get bigger money problem and rarely end up in a comfortable situation.
> they really do make stupid decisions and cannot figure out things correctly
Is this not the doom loop? People are poor because they don't know how to manage their money, and that keeps them poor.
If it were common knowledge that payday loans were a scam / terrible financial decision then there wouldn't be a dozen in every poor neighborhood. Somewhat related is the newfound ability to finance absolutely everything, including your $20 doordash order. It's never been easier for someone to rocket deep into debt because of their lack of financial literacy.
And of course vendors make these terrible decisions look very attractive. In a nation where diabetes and high blood pressure is rampant because fast food ads look so good, it's no wonder that this same nation struggles with financial literacy, because advertisers make these deicions look very good.
What an oblivious statement.
Of course poor folks know how bad payday lenders are. They're poor, not stupid. They use them because they live on razor-thin margins and life happens.
Poor folks generally manage their money down to the dollar. They have to, or they'll be out on the street.
All of the things you mentioned are middle-class problems and have nothing to do with the horrific grind that is being poor.
By abustamam 2025-11-1723:32 Thanks for the correction.
By seec 2025-11-182:38 Yes they are poor because they make bad decisions. If you are unable to avoid repeatedly making bad purchasing decision, you are poor not just because of unfortunate circumstance but because you are unable to not be poor because of personal limitation (sometimes I may be stupidity, sometimes addictions or other bad behaviors).
My father manages employees that constantly have garnishment on their salaries because of some unpaid debt. Yet they make decent wage and could afford an OK life if they didn't blow most of it on stupid stuff.
So what I mean is that you cannot put all the blame on the "system" and the marketers selling appetising food or whatnot. Those people keep making those choices themselves and outside out of taking their liberty there is not much you can do about it. I actually think the current system affords them a better life than they could otherwise.
By ineedasername 2025-11-1614:06 It’s hard to convey this, and what it does to your mentality
My Grandfather grew up poor during the Great Depression, working at a very young age to help support his family. Decades later after attending college on a full scholarship and becoming a doctor his own children would be embarrassed when they were in restaurants. He would see other diners leave their table and a plate would still have food on it, and he would take it and eat it instead of ordering for himself. It wasn't that he didn't understand the norms of eating at a restaurant, it was a pervasive fear, justified when growing up though no longer, of wasting anything. This general mentality was extremely common for anyone that grew up up during the depression. An extremely large number of anyone that lives in constant stress and anxiety for a long period of time experience something similar.
By AndrewKemendo 2025-11-1418:543 reply I spent years getting over the idea of saving some half broken thing because “I might need a part from that later”
By ASalazarMX 2025-11-1419:09 Specially because occasionally the usefulness of such saved junk appeared to prove the thought right, the rest of the unused pile of junk notwithstanding.
By potato3732842 2025-11-1420:09 And the more skilled and richer and better tooled up you get over time the more potentially useful everything is so the more you feel like you have to save it.
By neuralRiot 2025-11-1421:182 reply As an electronic tech I find myself hoarding discarded devices because sometimes I need some part and ordering means paying shipping and 4 day (if I am lucky) waiting to get a part that costs cents just to probably find out that I need more parts.
By pbalau 2025-11-1421:38 When I was younger, I've spent an entire summer working here and there, with the explicit goal to buy an 8MB stick of ram, so I can play Quake. Got the biggest ballacking from my dad about "wasting" all that moneis. Since then, storage and memory, the only things I'm actively trying to save.
By kldg 2025-11-1512:23 I'm fine enough now to retire but get on my hands and knees whenever I drop a tiny surface-mount resistor, which I have reels of tens or hundreds of. If I can't find it after 5 or so minutes, that's when the "what am I doing?" thought finally hits.
Definitely agree on the mentality it creates and how long it lasts. I’m fairly well off now, but grew up very poor. First developing world poor where running water and toilets were shared with the whole building, the whole family crammed into a single room. Then western world poor, where my parents and some friends that lived together (to save money) would walk to get groceries, buy one bus ticket to have one person carry the groceries on the bus most of the way back, and the rest of the group walk to the bus station and help to carry the groceries the rest of the way home.
Silicon Valley engineer income and wealth now, but still extremely uncomfortable spending money that isn’t necessary. My partner grew up quite differently and doesn’t understand why I’m so frugal with money given my relatively high income.
Something I find interesting is that my mother grew up in similar conditions - poor in Borneo in the 50s, my aunt was literally born in the jungle while hiding from the Japanese
And yet my mum's family were raised that they were broke, not poor.
There were definitely some echoes/overlap like we were raised that wasting food is one of the most egregious sins one can ever commit, and my mum has a compulsion of overpacking things with meat after growing up eating nothing but I know that she is definitely more broke than poor and was therefore able to reverse her fortunes.
Similarly, if you know people who grew up in Mainland China during the early years of the PRC, you can tell that while everyone had it tough, some people were poor while others were broke and this then can help explain the divergences of their outcomes when riding the wave of growth.
I think also perhaps the reasons for being poor. My family was poor but so was everyone else. It was structural. So as a result (my hypothesis), there wasn’t even the hope of being rich, just not so poor. So for instance the mentality was always to save, not invest, because no one has the money to invest could afford to lose whatever meager savings there was.
As a result my up bringing was filled with lessons to play it safe, don’t take risks, get a stable job etc.
By dijit 2025-11-168:44 Same here.
Its interesting that the same mentalities that get us out of poverty are not the same ones that make people rich.
You could naively assume that competence around money would be universal.
> its a tarpit and getting out of it without someone handing you a branch (and if you no longer have the strength to pull yourself out) then you’ll be stuck in it forever.
From your perspective/experience, what would constitute the minimum viable branch in such a situation? E.g., if you were receiving a donation, how much would it have to exceed to get you out of that situation? Or if a one-time donation wouldn't do it, what else would be needed?
Obviously not looking for exact numbers here, just wondering about the orders of magnitude.
I think its more about having enough that you don’t spend all your cycles worrying about money; and more importantly that there’s a way to get on some kind of positive reinforcement treadmill whereby effort is rewarded financially.
That makes sense, but I was trying to figure out something else: if there's someone in this situation I want to help, what (at minimum) could I expect to have to do to get them out of that situation?
I think a better way of thinking about it is to be a lifeline instead of monetary amount.
Otherwise you very much risk wandering in to social services, and managing this can be unfair too.
If you really want to hold me to a number, then each country has a “poverty index” of some form, if you are able to assist with a roof over someones head and provide them with as much as needed to be over the poverty line, then you’re well on your way to dragging someone out of being poor. The important caveat is one time investments (like buying a cheap car, fixing a car or getting rid of a fine) are sometimes needed and this is what separates poor from everything else: being able to invest in common sense things that are simply impossible because the money simply does not exist to do it.
Being a lifeline to those in need is the best possible thing you can be in this case, as you’re taking the “it’s not cheap being poor” mantra away.
What does "be a lifeline" mean? If it means "rescue them every time they have a financial emergency", is that an infinite commitment?
By dijit 2025-11-168:33 absent sufficient income, basically yes.
Does your employer have an “infinite commitment” to pay your salary?
Of course they do, but it isn’t framed as such.
We’re talking about social support networks here basically, the majority of actually poor people have nowhere to turn (or too much pride to turn anywhere).
There are some people who will be a bottomless pit of investment, and it is because of those that we think social support cannot work at all. The drug addicts, the gamblers.
but for each of those, immediately visible and obvious deadbeats there are 2 or more of people like my mother, who had no family to speak of and was raising a child alone. Or someone like the sysadmin in this thread, who has gainful employment in the first world, but can never get out of his debt hole.
By dataflow 2025-11-160:05 Thank you!
> terrified to discard anything even if its broken because there are components that might be useful to fix something else
I've fortunately never been poor, or even temporary broke, but I'm not sure how you'd get through life with without this. I've gotten myself out of so many binds by being able to repurpose something out of the junk pile. It is not even about the money, more being able to deal with it immediately. Once you need to involve other people the burden grows substantially.
> I've gotten myself out of so many binds by being able to repurpose something out of the junk pile
When you have money, you can just buy the thing you need, instead of hoarding five metric tonnes of crap that you'll never use.
If you haven't used something in the past 5 years, you can almost certainly toss it.
> you can just buy the thing you need
Ah but if only it were so simple. In my woodworking shop, in pretty much every project I end up using odd scraps for either temporary scaffolding or jigs or what have you that would be difficult to buy. You would have to go out of your way to buy a large board, and cut it up intentionally. Even then you would not have as rich a set of scraps. Actually the value is not in the material itself but in the variety of the shapes.
By lurk2 2025-11-1510:47 > Actually the value is not in the material itself but in the variety of the shapes.
By 9rx 2025-11-157:57 > When you have money, you can just buy the thing you need
What I need is time. Whereas buying things is stupidly time consuming, running completely counter to what is needed.
I don't have it all. Sometimes I have no choice but to go buy parts when a breakdown occurs, but that's never a welcome experience. You're looking at a good hour or more to source even if it is available locally, and often you have to travel far and wide to find someone who has it in stock. Worse, sometimes the only stock available is on the other side of the world in who knows where, leaving you down for days while you wait for it to show up...
Once someone invents a magical teleporter that can spit out what you need in a split second on demand, then money to spend when you need it becomes more powerful than already having what you need, but we're a long way from seeing that become reality.
By potato3732842 2025-11-1423:45 It's a lifestyle that snowballs. You can't "just start throwing things away" because your life has grown up around the assumptions of having your brand of junk around.
By Der_Einzige 2025-11-1511:56 If people lived like this the vectrex would have fewer units left alive and no one is making new vector displays anymore.
I for one welcome out capitalist induced pack rat disorders for the elderly as it guarantees that vintage and retro survives.
By mrsvanwinkle 2025-11-1420:31 Poverty-sculpted packrat brain here. I believe this specific behavior became a nuanced social issue starting with the Marie Kondo "Cleanliness" movement from years ago to present, at least my experience of this is through the Tumblr commentaries about how tone-deaf the movement was to people in or who grew up in poverty. so for "never-poor" people like you, the specific nuance would be whether you had space to keep these backup parts like an attic or garage or even extra closet space where this behavior becomes a "tidiness/organization" issue otherwise. hope this perspective gives a better picture
> a £50 fine might as well be £50,000- its unpayable, and leads to a sort of doom-spiral of lending to avoid worse consequences. Easily you can end up in unmanageable debt
Yup! Bank gave me an overdraft when I was 16. At 37 I'm still in debt connected to that first bit of "free" money.
I've never earned above £0, and at this point it's too late to care. They can write me off as a minor loss when I kick it haha
> I've never earned above £0, and at this point it's too late to care
If you have never earned above 0 at age 37, that suggests that you have a personal situation that actually prevents you from working, not so different from a disabled person might face. Just as tragic is the fact that people who do work full time and earn very little also end up in similar debt spirals.
In benevolent societies such people might end up being helped by the social safety net, but in less benevolent societies, they often end up on the streets. There are active experiments in decreasing benevolence right now across many societies.
it’s not terribly uncommon even in the UK to be generationally unemployable.
Homelife being bad = bad grades
bad grades = no support for further education
no basic (or further) education = disadvantage in entry jobs
no experience in entry jobs = red flag for employers (even for other entry level jobs in future where better educated folks fresh from school are also applying).
The larger the gap, the bigger the red flag.
I was in this trap, I just struck a particular lottery that the thing I love most (computers) was a booming industry which had no formal education requirements.
I work and earn money, my balance has never been above zero. Worded it clumsily maybe.
By fouc 2025-11-152:51 I don't know if it would be useful to you, but perhaps try reading some of the blog posts on earlyretirementextreme.com. Lots of good ideas there on how to save money, be frugal, etc.
Or read a book like "Your money or your life"
By cryptonector 2025-11-153:012 reply > I've never earned above £0, and at this point it's too late to care.
You're a sysadmin and what not -- how can that be?
Low salary for the role in my local area and not moving to a city when I still had the ability to take credit out
By cryptonector 2025-11-1521:001 reply It sounds to me like you don't need income from labor. I'm not going to cry for you.
He’s indicated in a sibling thread that he’s not looking for sympathy.
He’s trying to help you empathise that in reality these kinds of holes are really difficult to escape from; moreso than you think on first glance. It’s also very easy to fall into them even if you think you’re immune. Most people are about 2 bad decisions from poverty.
In light of that, your response is just horrible.
Most people spend insane amounts of money on things they don't need to impress the people they don't like.
Two hypothesis:
1) The nature of interest in unsecured loans is high interest (almost by definition) and increasingly so if you are seen as a credit risk. Thus small debts compound over time making them unbearable for longer.
2) Our friend is merely Keeping up with the Jones’ despite never going above a zero balance.
One of these is uncharitable and ridiculous- the other is a known issue that keeps people in poverty.
I’ll let you figure out which.
By tasuki 2025-11-1821:00 I guess I wasn't being clear: I wasn't talking about the person from this thread!
You said:
> Most people are about 2 bad decisions from poverty.
My reaction was to this. I agreed with you, and added the cause: utter financial recklessness. People spending money on things they don't need instead of saving say a quarter of their salary.
For some time I was earning a couple times the average salary in my region of the world. Yet I found that spending about the average salary was more than enough to live a very comfortable life. I feel this is not the norm for whatever reason: most people inflate spending to match their income, and then they're 2 bad decisions (or even some bad luck) from poverty.
If it's any consolation that's how finances work for most governments.
By corobo 2025-11-1421:03 No consolation needed - if I come across as woe is me it's not the intention. It is what it is and all that. I've got food, I've got shelter. It'll do.
You're born, you keep your head down, and you die - if you're lucky.
By amatecha 2025-11-150:22 > terrified to discard anything even if its broken because there are components that might be useful to fix something else; the constant churn of second-hand (and cheap/disposable) things that are already close to death before they come into your possession and- crucially: the crushing weight of knowing that any financial roadbump is existential.
I mean, I'm quite well off (and have never experienced true financial "poorness" at all), and I still have this mindset. Our hyper-capitalist society will have you on the streets for even the the most minor setbacks. Everything feels like a house of cards that could collapse from the smallest breeze.
I just replaced a faulty AC adapter and kept the old one in case the new one fails and the faulty old one will remain an option to repair if I can't repair the newer one.
By goodreadz 2025-11-160:55 I recently got yelled at by a schizophrenic homeless man with serious anger issues that was hungry. And he’s better off than a large percentage of the world. Poor is relational.
By p3rls 2025-11-151:40 [dead]
By ChrisMarshallNY 2025-11-1417:389 reply I like this guy’s backstory[0].
I grew up in Africa. The poverty I saw, as a child, was foundational in my own personal development.
There are some places in the US, that have that kind of poverty, but I have not seen them, with my own eyes.
I have family that dedicated most of their life to fighting poverty (with very limited success). They believe that poverty is probably the single biggest problem in the world, today. Almost every major issue we face, can be traced back to poverty.
Income inequality is one thing, but hardcore poverty, as described by the author, is a different beast, and creates a level of desperation that is incredibly dangerous.
By cryptonector 2025-11-1421:352 reply > I have family that dedicated most of their life to fighting poverty (with very limited success).
Yes, it's very difficult to defeat poverty. But it has been happening world-wide. Poverty has been going down world-wide for 200 years. It's not so much through the efforts of individuals or even governments, just a network effect of technological advancements and opportunity creation (made possible by those advancements), and perhaps (almost certainly) by credit that makes those advancements go faster.
By MangoToupe 2025-11-153:472 reply Only by some definitions of poverty—crucially, definitions that beg the question of rational wealth distribution. I would never, personally, defend such worldviews.
By MangoToupe 2025-11-155:352 reply This doesn't alter anything about what I said. It's still goddamn evil how bad we are at distributing resources in this world. Justice would look like actions that are not legal to advocate for in this country.
By Jensson 2025-11-159:31 Most resources go to average people, how is that bad? Wealth is not resource distribution, consumption is, and by far the most consumption is done by the middle class.
Consumption tax is said to be regressive since it doesn't work on rich people since they invest, that should tell you that consumption is much more evenly distributed than wealth is.
By cryptonector 2025-11-1520:56 > It's still goddamn evil how bad we are at distributing resources
How. How on earth is it evil if you or I have a bit more wealth than the other? Who gives a flying fuck, except... except those who seek power. Total power. You can't have peace as long as you or your preferred leaders are not in total power, and you won't let the rest of us have peace either.
By cryptonector 2025-11-1520:55 > Only by some definitions of poverty—crucially, definitions that beg the question of rational wealth distribution.
What do you care about wealth distribution? Why should anyone? As long as we each can a) not be poor, b) prosper, c) live our lives in peace, none of us should care that someone else is wealthier (or less so) than us.
"But wealth inequality!!" is just moving the goal posts: so poverty has gone down and has been going down, but you can't be satisfied with that, not even if it goes to zero. No, you want something else: power -- total power.
Sounds like the optimism rhetoric of Steven Pinker. I suggest you read up on the numerous criticisms of his work. Most of the optimism is based on a ridiculously low global poverty line conjured out of thin air, and other nonsense like GDP.
By cryptonector 2025-11-152:571 reply What you're saying is nonsense. I don't even know who Steven Pinker is. Poverty two hundred years ago was way worse than poverty today in most of the world -- this is a self-evident fact to anyone with even a passing knowledge of history. No running water, no water mains, no sewers -- these things meant death from cholera and other diseases for many children, and that's just for starters.
By fajitaforce5 2025-11-1515:521 reply Odd how you counter claims as fictional with zero evidence just speculation. I realize this is a discussion forum and not a policy office but I pisses me off when feelings is met with feelings and not explanation or examples. Now’s your chance to really prove your point.
By cryptonector 2025-11-1520:58 That we're all less poor today that our ancestors 200 years ago is absolutely, totally self-evident. No additional evidence needed. Indeed, the inverse claim would require evidence, and extraordinary evidence at that.
By jay_kyburz 2025-11-1419:59 >and creates a level of desperation that is incredibly dangerous.
I came into the comments looking for this sentiment.
We have a fairly good safety net here in my country, I've lived on study and unemployment benefits when I was young.
But when the author mentions they can't just make $300 appear out of nowhere, I can't help thinking that it _is_ possible, its just dangerous.
update: That's why we have good safety nets. Its dangerous for everybody.
So much of this poverty is hidden because it makes people feel uneasy and yet it needs to be exposed, not as a means to shame them or to give you pity to feel bad about yourself but to realise, there is an imbalance and we are all part of it in a small way. That collectively, as nations, we don't need to give up a little to make a lot of change.
Because as it stands there is this notion of person all responsibility, to be Atlus holding the weight of the world. For example, it is estimated that in at lot of poorer counties, the surgery to prevent many forms of vision loss costs $20. That is wild, but it can be a source of self inflicted shame. So you want to buy Mario Kart World, it is $80... Is my enjoyment of this game worth more than the vision of 4 people? That is a wild trip to work through. There is a memorial for Mahatma Gandhi that has an incription, something like "Think of the poorest person you have ever meet and ask yourself how your next action will help them". I wish more folks would ask that.
When you see these monstrous fundings for all manner of AI stuff and wonder where we went so wrong.
The folk I respect the most are those that give up the trappings of excess in the hopes of advancing others rather than hoarding wealth like dragons. To do the opposite of what many influencers do. We need more folk like that.
By luxpir 2025-11-1513:52 I agree. I also don't know how that could realistically be achieved, with everything nowadays being lowest common denominator, aid budgets being slashed and drawbridges being raised. It would take an extraordinary initiative by an extraordinary person or group.
My parents grew up poor in manner that is more extreme than anything OP described in the post and they always remind me that its just hard work and grit.
By jandrewrogers 2025-11-1418:541 reply I think there is an element of "right country, right time" when it comes to being able to escape poverty with hard work and grit, though hard work and grit always helps.
I am extremely fortunate to have been born in the US. My outcome would have been vastly harder to achieve almost anywhere else. Even in the US it was far from certain.
By kelvinjps10 2025-11-1419:267 reply I'm immigrant that come to the us and always that the Americans complain is hardd to understand, like for example inflation they complain about being 3% in my country there was hyperinflation 1000%, also I didn't use to have running water(water would come every 3 days) and electricity would stop working every few days and it would take several hours or days to get fixed. then working here there is so many jobs and you can gain skills and double your income. Most Americans have a car (in my country this is a luxury) latest ¡phone (also a luxury) and most don't cook by themselves also a luxury. I have a year here and I quickly got a comfortable living and I just don't understand it when they complain.
By autoexec 2025-11-150:00 It's perfectly normal for a person to complain about being screwed over even if the person next to him is being screwed even harder. There will always be somebody somewhere who has it worse than you, but that doesn't mean that you shouldn't expect better for yourself than what you have, especially in a country like the US where a small number of people with more money than they could ever spend relentlessly exploit others and take from them.
Starting from nothing, it's easy to gain income and then double it, but most people eventually hit a wall and find that they can't improve their circumstances no matter what they do. Our society will conspire against them to keep them in their place. It will lay out traps for them to hold them back. Some of those traps, like payday loans, you might be able to avoid. For other traps, like our healthcare system, you will have to depend on luck to limit the number of times you are caught. Medical expenses are the reason most people in the US fall into bankruptcy.
Wealth inequality, and a lack of social mobility are huge problems in the US. In the "wealthiest nation on Earth" 1 out of every 8 Americans can't make enough money to feed themselves without government assistance, but even for the others it's easy to gain a false sense of comfort where you are well feed and entertained, but still live paycheck to paycheck and don't have savings to protect yourself from sudden unavoidable expenses. 'Today you are fine, but always one bad day from ruin' is not a comfortable way to live.
Americans complain because even though things can always be worse, they should also be better than they are. I hope Americans never stop trying to improve their situation and the situation of those around them.
> Most Americans have a car (in my country this is a luxury)
Using this as an example to illustrate a broader point: Most Americans can't afford not to have a car. Public transit in the US is next to non-existent in many places. If you want a job, you probably need a car to drive to work every day. So you take out huge loans to pay for the cheapest car you can find: now your financial situation is precarious because you're in debt. Because you bought a bad car, you're constantly at risk of having it break down and having to pay to repair it, which is another layer of precarity.
Similarly, poor Americans do not have the latest iPhone—they have a cheap, used iPhone which could break any day, and they're extremely dependant on it. I can't speak to what life is like in the developing world, but living in poverty in the US is extremely stressful.
To be fair to iPhone point, that's sort of like saying they have a used Gucci bag. A new Motorola phone is cheaper than a 5 year old used iPhone ($130 for a new 2024 moto g vs ~$150-200 for an iPhone 12). A used Motorola is even cheaper (sub $100). Apple has always been a luxury brand. It's basically trivial next to housing, but I still can't imagine buying an Apple product.
By ido 2025-11-1619:40 I'll have to think harder to come up with the exact number, but I've had approximately 3 Android phones and 3 iPhones in my smartphone-career (changed phones more often in the beginning than at the end).
iPhones just last longer (and retain value a lot longer), even when compared to high end Androids (I did research online & bought the recommended brands at the time, like Google Pixel). I currently use an iPhone 11 (6 years old model at the moment, bought slightly-used a few years ago when it was a fairly new model) and have no plan to replace it anytime soon.
It is however very much a "rich people can afford to save money" boots-type situation.
By paulryanrogers 2025-11-1523:491 reply A smart phone is increasingly required to do things like banking, pay bills, order things.
I live within a bike ride of a lot of places, but it would still add up to hours more a week. And for 3 months of the year there's ice and snow that are rough on the equipment.
By ndriscoll 2025-11-1615:42 That's not my experience in the US, but in any case the phone I mentioned is a smart phone.
In a democratic society, complaining is very important. It is probably why, by people complaining about a 5% inflation, the government had to take drastic moves to suppress it.
If you don't complain, you eventually won't be able to complain. If you can't complain, you take anything shoveled to you by the government, poverty being the foremost.
By MangoToupe 2025-11-154:01 > It is probably why, by people complaining about a 5% inflation, the government had to take drastic moves to suppress it.
This is only a half-truth. Complaints are only worth respecting if people hold their governments accountable. There's a reason why single-payer healthcare polls higher than either party in the US. Inflation gets attention because it affects a minority of the population that matters more.
By metadope 2025-11-1423:31 Steve Cutts <https://www.stevecutts.com> explains American unhappiness and tendency to complain (even though we've had it better than almost everyone ever).
The Pursuit Of Happiness is humanity's universal right, but our culture and the economy depends upon everybody always wanting more, and better...
Some things are fake issues created by the media to give people a reasonable sounding cover to vote for politicians that have reactionary politics that they wouldn't cop to in public.
This is why you hear people say they vote for Trump because of "the economy", even though when he and his party were in power the first time, the economy was on the downturn after he implemented policy (even before COVID) and every economist said Trump's proposed policies in 2024 would be bad for the economy. They were proven correct.
People would rather seem like single issue voters who don't understand that issue than be thought of as racist, supportive of pedophilia, misogynistic, etc. See also: "but her emails"
By lurk2 2025-11-1510:59 American living standards have declined from their peak in the mid-to-late 20th century. If you’re under 40 you will likely be materially worse off than your parents even if you are better educated than they are. It isn’t like this in the developing world, so there is still an optimism there for the young professionals benefitting from the development.
It's not so much the absolute amount you have, but rather your situation in comparison with your country men.
Yes, I know what 3rd-world poverty looks like, but, in a sense health care is more accessible to poor people in 3rd-world countries than in some advanced countries (e.g., US). Also, the morale-destroying aspect of poverty hits harder in advanced countries, because people assume you're poor because of what TFA talks about: being lazy, dumb, etc.
Poverty exists people think it ought to, that's the simple reason it exists. People think a world where some deemed unworthy have to experience crushing poverty is a more meaningful world, that's it. Certainly there is absolutely no reason that any person has to go to bed hungry, as a lot more food is produced in the world than is needed.
By terminalshort 2025-11-153:481 reply But the difference is that I can respect people who complain about having absolutely nothing, but I can't take seriously the complaints of rich people that they aren't richer.
By prmph 2025-11-157:12 You misunderstood my response. Let me explain better: I'm not saying what matters is the relative amount of money you have in relation to your peers; it is about the relative claim you have on resources, power, respect, mental health, etc.
Money and those other things may be correlated, but focusing on those things emphasizes how much money is a proxy for them.
So for example, even if you earn 100k, but many/most people are earning 500k, it cause a huge power imbalance that enables them to easily make your life miserable on a whim. It also causes society to see you as a failure, causing mental/emotional distress that further pull you into a spiral of despair.
> health care is more accessible to poor people in 3rd-world countries than in some advanced countries (e.g., US).
Do you seriously believe it's even remotely comparable? In 3rd-world countries even basic healthcare is totally inaccessible unless someone in your family is at the top level of government. If you're a worker or in a worker family even glasses are probably almost impossible to get.
> In 3rd-world countries even basic healthcare is totally inaccessible unless someone in your family is at the top level of government. If you're a worker or in a worker family even glasses are probably almost impossible to get.
I know for sure this is totally wrong, because I have lived in 3rd world countries, and I was born in one. You're just imagining stuff.
I visited a few rural cities in the Central African republic ~15 years ago and this situation definitely exists (existed?) there. Your best bet is to try to get care in a monastery, but it's not like they have glasses or anything other than basic medicine.
The Central African Republic is among the poorest of countries in the world, so that situation might exist there.
But many (most?) 3rd world countries, like Ghana where I was born, are nowhere near this level of misery.
By inglor_cz 2025-11-1513:01 The root of your disagreement lies in the fact that "The Third World" isn't really a useful abstraction anymore.
Plenty of former 3rd world countries are middle-income now. There is just no comparison between living in Thailand vs. South Sudan, even though there might be in the 1950s.
Time to toss the expression entirely, it doesn't really describe anything concrete anymore. The world has changed.
By ChrisMarshallNY 2025-11-1418:444 reply That, and an environmnet that allows folks "from the wrong side of the tracks," to get ahead.
For all its faults, the US is just such a place. I suspect that many other nations are starting to improve.
At one time, the UK was a nation that you couldn't get ahead, unless you were of a certain class. I think that it is much more like the US, nowadays. You can hear lots of cockney accents in Harrods.
> I think that it is much more like the US, nowadays.
IIRC, mobility indexes crossed quite a few years ago. IOW, UK is better than the US in this respect. See, e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Social_Mobility_Index, though it's a claim I've read based on other data and before that particular index was compiled.
By jandrewrogers 2025-11-1419:032 reply Social mobility doesn't measure financial welfare and is only weakly correlated with the ability to improve your financial situation. It is largely a measure of wage compression in the economy. If everyone makes similar wages then the population will be highly socially mobile even if those wages are mediocre.
Absolute economic mobility matters much more in terms of having an opportunity to get out of poverty. High economic mobility increases wage variance and therefore naturally reduces social mobility scores since the latter is a relative rank measure.
There are countries where increasing your income $10k makes you "socially mobile" and other countries where increasing your income $50k does not.
By verteu 2025-11-1421:05 > Absolute economic mobility matters much more
The US does poorly on this metric too: https://i.imgur.com/eYHUysQ.png [1] https://i.imgur.com/vLz5iUz.png [2]
(Note that the x-axis is "birth year.")
[1] https://equitablegrowth.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/04282...
Your statement doesn't really make sense and contradicts what research [1] is saying so you really back that up with a good argument and evidence.
[1] https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/report...
By jandrewrogers 2025-11-1420:441 reply It is a maths problem, not one of economic theory, and a well-understood limitation of "social mobility" as a measure in this context. Social mobility between two countries is only meaningfully comparable if their income distributions also have a similar degree of compression since it is a rank statistic. The large differences in wage compression between e.g. Scandinavia and the US are well documented, such as this[0] recent NBER paper, and not controversial.
Increasing rank is much easier than increasing income on a compressed distribution. Being able to easily increase income is much more important than being able to easily increasing rank if you are optimizing for economic opportunity.
[0] https://www.nber.org/digest/202505/wage-compression-drives-n...
By wahern 2025-11-1422:48 Yeah, median income in the UK is about at the level of Mississippi, as is much of Western Europe (Western, not Eastern!). The US is just ridiculously wealthy, and our income inequality is largely a matter of the absurd heights reached at the top, with wide distributions. OTOH, wealth disparity (or even just the perception of wealth disparity) can be politically destabilizing and lead to some pathological social issues. Greater relative social mobility and greater (perceived?) wealth equality seems to result in a better sense of fairness, a sense of fairness is key to social cohesion and trust, and social trust is key to producing wealth. Though, social trust is necessary but hardly sufficient. Likewise, perceived mobility and equality seems necessary but not sufficient for healthy political and civic culture.
By ChrisMarshallNY 2025-11-1617:37 I remember watching Fiona Hill's testimony.
That lady has some serious chops, but she said she had to leave the UK, as she was denied opportunities, because of her "Distinctive Northern Accent" (In the UK, the "North" is considered kind of "Redneck," like our South).
By potato3732842 2025-11-1420:13 >For all its faults, the US is just such a place.
Trying hard not to be and using some flimsy pretext to justify it probably accounts for 3/4 of state laws that don't pertain to a) a procedural matter b) a matter with an identifiable victim, or at least that's how it looks by my unscientific observation.
By ToucanLoucan 2025-11-1419:271 reply > That, and an environmnet that allows folks "from the wrong side of the tracks," to get ahead.
Vast swathes of this country look no better than the developing nations Sarah McLaughlin would go to to sing sad music and hold little kids to beg people for money in television ads.
Like I don't think you're wrong necessarily but at the same time, it really, really matters which tracks you're on the wrong side of.
You're not wrong. We routinely ignore things like this: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/sep/05/hookworm-low...
> The average income is just $18,046 (£13,850) a year, and almost a third of the population live below the official US poverty line. The most elementary waste disposal infrastructure is often non-existent.
> Some 73% of residents included in the Baylor survey reported that they had been exposed to raw sewage washing back into their homes as a result of faulty septic tanks or waste pipes becoming overwhelmed in torrential rains.
...
> An eight-year-old child was sitting on the stoop of one of the trailers. Below him a white pipe ran from his house, across the yard just a few feet away from a basketball hoop, and into a copse of pine and sweet gum trees.
> The pipe was cracked in several places and stopped just inside the copse, barely 30ft from the house, dripping ooze into a viscous pool the color of oil. Directly above the sewage pool, a separate narrow-gauge pipe ran up to the house, which turned out to be the main channel carrying drinking water to the residents.
> The open sewer was festooned with mosquitoes, and a long cordon of ants could be seen trailing along the waste pipe from the house. At the end of the pool nearest the house the treacly fluid was glistening in the dappled sunlight – a closer look revealed that it was actually moving, its human effluence heaving and churning with thousands of worms.
By ToucanLoucan 2025-11-1422:251 reply Yup. Also: everyone reading this, celebrate that Flint, Michigan finally has water that's clean by Federal standards after just over ELEVEN. FUCKING. YEARS. That's right, America, land of opportunity, the wealthiest country on the face of the Earth (at time of comment), needed just over eleven years to get one city's inhabitants water that wasn't full to the tits with lead.
That's not NO lead, mind you, it's just now below the levels where the feds were willing to say it was a legitimate crisis. With a nod to who the feds are right now, and with a second nod to that's just at the supply line level, fuck knows how many homes still have lead pipes leeching into the taps.
Shocking absolutely no one who pays one damn bit of attention to this sort of thing: yes, Flint, Michigan is majority black.
By inemesitaffia 2025-11-158:30 People are paying attention.
Don't forget who was President during the time and sold us the idea it was fixed that year.
I had no idea it wasn't all fixed until someone there told sometime in the last two years.
“Used to be” such a place. Stagnating minimum wage while inflation proceeds unchecked, the rise of marginal employment and contract work. Skyrocketing housing costs. I don’t think the us is such a place anymore. It fast becoming a place that is not.
By mrguyorama 2025-11-1420:061 reply The US was never a place like that. Even in the mostly imagined "golden age" of the fifties, if you were the wrong family or color you would not be able to reliably get out of poverty no matter how much effort or guile you could afford
The bank did not care that you would be a profitable customer, they still weren't going to lend to you.
By potato3732842 2025-11-1420:25 You're projecting the current onto the past. It was a problem, but it wasn't the show stopper it would be today. Not having access to credit wasn't as big a deal when there weren't subsidized credit products and you therefore weren't competing with people who had artificial access to cheap money.
The reason minority communities exist is because those people were wealthy enough to own land, have businesses, etc. And this was before the modern idea of a home or business as a leverage investments so when they bought homes or started businesses they mostly did it where people like them were, not where a bunch of snobbish white people who hated them were (because that's where the best investment growth potential is).
Pretty much every discernible ethnic group in the history of the US has made an upward march from generally poor to more or less the same as average. There are two exceptions, native americans and blacks. And the latter was poised to do so in the 1960s. Much has been written about both so I don't feel the need to opine here.
Yeah, society was racist AF back then and imparted a lot of glass ceilings and certainly kept certain groups a little more down, but the past wasn't simply like the present but with more racism.
By potato3732842 2025-11-1420:142 reply Minimum almost doesn't matter in a discussion of mobility. Nobody ever escaped poverty working minimum wage. They found a way to move up.
By tstrimple 2025-11-1420:56 Minimum wage provides breathing room for other opportunities including self-advancement. Just survivorship bias nonsense.
> They found a way to move up.
Yeah, and they probably had to spend money to make that happen. Night courses at a community college aren't free. A higher minimum wage makes it easier to get your foot in the door for something better.
By nradov 2025-11-1518:31 Most community colleges have some sort of tuition waiver or scholarship program for low income students.
I think that's a comforting lie people like to tell themselves. Lots of hard-working people never get their due. In reality, people who escape bad circumstances often just get lucky. That's hard to accept, because nobody "deserves" to get lucky. We want to believe we earned what we have, and that, if we had to do it all over again, we'd still end up succeeding. But often that's not true.
By kmijyiyxfbklao 2025-11-1520:30 I think it's more comforting to think that you could've done nothing about your life being bad. It's so obvious that you need both good luck and hard work.
Both my parents came to America with less than $20 and nothing else but what they wore. I constantly think of how hard they worked to let me live such a leisurely life.
Sadly many kids (college graduates) start out with -250k$ and the clothes they're wearing.
Of course, they often have family they can fall back on, and education, but debt creates an entirely new class of 'less than dirt' poor.
You have to be pretty well off to begin with in order to be in a position to take out $250k of student debt.
It’s the kids who can’t even imagine going to college due to living in poverty growing up that are actually “less than dirt poor”. Someone who went to a fancy college enough to get that far into debt is going to be extremely privileged on average.
You do not at all need to be well off to take $250k in student debt. In fact, the worse off you are the easier it is to do so. It’s how the US federal student loan aide works, essentially. The less you have the more they’ll loan.
Totally different from my lived experience.
Friends who grew up in middle class to upper middle class suburbs and parenting all took on college debt to varying degrees and varying outcomes 20 years later.
Friends who grew up with me in the inner city around poverty and who grew up poor or worse didn’t even consider college as an option due to the costs.
Almost no one growing up in actual poverty is going to be considering taking on six figures of college debt. The concept itself is utterly foreign and absurd. You simply already know at a young age it’s out of reach short of a full ride (sports or academic) scholarship. Even if you wanted to, your family doesn’t have the luxury of waiting for you to graduate college before you contribute to helping care for parents or younger siblings. This fact is socially reinforced by both family and your peers.
The folks I know who ended up with massive life-ending crippling student debt all grew up insanely privileged compared to the average around me. They all pretended to grow up “lower middle class” but they are outright lying to themselves (and others) about it.
It’s been interesting watching the student debt forgiveness debate under this lense. I don’t think a certain class of people understands just how tone deaf they are on the subject.
Sure there are outliers, but I’m talking about generalizations here.
By slaughtr 2025-11-1517:05 I mean maybe by being a poor person in college on federal student loans I ended up naturally around other poor people in college on federal student loans and it’s confirmation bias, but what you’re saying is a little too generalized for my lived experience. Lots and lots of people growing up in poverty take that FAFSA and run - it’s what everyone says is the only way out of poverty.
I’ll give you this, though: most of the poor college students I knew (myself included) never made it to the $250k line because we eventually had to drop out because things like having to work to afford food made it harder to do well enough to stay in school and graduate.
By moralestapia 2025-11-1418:181 reply >its just hard work and grit
Which country, though?
Because that's like 90% of the solution.
The other 9% is good health.
The remaining 1% is a mix of your community/family/friends and, sure, hard work and grit and whatnot.
By magicalist 2025-11-1418:56 > china 1962
that seems like a perfect historical period for a lesson on "just hard work and grit" being necessary but not nearly sufficient.
By moralestapia 2025-11-1419:021 reply Credit where credit is due.
I could say "yeah, but that was your whole country", but that was definitely your parents and everybody else doing unpleasant things for a while to improve the well-being of everyone after them. Amazing.
Edit: answer to @kragen. I have to do it like this as I'm (partially) censored on HN.
xe doesn't mention xir parents leaving China, from the context of this conversation I would assume they are still in China since we are talking about the environment where people thrived.
By kragen 2025-11-1420:18 Well, the thing wagwang's parents did that improved the well-being of the people after them was to leave China.
What the Chinese society had been collectively doing for the previous ten years, however, was creating "the deadliest famine and one of the greatest man-made disasters in human history, with an estimated death toll due to starvation that ranges in the tens of millions (15 to 55 million)." And the following ten years included the first six years of the Cultural Revolution:
> Estimates of the death toll vary widely, typically ranging from 1–2 million, including a massacre in Guangxi that included acts of cannibalism, as well as massacres in Beijing, Inner Mongolia, Guangdong, Yunnan, and Hunan. Red Guards sought to destroy the Four Olds (old ideas, old culture, old customs, and old habits), which often took the form of destroying historical artifacts and cultural and religious sites. Tens of millions were persecuted, including senior officials such as Liu Shaoqi, Deng Xiaoping and Peng Dehuai; millions were persecuted for being members of the Five Black Categories, with intellectuals and scientists labelled as the Stinking Old Ninth. The country's schools and universities were closed, and the National College Entrance Examinations were cancelled.
I don't think any of that can be accurately described as "everybody else doing unpleasant things for a while to improve the well-being of everyone after them."
Chinese history, including in the 20th century, includes many of the brightest stars that have ever illuminated human history, and after the Cultural Revolution, a meteoric rise out of poverty, led by the same Deng Xiaoping whose son was tortured and crippled by Red Guards in the Cultural Revolution. But specifically in 01962 "everybody" was creating that poverty and worsening the well-being of everyone after them.
By wiseowise 2025-11-157:42 > they always remind me that its just hard work and grit
Copium for poors.
By gopher_space 2025-11-1419:072 reply Immigrants show up in America having been knocked down by life here zero times and then compare themselves to people who've been knocked down generationally.
By BobaFloutist 2025-11-1419:46 I don't know how to tell you that some people have war in their country.
By igor47 2025-11-1419:42 Is "by life here" doing the heavy lifting in your comment? Because obviously immigrants haven't been knocked down by life here.
I agree that folks have a pretty tough life generationally in America's rust belt. I disagree that this is unique or uniquely bad compared to many other places in the world. Although there is something pretty unique about the way American culture processes or encodes the hardship. Individualism can really make things worse...
> Income inequality is one thing, but hardcore poverty, as described by the author, is a different beast
This is something I never thought of but certainly rings true. The left always talks about income inequality and poverty as if they are one and the same. And then rebuttal almost always rebut against income inequality (or being "broke") and not poverty. By conflating the two, we're throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Perhaps we need politicians who will accurately define poverty and policies for getting folks out of poverty, and then once everyone can afford to eat, we can talk about income inequality.
By ChrisMarshallNY 2025-11-162:061 reply Not sure why that comment got downvoted. I guess that "income inequality" is the Boogeyman Du Jour.
I'm unhappy with it, but it is also a lot harder to address, than hardcore poverty.
A popular thing for people to do, is wring their hands and complain about problems that can't be solved, while ignoring the ones that can be addressed.
Fighting poverty is going to be tough, but fighting income inequality would be orders of magnitude more difficult, because of the entrenched and powerful folks with investment in the status quo.
If we split them, we can deal with the "low-hanging fruit" of poverty, maybe even leveraging the vast resources of the very rich, who might be more willing to help, if they didn't see it as a threat.
By quails8mydog 2025-11-1610:082 reply Maybe splitting them is helpful, but why would you have to do them sequentially? Many of the things that reduce income inequality also help reduce poverty. Poverty isn't "low-hanging fruit" and it's something people have been trying to eradicate longer than we've been alive.
Saying "let's not even think about B until we've 100% sorted A" is just a way to ensure B never gets done.
By abustamam 2025-11-1618:00 I think I gave the impression that we should tackle them sequentially with my comment. My point was that I don't think it's controversial to eradicate poverty, but for whatever reason it is controversial to eradicate income inequality. We don't need to tackle them sequentially but we also don't need to wait for a silver policy bullet that solves income inequality while we try to solve poverty as well. It may be possible to do both, but in the event it's impossible to do B at least we can still try to do A.
By ChrisMarshallNY 2025-11-1613:26 Is that what I said?
I apologize. That was not what I meant.
I simply stated they should be decoupled, and approached concurrently.
I live comfortably in the United States. I consider myself middle class. I worry about my job and increasing costs. But I’m okay.
I do feel like that we really could end global poverty if we tried, and that people like me ought to contribute.
By expedition32 2025-11-1422:05 Everyone worries about losing their job I think. Nowadays employment is a lot more unstable. Hell a large percentage of the workforce doesn't even have permanent employment. Flexibility is great for companies but humans need stability.
There is nothing worse than the economy going South, corporations starting to cut jobs en masse and you finding out that there are 50 other people who show up for that job interview.
Not all poverty is created equal.
Some people had good financial discipline and still fell into poverty due to business catastrophes, accidents or health problems. We need better systems to provide shields for those people, be it bankruptcy laws, universal insurance or healthcare.
Others live in unhabitable environments that can never sustain a viable economy. Until humanity finds technologies to address those environmental issues, they can never get out of poverty.
Then there are always people who are reckless and irresponsible. They are black holes of resources. Some can be educated while others do deserve to be poor. It's based their own decisions and I don't see a moral issue to leave them alone.
By throwaway173738 2025-11-152:422 reply I’d say 99% of the poor are in the first two categories. So I don’t really care if the third category gets some stuff too if it means we help everyone else.
By terminalshort 2025-11-153:461 reply I sure see a lot of people in category 3
Oh really? Where? How can you tell they're reckless or lazy and not (e.g.) disabled?
By terminalshort 2025-11-1511:591 reply It's pretty easy to see when someone spends money like an idiot
By bccdee 2025-11-1515:05 The spectre of the "wasteful welfare recipient" is invoked constantly, but I've never seen any of these people. The poor people I've known are, by necessity, quite careful with money.
By abnercoimbre 2025-11-153:11 Agreed. I was nodding along with the GP right up until their ending statement, yikes.
Poverty is usually (always?) result of politics. I.e. in poor countries you have a highly dysfunctional system and elites which profiting off it. So the only way to to help is to instigate some kind of coup, eliminate warlords etc. But then how do you guarantee that whoever replaces them would be better?
By xg15 2025-11-1423:24 Our own countries could stop actively funding, supporting and even creating that corrupt elite, for a start. See e.g. the Françafrique system in Africa.
By reaperducer 2025-11-1417:4410 reply There are some places in the US, that have that kind of poverty, but I have not seen them, with my own eyes.
Americans are very often blind to the poverty in their own backyards.
There are hundreds of thousands (millions?) of people in America who do not have electricity or even running water in their homes.
I'm always reminded of a photograph from a few years ago in the Navajo Times showing a handful of children sitting in a little clearing bordered by rocks at the top of a hill, surrounded by endless desert. That was their classroom.
No desks or chairs. Not even walls, a roof, or a floor. Just out in the open, sitting in the dirt. According to the photo caption, they had to have their classes there because it was the only place where they could get a cellular signal to do their lessons.
Edit: I can't believe I found it - October, 2020. (I took a picture of it, and it was still in iPhoto.)
Caption: Milton T. Carroll, left, and Wylean Burbank, center, help their daughter Eziellia H. Carroll, a kindergartener at Cottonwood Day School, with her school work on Monday in Fish Point, Ariz. Carroll said he built the circular rock wall to protect his children from the elements.
I was wrong about no desk. The three of them share something that looks like it was nailed together from a discarded wooden palette. There's also a plastic milk crate nearby.
These are American citizens. In America. It's hard not to go off about the gilded ballrooms and trillion-dollar bonus packages.
This is what Cottonwood Day School on the Navajo reservation actually looks like.
Clean modern buildings, desks, air conditioning, running water, very nice. You were fooled by that photo into making a bigger assumption about the full school and situation.
The story that photograph is from is about distance learning enforced by the COVID pandemic. https://navajotimes.com/edu/hill-becomes-makeshift-classroom.... The family does not have internet access, and while they were issued a laptop and mobile hotspot, it only gets signal from the top of that hill.
OP may have misunderstood the context but I think it's a stretch to say they were intentionally fooled.
By jibe 2025-11-1421:45 What I meant was they fooled themselves. They had negative assumptions about how Native Americans live and are treated, then they see a photo of a dirt pit, and even though it is completely implausible, assume it is a school. It is so far off reality it is notable.
I can’t imagine why anyone would be deliberately misled to believe Cottonwood Day School on the Navajo reservation is not very nice. Oh wait
By renewiltord 2025-11-1418:432 reply Not American born so there is some obvious thing here that’s not so obvious to me. What’s the ref? Is it a race thing
By pkkim 2025-11-1420:08 Not sure exactly how obvious it is to most Americans, but the Navajo reservation is extremely poor by American standards. When I went there, the local roads were all dirt and the houses seemed to have no electricity.
By UncleEntity 2025-11-1420:32 I used to have Hopi and Navajo friends and I have no idea what they are referring to.
One thing I can tell you that the whole situation up there is contentious and complicated between the tribes, the states and the feds where one could support any argument as there isn't some standard "Rez Life" one can point at.
I mean, I used to have this one friend who grew up (and still had family) on a part of the reservation which was completely surrounded by the other tribe and her and my other friends (from the other tribe, don't quite remember which was which here) would get into some serious arguments at the bar over the issue where we'd have to separate them before it came to fisticuffs.
By reaperducer 2025-11-1418:50 I can’t imagine why anyone would be deliberately misled to believe Cottonwood Day School on the Navajo reservation is not very nice. Oh wait
The real world isn't TV. Not everything is a grand conspiracy.
Is this the photo? https://navajotimes.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/dq-no-wif...
By reaperducer 2025-11-1417:54 Not the exact photo, but it looks like it's another angle from the same photo shoot.
Thanks for finding that.
The other crime in that photo is the lack of cell service, despite billions of dollars that the USG has given ATT/Verizon/T-Mo over the years.
But these phone companies just give unfettered access to their networks to the various TLAs and everybody ignores the fact that they are not providing the cell service they are contractually obligated to.
By jandrewrogers 2025-11-1421:14 Why would you expect there to be cell service there? Large parts of that area of the Mountain West are virtually uninhabited and have no telecom infrastructure to connect the cellular service to. There is literally nothing out in much of it except the occasional building every 10-20 miles which isn't enough to sustain a cellular network.
These days satellite would be cheaper in any case.
Why is cellular signal required for lessons? I went through 12 years of school in Eastern Europe without anyone in the entire country having cellular signal, or cellular phones. (Well mostly, towards the end they appeared, but had no effect in school). Granted, perhaps the lessons were less than perfect, but they were way better than nothing.
By maxerickson 2025-11-1417:58 It was during the pandemic, the family did not have good phone service at their home...
https://navajotimes.com/edu/hill-becomes-makeshift-classroom...
By reaperducer 2025-11-1417:58 Why is cellular signal required for lessons?
Look at the photo (linked to elsewhere in this thread).
If it's anything like some of the parts of the big rez I've been to, the nearest school is probably three hours away over sand/dirt roads. The teacher teaches remotely to children spread over a thousand square miles.
By dotnet00 2025-11-1418:02 It's to have something better than just the bare minimum. I remember seeing similar reports about higher education in remote villages in India, with cellular networks and internet access allowing people to learn without being able to move to somewhere close to sufficiently qualified teachers.
> Americans are very often blind to the poverty in their own backyards.
it doesn't help that it's in practice illegal to be in such poverty.
By ModernMech 2025-11-1418:033 reply If anyone is wondering why solving homelessness and poverty is so hard, this sibling reply is dead but I think people need to see that this opinion exists, and we need to contemplate the richest and most powerful people in this country share this sentiment:
"we're not blind to it, half of us are sick of paying for it for multiple generations, accruing interest. we're paying for poor people from 20 years ago still. let them sink, let them go away. its a test, they failed it."
Here, "go away" is a euphemism for "die from exposure".
20 years ago we had a worldwide financial crises caused by the capricious whims of the richest people in this country, they caused massive amounts of damage, destroyed people's lives and livelihoods, kicked them out on the street, and it's framed as "paying for poor people".
By steveBK123 2025-11-1418:201 reply I often find the loudest voices with this mentality either come from well off families, or were poor enough themselves in childhood to have benefited from the government programs they wish to destroy. The first is ignorance and the second is some sort of self hatred / shame.
I rarely hear people that grew up fairly middle class and "made it" looking back at the poor as someone holding them back in this same manner.
By duskdozer 2025-11-158:18 >or were poor enough themselves in childhood to have benefited from the government programs they wish to destroy
or, are currently benefiting, but they're just getting what's owed to them, unlike all the other moochers taking handouts
By piva00 2025-11-1418:21 It's always sickening to hear more educated people (compared to the average) repeating this inhumane bullshit.
Wanting people to die because they are poor, losing complete touch of why we humans even develop what we do: to the betterment of us all, to enrich all of our lives, to make the lives of future humans better. There's no other point to it, the absurd individualism is a disease, I'd much rather eradicate those from our lineage than the less fortunate, for a better future for humanity.
By carlosjobim 2025-11-1418:205 reply It's nobody's fault for becoming poor. But if you're staying poor (dirt poor) for decades, then there is something you're doing wrong. The other commenter puts it in a rude way, but there's something to it. If you evidently can't take care of yourself, then you shouldn't be given more money. You should be in some kind of institution which takes care of your basic needs.
By bluGill 2025-11-1421:35 > If you evidently can't take care of yourself, then you shouldn't be given more money. You should be in some kind of institution which takes care of your basic needs.
We used to have those in the US. Things are better for the poor now without them - a few do freeze to death in the streets today, most do not, while the abuse of those old institutions did hit most. The people who need institutions are also those least able to advocate for themselves if they are abused.
I don't like the current answer, but it could be worse and if you want something better you need to explain how it won't descend into worse. I don't have any ideas myself.
By TheOtherHobbes 2025-11-1418:391 reply No.
So far as I know, every single UBI trial has had consistently positive outcomes. People get jobs, get training, get a roof over their heads.
Giving people money does in fact give people more choices, and helps make the poor less poor.
Which UBI trials do you know about? There's a list here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_basic_income_pilots
But only six of the listed pilots mention the results.
1970s NIT pilots: no noticeable improvements.
Mincome: significant reduction in hospitalization. Slight decrease in work?
Tribal profit sharing: better homelife for children, parents on the booze less.
Madhya Pradesh: great success.
Netherlands: increased employment slightly, not health.
Finland: improved health slightly, not employment (employment was the goal).
So, I don't know. I suppose it helps, but mostly in Madhya Pradesh.
By lostlogin 2025-11-1617:13 Everyone over 65 gets a state pension in NZ. And they hardly contribute to the tax take. I’d say that’s a partial UBI.
By ModernMech 2025-11-1418:232 reply > It's nobody's fault
Sure, but it's the system's fault, and we can point at the people who are keeping the system the way it is. The system is what it does, and what it does is syphon money from everyone else and pumps it upward to a few individuals. That's not an accident, people are responsible for that, they like the way it works, and they're intent on keeping it that way.
Remember, in this system you get paid money for having money and you get charged a fee if you don't have enough. You get taxed more for working with capital than for owning capital. You pay more the less you buy. People always say "The hardest million was the first million". This is by design!
> You should be in some kind of institution which takes care of your basic needs.
Maybe, but we refuse to fund those because they're too expensive to operate.
By carlosjobim 2025-11-1418:523 reply Have you seen "the system" sleeping on the streets, starving, or not having enough clothes?
No matter who or what is to blame, the individual is who is paying the price and who should have the strongest interest to get out of that situation. Which means, if you're staying in that situation for years on end you have to admit to yourself you are doing something which isn't working.
Thats why people have more sympathy for somebody who is poor because they are temporarily down on their luck or born into poverty, and less sympathy for somebody who has been poor as an adult for decades.
By cycomanic 2025-11-1420:00 Yes the argument that being poor is some sort of character flaw, while realistically it's just a lack of money, usually inherited from the parents. I would bet that most people who make these arguments (like everyone else) would end up permanently poor if one was to take away their money and networks.
All research (e.g. UBI trials, mirco loan experiments...) have shown that giving someone poor access to money allows them to dramatically improve their situation.
By ModernMech 2025-11-1419:08 In 2024 over 700k people were homeless in the USA. That's a system failure. If you want to talk about personal failings you have to consider individual circumstances. But 700k being homeless is abjectly just not how a civil society should operate.
Yes, because human mind is famously known for being extraordinarily good at getting out of self-destructive spiraling without external help, and that help is famously known for being provided to everyone who needs it regardless of their economic status. Also, chronic lack of money has absolutely no way to contribute to that occurring in the first place. /s
By carlosjobim 2025-11-1421:364 reply I get it. Everybody gets it. For some months, even years. But after a decade or so in such a situation, you must arrive at some sort of epiphany, look at your life and say "what the fuck?".
And I don't think anybody is arguing that people shouldn't get help to get back on their feet. Rather that some people refuse to get back on their feet.
By carlosjobim 2025-11-1516:401 reply Unfortunately hackers made sure that the only reply below written by somebody who has actually been homeless was [flagged] and [dead]. That's the prevailing attitude towards poverty among the intellectuals. "Let's talk about them, not with them."
So I'll reply here, since I can't reply to a [dead]:
> And then what? You're 54 years old. No degree. No work history. Criminal conviction for drug possession. You're mentally ill and unmedicated. You realize for the first time you want to change your life. What's your first move? You have until your lucidity is interrupted by the next bout of mania and paranoid delusions to turn your life around.
You get medication and join the merchant navy as a mess hand. Not only do you get food, a safe bed, medical attention, safety, a salary, and companionship. You also get away from a destructive environment, drugs, threats, and all that shit that made life hell.
By ChrisMarshallNY 2025-11-1622:361 reply > Unfortunately hackers made sure that the only reply below written by somebody who has actually been homeless was [flagged] and [dead].
I't been my experience* that HN folks don't like reality, practicum, and personal experience. They mostly like abstractions and theory.
*See what I did, there?
If you'd be actually experienced, you would realize that there's an autokill filter on HN and the comment in question contains the forbidden M word. Apparently my vouch wasn't enough to resurrect it.
By ChrisMarshallNY 2025-11-1711:08 Makes sense (I run showdead=no, so I never saw the original), but that doesn’t make my comment any less accurate. We all see this stuff happen on a regular basis.
A long discussion is going on, with people flinging poo, back and forth, and one comment appears, from someone actually in the industry/organization being discussed, or by someone with very relevant direct experience, and that comment gets immediately dogpiled; often by both sides. It’s happened to me, a couple of times. I’ve learned to just stay out of these shitfests, even if they are embarrassingly offbase.
With this kind of emotionally-charged, nontechnical topic, it’s even worse than things like OS or methodology dogma battles.
By baq 2025-11-1423:26 No. After a decade the ‘what the fuck’ is just a distant memory. ‘It is what it is’, ‘nothing ever works out’, other kinds of depression just win by default.
By seba_dos1 2025-11-152:11 Looks like you don't.
By ModernMech 2025-11-1421:49 [dead]
By potato3732842 2025-11-1418:302 reply If it only pumped the money to a few individuals someone would've pushed those individuals off a cliff and seized power by now.
The magic of the system is that there's enough trickle down to motivate the petite-bourgeois (I hate Marx, but I'll be darned if he didn't enumerate some good economic tiers) to make them keep the system running.
Your media talking heads peddling division, your 200k+/yr software engineers implementing extractive algorithms to make the gig economy tick, etc, etc, etc.
By TheOtherHobbes 2025-11-1418:45 It looks like the times are changing thanks to AI, so we'll see what happens when the petite-bourgeoisie stop being quite so bougie.
By ModernMech 2025-11-1418:46 If that were true, the Vice President wouldn't be trying to convince us that housing costs are high because of illegal immigration.
> You should be in some kind of institution which takes care of your basic needs.
You're right of course. The problem is that such institution no longer exist in North America.
By dingnuts 2025-11-1419:23 [dead]
You are one major sickness and one layoff away from getting into the same situation, often to the point of no return.
No, I doubt they are. Most people who are on the streets chronically are there because they’ve burned every bridge. Most people have a dozen friends or family who would gladly give them the guest room for a few weeks if they had a job loss that put them at risk of hard times — on the other hand those who mysteriously have zero friends or family usually got that way by the same antisocial behaviors that contributed to their problems in the first place, until every last person that once cared said “don’t come around here anymore.”
Not saying anyone’s a Bad Person for this, but treating everyone like zero-agency victims or helpless children has never fixed anything. You can’t fix people without at least their partnership, and generally it’s substances and severe mental illness that gets in the way of the cooperation. “Bitter pills to swallow” as the meme goes but anyone who doesn’t admit this is kidding themself.
> who would gladly give them the guest room for a few weeks
Yeah, a couple weeks and then what? Couch-surfing is a form of homelessness, and the membrane between sleeping on a couch and sleeping on the street can be very thin, especially when your health makes it unlikely you'll find work in the near future. Something as simple as a concussion can stop you from working for months.
> but treating everyone like zero-agency victims or helpless children has never fixed anything
I hear this argument a lot, and I find it baffling. What's your proposal here? That we all wag our fingers at homeless people? The people with agency who can fix their situations on their own already did—in fact, they course-corrected long before they slid into poverty or homelessness in the first place. If they had agency, they wouldn't be in this situation.
By ModernMech 2025-11-156:48 > What's your proposal here?
There is no proposal, and that's the point.
That's why I dredged up the dead comment in the first place stating it plainly "let them sink, let them go away." At least that poster was honest about the end game.
Lot of other posters here on HN seem to feel the same way but they're rationalizing it with "well, they deserve it after all". It's their fault "because they’ve burned every bridge." It's their fault because "most people have a dozen friends". It's their fault because "substances and severe mental illness that gets in the way of the cooperation."
And if we don't agree with this assessment, it's we who are not serious. But left unstated is: their way just ends up leaving this vulnerable population to die, and they really don't have a problem with that, because according to them, it's their own damn fault.
I believe the latest solution to homelessness proffered in the public sphere was from Brian Kilmeade, who said "involuntary lethal injection, or something. Just kill 'em." A final solution if you will.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/fox-news-brian-kilmeade-apologi...
By xp84 2025-11-173:19 > a couple weeks and then what?
Then they need to start supporting themselves. Or at least not strew needles all over the friend’s living room and pawn their valuables to buy more meth.
Most of those friends would settle for just the latter for several months, but the worst cases 100% got kicked out of even family members’ homes for that kind of thing and that’s why they’re on the street.
10 trillion dollars of welfare, free houses, cash, whatever, is not enough to fix addicts who don’t have an insane amount of willpower. Which most people just don’t have. Drugs are mostly the problem. Most non-addicts sleep in their cars and rely on friends for a month or two and get their shit together. “Homelessness” numbers always conflate both kinds: the lost causes and the temporarily homeless.
I can tell your income bracket from this phrase alone:
> Most people have a dozen friends or family who would gladly give them the guest room for a few weeks.
No, most people do not.
I am aware of classic triad of "malignantly antisocial personality + substance abuse + criminal record" that makes people stay on the streets.
But a lot of people end up on the streets simply because they were already only one notch above financial destitution and so all of their friends and family.
Lose a job + get sick in body or mind, even temporarily = game over. "Friends and family" who are also financially vulnerable would ruthlessly shed the load of extra mouth to feed, much less to house.
By ModernMech 2025-11-1422:05 The friends and family route works the first time around. You couch surf until you find a job, as you go through your contact list people are happy to host at first, but there comes the awkward "so... it's been a couple weeks... how's that job search going?". Then you have to put your job search on pause until you find a new place to live.
Eventually your job search keeps turning up "no" because they don't like the answers to "can you explain this gap on your resume?" and they really don't like the answer to "do you have a permanent residence" or "do you have any drug-related convictions?"
Hopefully you find a job before you've exhausted the good will of all your friends. And pray to GOD it doesn't happen again because the next time around, each one will have an excuse as to why they can't host you. "Oh sorry, we've got our inlaws, try X, Y, Z"... who are also "unable" to host.
So then your car is your home. If you're lucky enough to have one. But the point is "just have friends" isn't a solution.
By carlosjobim 2025-11-1422:09 I wouldn't say so. A large percentage of the population - double digits - have never had any job security in their lives, or any guarantees whatsoever. We've learnt to adapt and know we can do it again. People aren't allocated 1 job per person for life and if we loose that job we're in the shit for life. Most people know they can get another job.
By potato3732842 2025-11-1418:01 Legality only matters insofar as people use it as a mental shortcut to turn off their brains.
Which TBH I think is way less than it used to be, but feels like it's more because so much more stuff involves law and government than it did 50yr ago.
By breakingrules3 2025-11-1418:00 [dead]
By diet_mtn_dew 2025-11-1418:071 reply >There are hundreds of thousands (millions?) of people in America who do not have electricity
I cannot find a citation for a number that large of people who do not have access to electricity in the USA, would you happen to have one?
By kyleblarson 2025-11-1418:07 I grew up in Kentucky and spent a lot of time in the areas around the Red River Gorge in the southeastern part of the state. Some of the poverty there is shocking. The movie Winters Bone actually seemed to do a decent job of showcasing similar areas.
> There are hundreds of thousands (millions?) of people in America who do not have electricity or even running water in their homes.
This is just not true. America has many problems but access to electricity/running water simply is not one of them.
By jcranmer 2025-11-1419:41 It's difficult to find trustworthy statistics quickly, but the penetration of electricity and running water in US households is only about 99%. At the scale of the US (~130 million households), 1% of households lacking electricity equates to over a million households and somewhat more in terms of number of people. So yeah, there's probably about 1-2 million people in the US without running water and/or electricity.
Where are these people? Probably the largest concentration of such people are on the various Native American reservations (I believe ~15% of the Navajo Reservation lacks running water). The hinterlands of Alaska also likely has a high number of these houses.
By closetohome 2025-11-1418:391 reply It's less an issue of access than affordability. The term is "energy insecurity" - https://www.energypolicy.columbia.edu/publications/energy-in...
By prewett 2025-11-1618:50 "Energy insecurity" transforms the problem from lack of "energy" into an emotional problem. The problem isn't feelings of insecurity, it's lacking electricity. But now we can feel all self-righteous that we're making people feel better because we don't call them homeless and hungry and in the dark. Now they "have housing insecurity" and "have food insecurity" and are suffering from "energy insecurity".
I lived for a month in a dorm in China quite a few years ago, where they had running water for an hour every other day. Hot water for tea was delivered in a thermos every morning. Nobody had "heated water insecurity". Everyone knew exactly how it worked, and they all showered two or three to a shower. I couldn't bring myself to do that, so I showered after they were all done, usually in cold water. The problem was very clearly lack of hot water, not "insecurity".
I mentored a kid for a few years whose family occasionally couldn't afford meals, so they had "fend for yourself night", where he had to figure out how to get a meal on his own. His problem was not "food insecurity", his problem was that he was hungry. Any "food insecurity" he might have had was distinctly downstream from his lack of food, and would have been entirely eliminated with regular meals.
By jandrewrogers 2025-11-1418:431 reply The US still has some really remote backwaters. Not too many but you can find them if you know where to look.
By zarl 2025-11-1419:28 I'm not saying literally everyone in America has electricity/running water. I'm saying it's a rare exception, not "hundreds of thousands (millions?) of people".
By potato3732842 2025-11-1418:39 And when it is a problem, it's usually a problem with the system denying people access rather than literal inability to afford.
Municipality would rather some house be vacated (perhaps based on a "poor people drain services, kick-em out" policy posture) so when a storm takes out your utility pole guess who isn't getting a new meter drop until they bring their shit up to current code at a non-starter price... and oh look here it's illegal to live in a house without electricity. I guess that means someone's getting evicted, what a shame...
By metalforever 2025-11-1418:431 reply I know people without running water in their house right now in America . In fact I know multiple families in this situation .
By jay_kyburz 2025-11-1420:07 I know some people living in their car. It doesn't have running water or electricity.
By reaperducer 2025-11-1418:372 reply This is just not true. America has many problems but access to electricity/running water simply is not one of them.
You are disconnected from reality.
I can take you to places in Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, West Virginia, and even California where people have to live without electricity, running water, or both.
I'll take the word of what I've personally seen with my own eyes over someone who created an HN account three minutes ago.
By tredre3 2025-11-1419:10 > I'll take the word of what I've personally seen with my own eyes over someone who created an HN account three minutes ago.
> I can take you to places in Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, West Virginia, and even California where people have to live without electricity, running water, or both.
But can you provide us with a source other than your own eyes for the "millions of people" you claim to be living in such conditions?
By zarl 2025-11-1419:26 No one in this thread has any evidence of these "hundreds of thousands (millions?) of people" and just falls back to "well I met a guy".
The claim is not that literally 100% of Americans have electricity/running water. It's that there are not "millions" of Americans without them.
There are Americans who have open sewage in their yards [0], because their counties are predominantly Black or Latino, and their state deprioritizes any infrastructure work. It’s structural racism.
Even better, the Trump administration canceled [1] an attempt to right that wrong, citing that it was “DEI.”
0: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/sanitation-open-sewers-black-...
1: https://apnews.com/article/justice-department-environmental-...
What the Trump administration canceled didn't right that wrong. What the Trump administration canceled was an agreement for the local county to stop issuing fines, which had already been in effect for over two years. And within those two years, the local county built zero sewers, zero hookups. They literally built nothing in two years.
The original agreement under the Biden admin, which to be clear, the President doesn't personally oversee these kinds of agreements, this is sort of all within the DOJ, but the original agreement doesn't even require them to build the sewers. It literally just requires them to run a public health campaign and not issue fines.
By potato3732842 2025-11-1418:211 reply I guess the DOJ saying not to fine these people is a nice gesture but in practice local fines don't mean anything in a situation like this unless the poors on the property are unlucky enough to be on a property that the municipality wants to lien and take for whatever reason.
Whatever the dollar number is, it's likely some insane punitive number (hundreds to thousands per day) that nobody could ever pay and never will actually be enforced, it's basically just a threat and you wind up going to court over it in the end or you fix it and they drop it or fine you a reasonable amount (thank the 8th amendment).
This sounds like a standoff situation. Municipality wants trailer park to pay for its own sewer. Trailer park can't afford it. Municipality fines them. Trailer park gives them the bird because they're so poor they're basically judgement proof. Municipality doesn't push the issue because if they take it and kick them all out then they will pick up the tab for remediating, etc, etc.
By vorpalhex 2025-11-1917:22 Right, the fines don't matter.
What should have happened in the original agreement is that the fed pays for the sewers at a very cheap rate and the municipality does the work and owns it for eg 10-20 years.
That's actually a really common agreement. I don't know why DOJ had such a derp moment here and instead demanded billboards about health risks for people who don't have the money for basic medical care much less exploratory lab testing.
By potato3732842 2025-11-1418:17 They're called sewage "lagoons" and work basically the same as septic systems from a environmental impact perspective. They only really work well in certain climates and even then you need to have enough spare land to just locate a sewage pond somewhere. Even in richer areas it was dirt common for schools and prisons (which aren't likely to be located in the center of town like other government stuff is) to have them way deeper into the 20th century than you'd expect since it's not like they were short on land (just use more taxpayer money).
Normally the plumbing runs underground but those people have a trench solution likely because they added a bunch of trailers to the property and more lines were out. There's probably some weird government rules at play here. Like they don't want to dig pipes into the ground because screwing with their grandfathered in lagoon would be "state problems" level illegal whereas right now it's "municipality problems" level illegal and the latter doesn't wanna stomp them with the jackboot for obvious political reasons.
The clean water act and it's knock on rules really act as a huge impediment to "it won't make it compliant, but it will make it a hell of a lot better" fixes in cases like this.
By mrguyorama 2025-11-1420:33 The US desperately needs another version of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_the_Other_Half_Lives to become virally popular.
I went to school with kids who didn't have winter jackets. In Northern Maine. I studied with kids who didn't have any food to eat, almost ever. My mother taught kids that were kicked out and homeless at like 16. One child was named after a beer. Entire classrooms worth of kids being "raised" only by an impoverished grandparent who wasn't able to leave the house and couldn't really do anything and had only minimal social security checks for income.
There was a family that lived in a 10ft by 10ft shack and had 6 kids and basically nothing else to their name. One daughter was hit by a dump truck getting off the school bus and died.
My own family was impoverished for a long time. Sometimes the only food left in the house was old flour with bugs in it. The mental toll it took on my mother is still clear and evident, and I myself still have deep "scarcity mindset" behavior, and our situation wasn't even that bad. We technically were above the poverty line. We had a home that was clean and well built and very cheap ($400 a month mortgage). My mother had an education and a career, and my dad's employer was in control of making his child support payments, so they were always on time. My mom was really smart and extremely good at stretching money and playing the games required to cover your bills when you literally make less money than it takes every month to be legally alive, like making friends with the telecom neighbor who will set you up with free cable for a bit out of pity. Her job in government ensured we had good health insurance and visits to doctors. We had much wealthier family who kept us clothed with truckfulls of handmedown clothes from the previous decade. She had great credit and could manage credit cards very well.
It almost killed her a bunch of times though. Once when I was 12, she called my dad to come get me because she couldn't get herself out of bed and was bawling and openly talking about suicide. She couldn't really afford therapy and the local therapists in bumbfuck nowhere aren't good at their job anyway. Turns out there's a medically important distinction between "Therapist" and "Psychologist" and in the 90s neither was equipped to handle "Undiagnosed neurodivergent driven to the very end of their wits and surviving exclusively on adrenaline".
Yet there are people on this very board insistent that people do not starve in America (before Trump decided we didn't need to report on it and thus killed the program tracking it, it regularly reported millions and millions of American children literally go hungry. Free lunch and breakfast programs reliably improve grades and education outcomes still because children are hungry)
There are people who insist it is cultural or based on making bad choices.
These people are gross.
By bwhiting2356 2025-11-1418:032 reply > But, I absolutely hated working in an office. I also hated what digital marketing has done to people’s privacy. I had to get out. So, after 10 years I left and went back to my roots. I founded a sprinkler contracting business with my brother and work outside all day, every day. And I love it.
I don't think this person should be putting themselves in the same category as people who are stuck in poverty with no options.
By ChrisMarshallNY 2025-11-1418:421 reply I don't think he is. That's sort of his point.
By bwhiting2356 2025-11-1422:541 reply am i misreading the article?
> I have a van that is falling apart. It needs a lot of work that we cannot afford to do. In the mindset that poor people are unskilled, it appears that I should watch some YouTube videos, get the parts, and do it myself
I’m not saying running a small business is easy. But they previously worked a corporate job and chose to start a landscaping business partly for lifestyle reasons.
By otterley 2025-11-152:02 It's not as well written as it could be. He's using the first person, but he's not actually referring to himself. It's a hypothetical. Pretend he put the word "Suppose" in front of the first word, as in "Suppose I have a van that's falling apart."
By selimthegrim 2025-11-1420:27 I live in New Orleans. I see this sort of thing around me every single day.
It's interesting how many comments here are knee jerk annoyance at this blogpost, which in my mind does a good job outlining two different financial situations and how flippant suggested solutions for escaping poverty don't make sense.
The fact that many of us here have so much compared to others in our community however you define it is disturbing and not helpful information for our day to day lives so we do what we can to ignore it.
By neuralkoi 2025-11-1417:53 “How can you expect a man who’s warm to understand a man who’s cold?” - Alexander Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
I feel like we generally compare ourselves relative to those around us. The US enjoys incredible amounts of comforts (for which I'm grateful for), but one need not travel far to understand how much potable water, breathable air, and electricity are very much not a ready given in other countries.
By rustystump 2025-11-1420:163 reply I am normally a knee jerker but i grew up in a big family with very little. Between broke and poor. Almost going to food banks but not quite. This is pretty spot on to what it is like.
Even broke, something as simple as a parking ticket is borderline life threatening. Id buy the McDonald’s 1$ drink with free refills and calorie load on that all day reusing the cup. He doesnt touch on the shame of it you feel esp in todays us culture.
I am lucky to get out of the cycle.
> something as simple as a parking ticket is borderline life threatening
I always lived in fear of being pulled over and getting busted for not having the insurance I couldn’t afford.
Eventually get pulled over and ticketed, cough up $1000 for proof of insurance to bring to court then get a payment program to pay off $1000 fine.
Once the proof of insurance expired, begin the cycle again.
Until I finally got enough earnings to always pay my bills every month on time, my entire financial existence hinged on how often the police stopped me.
By selimthegrim 2025-11-1420:50 There are definitely people in Louisiana who just dispense with having a driver's license and tell the police to arrest them and they will bail themselves out with cash (and keep the cash around!)
By popcorncowboy 2025-11-1420:422 reply > He doesnt touch on the shame of it you feel
This is the part people who have never experienced it most overlook. The profound, lived-in shame that comes with being poor, and the damage that does over time.
By wiseowise 2025-11-157:46 Don’t forget that it will be there forever no matter how many millions you make.
By rustystump 2025-11-1420:49 This. It is hard to not have that chip on your shoulder.
By PeaceTed 2025-11-153:40 Louis CK had this line that was far too close to me "Have you ever been so poor that the bank charges you for being poor?".
If you have been there, you feel that one.
By aidenn0 2025-11-1419:20 Related: "You can't tell people anything"[1]
By bccdee 2025-11-156:16 It's honestly amazing how many people hold a powerful a conviction that the world is essentially fair; that the poor must have some moral failing which justifies their poverty. If it's happened to thousands of people—if you see the afflicted every day—then it must just be a plague of poor morals. We'll believe anything before we accept that we're lucky, and that we owe something to those who aren't.
By carlosjobim 2025-11-1418:283 reply I guess because the ratio of people complaining about poverty is 10 000 to 1 compared to people who give solutions to poverty.
There are solutions to poverty, which the individual person can follow, but nobody wants to talk about those. It has always amazed me, because poverty is hell. Who wouldn't want to get out of that, and who wouldn't want his fellow brother to get out of that?
I could talk about it here, but I would just get down voted [dead], [flagged] and so on.
By dugidugout 2025-11-1418:461 reply While I understand the sentiment, you stated it yourself, "It has always amazed me, because poverty is hell. Who wouldn't want to get out of that, and who wouldn't want his fellow brother to get out of that?". This is a puzzling question to ask and it shouldn't stop there. The post is very much trying to add some depth here, however it isn't targeting solutions for "poor" people, it is hoping to provoke those who are not to take the problem more seriously.
> I could talk about it here, but I would just get down voted [dead], [flagged] and so on.
Go ahead and just talk about it, I want to hear it. This isn't so easy a problem, even on an individual level as you put it.
By carlosjobim 2025-11-1419:115 reply My solution is boring, but it works for the individual who is in that situation: Go and work somewhere where you are provided food and board and a salary. Not only do you physically get yourself out of the environment which has dragged you down, you can also cut out expenses such as rent and even transportation. Which is huge.
Yes, it's not a fun solution. It won't make you rich. But it will take you out of being dirt poor, which the article is about. One example of those kind of places is the merchant navy. You're on a ship, so you don't have to spend any money and you can't even spend it. Instead of going on shore leave like the other people, just get extra days, or work on another ship on your leave days. I'm not going to mention the military, because people might have objections against killing and being killed, but it works in the same way.
While you're at it, you have the opportunity for a career or education. And entry level jobs are available for those who have the work ethic.
Monastic life is another such example, where you are at least provided for. And traditionally the monasteries have swallowed up millions of people who would have been dirt poor, and given them an alternative. Just like the merchant navy and the military has done the same for millions. You can arrive to these places with nothing but the clothes on your back, and start putting together your life again.
I think implicit in the anti-poverty argument is individuals shouldn’t have to take a vow of poverty. So the monastery is out.
Not everyone is physically cut out for the merchant marines. This is also inconveniently ignores OP’s family.
Not everyone wants to join the military, but that feels like it’s getting somewhere… What if the government had other jobs that paid food and shelter?
By carlosjobim 2025-11-1422:131 reply My suggestions can help some people, but not everybody. Because everybody is different. Let's continue complaining instead then?
But I've worked in places like this with people who were deaf and people who had limps, and people with a ton of other problems. And hundreds of thousands of people who have families work in the merchant navy to support them, or in other similar work places.
Sometimes (almost all the time) trying to talk about things on HN feels like having to argue that it is indeed possible to fry an egg or boil a cup of coffee...
Well I don’t think anyone is browsing this thread because they need a solution to their own poverty.
So we’re talking about general solutions for the country at large, and solution that only works for a few means there’s still the problem of the rest of the poor to solve.
By carlosjobim 2025-11-1513:29 How do you know that? And how do you know that somebody reading here won't need a solution in the future? Or knows somebody who might?
But that was why I didn't want to write about it in the first place. People here don't take kindly to solutions, when it feels so good complaining about problems.
> What if the government had other jobs that paid food and shelter?
They do, various and sundry, e.g. making license plates.
I'm being glib, which is probably unforgivable under the circumstances, but people do this. Sometimes intentionally -- and, granted, there are often other issues in play -- but it's heartbreaking.
Ok, hear me out: jail, but you can walk right out again as soon as you are in…
By quesera 2025-11-150:04 Right, and I can construct theoretical models where this works well!
But they're all ripe for abuse, and that makes them politically untenable.
As a layperson in such social matters, I'd guess the real-world abuse rate would be something like 10%. This is mathematically tolerable, and socially beneficial.
But even at 0% real-world abuse, there would be righteous opposition. And at 0% + 1 predictable example, it'd be politically toxic in most of the country.
By dugidugout 2025-11-1420:511 reply These are not boring solutions, they are incredibly difficult, and unfair solutions for a poor individual to take. You may find this all very annoying and we hear you, thank you for expanding upon your earlier vague notions.
By carlosjobim 2025-11-1513:32 Unfair is being poor in the first place. Almost nobody in this world gets a fair hand. But is that reason not to change your situation and get out of the hell which is poverty?
I have to ask what you mean by incredibly difficult? These are just normal jobs, with no skill required to start.
By decimalenough 2025-11-1419:561 reply The vast majority of mariners these days are third world nationals getting paid third world wages.
Becoming a full-time monk is a slow and demanding process that takes years, you can't just rock up at a monastery and become one.
By carlosjobim 2025-11-1420:171 reply > The vast majority of mariners these days are third world nationals getting paid third world wages.
So? Is the third world not included in the original article? And also, that's like saying that you can't become a farmer or a teacher, because the vast majority of farmers or teachers in the world are third world nationals getting third world wages. The merchant navy also has many ships which only hire nationally.
As per the article, we are talking about being dirt poor. In that case, in the merchant navy you get food, board, medical attention and on top of that a salary. Which may be good or very small. If you have better options, please feel free to ignore my advice. It is for those who don't have any better option, but it is always impossible among hackers to get this through. Maybe we should discuss a few hundred miles of text more about how to change the system, rather than talk about real and actionable advice?
> Becoming a full-time monk is a slow and demanding process that takes years, you can't just rock up at a monastery and become one.
Have you tried?
By titanomachy 2025-11-150:06 You could definitely go live and work at a monastery in exchange for room and board. They usually won’t let you become a monk right away.
> Go and work somewhere where you are provided food and board and a salary
Where can I easily sign up for such a situation? And mind you I mean the average person signing up, not that `anyone` could sign up.
I've looked at downgrading myself in the economy and the standard reaction is that the employers at that level dont like the idea that I know whats going on or have skills and dont want to take me on as "overqualified"
You might as well say, "let them eat cake" when your argument is just to find a job. Employers arent hiring.
By carlosjobim 2025-11-1513:251 reply Here is an example of an open mess boy position on an oil tanker: https://seacrew.net/vacancy/40763
And there's countless more similar vacancies.
Food, board and $1500 per month. That's a life line out of absolute poverty for any person who is willing to take it.
I know that hackers hate it, because the truth is that deep down most of you have a caste mentality and think that people who are born poor should stay poor, and dependent on government handouts. All discussion about "changing the system" is just for show so you can feel good about yourself and pat each other on the back, while things remain the same.
So hackers are provoked by people taking their destiny in their own hands and clawing their way out of poverty by virtue of their own honest labour. How dare they leave the ghetto behind, when they belong there?
By lovich 2025-11-1522:12 Oh, so you mean be driftless as well. I thought you meant room and board in a community.
It is ridiculous of you think this sort of job is the solution to poverty at any amount of scale.
> So hackers are provoked by people taking their destiny in their own hands and clawing their way out of poverty by virtue of their own honest labour.
Hackers on this board are provoked when people suggest ways of taking destiny into their own hands that removes power from the tech billionaires, they are not provoked when someone finds a job
By ValentineC 2025-11-1423:11 > I'm not going to mention the military, because people might have objections against killing and being killed, but it works in the same way.
I don't know about the US services, but some militaries have non-combat roles which have no deployment and never see combat, but offer food and board.
Occam's razor. Either:
* There are solutions to poverty, which the individual person can follow, but (even though poverty is hell) people ignore them and prefer to stay poor
* The solutions to poverty you think about actually aren't. The money-deprived people already know about them and (having much more knowledge about poor people's world) know they don't work.
Since you - like almost everyone here - are a smart person with a scientific mind, I'm sure you can see that the first explanation is more likely.
If you get downvoted (as a matter of fact, I didn't) it's only because you declare that there is a miraculous solution to poverty, that would help people, that nobody talks about, and then you well, don't talk about it.
By carlosjobim 2025-11-1421:29 You forgot with your razor the third option:
* People who have successfully clawed and scratched themselves out of poverty are almost never taken into consideration in discussions about poverty.
At most modern culture appreciates a rags-to-riches story. But rags-to-normal stories are unheard of. When was the last time you heard about people going from poverty to having just decent lives? Doesn't really pique the interest of people, perhaps.
But that's what countless people have done, they're just not considered in the perspective of poverty. At most you just see them as some everyday guy in the supermarket or on the bus.
Getting out of poverty and back on your feet again is very close to a miracle. That's how it feels for those who experience it. But hackers spit on it with contempt, because that was not the solution they would have preferred. Or that was not a solution which was applicable to every single person on earth. And in that case, I guess we should file a formal complaint also against all the saints who cured the blind but didn't cure the deaf.
By projektfu 2025-11-1419:43 Either:
1. There are solutions to organization and staying on task, that person can use, to successfully manage their lives, or
2. Those solutions actually aren't. They only work for people who would have been organized anyway.
Casting this dichotomy into a different area that I understand better helps me to see what you are saying. I think that it also gives me an idea that this is not a dichotomy. There are solutions to poverty for the individual. The individual must be aware of them, use them, and keep using them, until they are no longer poor. Then, they have to have a system to avoid returning to poverty. The sum total of this is much harder than it seems, so to many people it seems like those solutions cannot work. Sure, to a person for whom these approaches work, who has become broke and homeless, they can do it, but that is cold comfort for those who cannot escape poverty.
Thanks for the insight.
By treis 2025-11-1422:26 There's a clear 3rd option where the poor are self destructive shit heads.
IMHO this is one of those areas where lots of things can be true. If you're sick or catch bad breaks then yep poverty is a grinding cycle. If you're not then the American Dream is still alive. But the "American Dream" always kinda sucked. In that you never got a ton of luxuries and it was all somewhat precarious.
By bluGill 2025-11-1421:46 There are solutions to poverty and the majority of people do follow them successfully. However there are always people getting into poverty and so there is always poverty. Worse there are people who cannot follow the solutions we have to poverty - this is a small minority, but it is the ones that are hardest to deal with.
There are also a tiny number (less than 1 in 1000) who have a lot of wealth but choose to live in poverty because that is freedom. If you look close you see they are the ones who have a warm coat and working heat in their tent. This is not poverty, but they try to be counted in your poverty numbers because it helps them. When you have wealth living in poverty is not that bad. (the above is a story a homeless man told me this week while I was helping out at our local food shelf. The homeless man is in poverty and I get the impression his divorce settlement is the problem and as soon as his kids are out of school he plans on getting a real job)
By Aunche 2025-11-1419:17 Gee. I wonder why people find a blogpost telling them to fuck off and acting like they don't know that quitting Starbucks is only relevant to those who go to Starbucks annoying?
