‘Some things never leave you’: Poverty’s indelible marks

https://longreads.com/2022/10/11/some-things-never-leave-you-christian-livermore-on-povertys-indelible-marks/

by Pamar • 4 years ago

153 215 4 years ago

The architects of the economic system in the United States don't want to eliminate poverty - it's kept around as a threat, something to point to - see, grunts, that's where you'll end up if you're not an obedient drone. This is also a main reason why there's no reliable public health care system, instead it's tied to employment. The general concept is "discipline of the labor force."

mistermann3• 4 years ago

Arguably, if our culture didn't offload essentially all responsibility for running society off to "democracy" (a magical term that no one really considers the precise, real world manifestation of...another cultural norm/shortcoming, that is strongly culturally enforced, often using conveniently existent memes/psychological-exploits) people may be more interested in problems and insist that they are addressed one way or another.

But alas, this seems to be the equilibrium we're satisfied with (or insist upon) for now.

stevenwoo2• 4 years ago

Also, any of the programs addressing the issues are often associated with the catchall terms "socialism" and "communism" pejoratively.

Aunche3• 4 years ago

Civics and government ought to be mandatory subjects in American schools. In school, we learn about the Civil Rights protests, and we learn about laws that made in response to these protests. What's completely neglected is are the lobbying and legislative process that lead to the creation of these laws. Nowadays, lobbying is a dirty word which for the average person means literal political bribery, which only leads to more political apathy.

sokoloff4• 4 years ago

I’m not convinced that healthcare is a Machiavellian planned top-down threat.

The origin was in employers competing for labor during a time of wage controls.

The continuation is driven more by people who have good health coverage not wanting to lose that and the fear that their doctors visits will feel like DMV visits. That’s a powerful force.

sdiacom2• 4 years ago

The vast majority of people who have so-called "good" health coverage in the US are paying one to three orders of magnitude more for it, compared to the price of private health insurance in countries with a public health system.

The best thing that could happen to people who currently have private health insurance and wish to keep it is that a public health system appears, forcing the private health insurance oligopoly to actually be competitive.

delecti• 4 years ago

I think "doctors visits feeling like DMV trips" is a hyperbole sold to us by people who are actually trying to keep people trapped in jobs. It's not entirely false, but it's definitely vastly overblown, as seen by current emergency rooms, where you don't need insurance to get emergency care, but do often need to wait several hours, and other countries' routine medical care, where it varies too much between countries to say that waiting lists are a consequence of universal healthcare.

glasss• 4 years ago

Of course it's not an evil plot formed by a small conference table worth of people. However when the majority of the US recognizes flaws with our medical systems and nothing changes, it's perceived as a threat, and perception is reality.

Also, while anecdotal, I've never met anyone who is actually opposed to changing the healthcare system. I understand that the main talking point on one side is the fear of lower quality medical care, but I've honestly never seen this brought up as a genuine point. I've seen it used as a straw man because it is a weak argument though.

strken• 4 years ago

Here's a Reason article on the origins of the US healthcare system: https://reason.com/2020/04/05/how-doctors-broke-health-care/

The origin of the current system was in the AMA and insurance companies lobbying to make everything except health insurance illegal, trampling all over the system put in place by employers, unions, and mutual aid societies.

shadowfoxx2• 4 years ago

Thing is - Our doctors visits already feel like DMV visits?

I've lived all over VA - Richmond, Fairfax, Alexandria. All felt like DMV. In Michigan now. Feels like DMV.

Thing is, too - by all accounts I can tell - people are largely satisfied with their State Healthcare, in those places that have it (Whichever form it takes). Sure people have critiques. But some people saying something can be an issue is not the same thing as the entire system being broken + in the other system everyone gets good instead of just a few + no reason to try + instead keep this system with the same problems but also costs more.

Eleison232• 4 years ago

Poverty is hard to come by in these United States. If you're starving, or homeless, or unemployed, you've worked yourself into a corner fairly diligently.

There are myriad social safety nets out there for people if they'd only take advantage of them. Yet there are people roaming the streets and picking out of trash cans. Why? Because they've lost their families, they've lost their minds, they struggle with addictions and mental health, so they don't really fit in anywhere.

So you really only manage to be poor by becoming an utter social outcast first. If you can hold down the fort and navigate a bureaucracy, you can get on SNAP, Section 8, Voc. Rehab. and all sorts of programs that will get you back on your feet, courtesy of Uncle Sam, and that's not even counting the faith-based charities you could avail yourself of.

squaredot• 4 years ago

I agree on this. Poverty, in this sense has, more to do with being than with having.

A friend of me recommended to me on this subject the book: Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_at_the_Bottom).

11101010001100• 4 years ago

What version of the US are you talking about? Perhaps the shame that the author discusses makes a sizeable amount of poverty not visible.

phkahler• 4 years ago

> Poverty is hard to come by in these United States. If you're starving, or homeless, or unemployed, you've worked yourself into a corner fairly diligently.

You have a lot to learn. Start by reading the article, and understand that the effects of growing up that way are hard to overcome - psychologically. The author has a Ph.D and still suffers from it.

You may also want to look around at low cost of subsidized housing. It's often closer and more common than we think.

I know a person living it, and I can look at the situation and think about how I might handle things better. But that ignores a huge part of the reality of what it's like to be that person, or live that life.

1attice2• 4 years ago

What's important in understanding falsehoods like the above post is the work they do.

It's patently clear to any of us who have experienced poverty that Eleison23 hasn't actually looked into any of this. Ignore that part for now, and instead ask:

Why does he need to believe & say these things? What fear does this false view assuage? What feelings, what thoughts, are throttled?

It's really hard being alive during a collapse.

troupe3• 4 years ago

Was talking with a homeless guy yesterday. He has been given free housing multiple times, but he always leaves and goes back to living on the streets. He isn't kicked out, he just leaves. He is a very nice guy, but isn't looking for housing. Is he poor? Yes, but, as you say, there are safety net programs out there for him if he wants them.

Our town has clothes available for people who need it and (in some circumstances) housing. When people go to clean out the houses afterwards they find lots of dirty clothing. Instead of washing the clothes (in a machine or by hand), they go back and get more clothes.

On one hand we could say they should know better, but really they probably don't. All of us have blind spots and people in poverty in the US typically have lots of blind spots about how they could live differently.

Mezzie17• 4 years ago

If you're starving, or homeless, or unemployed, you've worked yourself into a corner fairly diligently.

raises an eyebrow in disabled

mmmpop• 4 years ago

Hey I used to agree with you but then I realized that I'm smart, industrious, and not ugly which puts me just miles ahead of the average person, which is still the middle-of-the-pack. Actual dumb people still need to be fed, housed, and given meaningful existences right? So what to do>

Engineers and other techy people that peruse HN probably don't spend a lot of time around less-than-average folks on a routine basis, I figure.

m348e912• 4 years ago

One thing that confuses me is that people talk about lack of healthcare for the poor like Medicaid is not a thing. I have a friend getting a hip replacement in three weeks, after getting an appt with a specialist in one week, and it's getting covered under Medicaid. Will she have co-pays and out of pocket costs? I don't know. But I can't imagine it will be worse than with the shitty insurance I have.

PopAlongKid• 4 years ago

And also Affordable Care Act (U.S.) which is not tied to employment. It's been around for over 10 years.

Mezzie17• 4 years ago

You have to be really poor for Medicaid. Back when I relied on it via income qualification (before I qualified through an obscure loophole that I found via figuring out the website page structure of MDHHS and manually searching every single posted BEM manual (social work manual) - totally a normal and cool thing that most people would think of and know how to do /s), I had to make under 1100/mo.

GROSS income.

So basically I had to choose between healthcare for MS and the other basics in my life.

rolisz• 4 years ago

What about all the other countries in the world, where poor still exist, even if there is a public health care system?

hilom• 4 years ago

That was a long read, but very much worth reading.

This part really stuck out to me:

A few years ago, a friend of mine, in a well-meaning attempt to understand the impoverished diets of poor people, ate a Food Stamp diet for a week. On the last day of the diet, he talked about what he had learned and spoke philosophically about his renewed appreciation of healthy food as he prepared to end his restricted diet with his first good meal of the week: homemade vegetable pizza. He thought about what he had learned as he kneaded the pizza dough. He had already sliced the vegetables, and they sat piled high on the cutting board. While he had the best of intentions, what he said made me sad. He had misunderstood.
In his week of eating like poor people, he had missed two crucial ingredients: fear and shame. While he was looking forward to breaking his fast that night, poor people don’t get to do that. They don’t get to look forward to the end of impoverishment, to a good meal. My friend would eat a healthy meal that night, and he had known throughout the week that he could stop whenever he wanted, that all he had to do if he missed healthy food was open his refrigerator. Poor people never know when their next good meal will come. They look in the refrigerator on the 25th and maybe they only have enough food for a couple more meals but they don’t get paid for a week. And vegetables are expensive. Most poor people can’t afford them. All of this causes great shame. Shame that they don’t make enough money, shame that they can’t give their kids decent food, shame that they must rely on government assistance, shame that they can’t afford the restaurant their friends want to go to on Saturday night. That shame never goes away. It is not my friend’s fault that he does not know this. He doesn’t know it because society does not talk about such things, does not want them talked about. The result is that my friend would never understand how poor people feel—never understand me—and I felt sad and alone.

It's a doublet of suffering: not just the material burden of living in poverty and being unable to provide for yourself and family, but the ideological burden of being shamed into believing it was caused by your own personal failure.

kjellsbells2• 4 years ago

Pulp called this out in 1999. There's a william shatner cover which is...surprisingly good.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_People

jl62• 4 years ago

“If you called your dad he could stop it all”

- the key line.

ryan932• 4 years ago

This doesnt really square with the insane fraction of food stamps spent on soda. Im lowish income and can easily afford peppers, onions and garlic. bulk stuff like sweet potato is cheap. My rice and chicken stir fry would take like 20-25 min of work at a fast food job to afford.

steele5• 4 years ago

You got dependents? Does cooking require any utilities? Let's say you can only afford one. You going to sleep by the oven or do homework by candlelight? How many illnesses are you away from homelessness?

monero-xmr5• 4 years ago

Is that a historical thing? In the US you get a SNAP card and can buy fresh produce at the store. I shop at a low-income focused grocery store (because it’s the same stuff but cheaper) and most people are using SNAP benefits and carts are always a mix of healthy stuff to unhealthy frozen junk.

fbdab1032• 4 years ago

When you are poor, you have to be frugal in all things. Even "free money" needs to be spent judiciously. Junk foods will extend your dollar further and are typically faster to prepare than alternatives.

bluedino6• 4 years ago

The excuse for this is they either don't know how to cook, or don't have the staples to cook, or they don't have the time to cook.

dionidium7• 4 years ago

You're going to get pushback on this commonsense understanding of the world, but I've been on food stamps and of course you're right. "It's more complicated than that." No it isn't. Poor people shop at the same stores as everybody else. The food is all there. "They don't know the difference between healthy and unhealthy meals." How stupid do you think poor people are? They know how to prepare a healthy meal. The notion that this is just completely beyond the abilities of poor folks is risible. "They don't have as much time to prepare meals." Yes, they do. They have time to prepare a meal. Of course they do. Maybe not every single night, but they can make it work. (In fact, in the United States upper-income earners work more hours than those at the bottom [0].)

It's just an endless array of easily-overcome excuses (mostly from people who have never been poor and don't actually know any poor people).

[0] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/09/working-hours-america...

steele5• 4 years ago

Google food desert

dionidium7• 4 years ago

What sticks out to me is that it sticks out to you (and the author and so many others besides). I have actually been on food stamps. I never ate so well. Before I had food stamps I was just a typical working poor person. I had never spent as much on groceries as I was able to on food stamps. Food stamps are accepted at regular grocery stores -- the same ones you shop at. You can get anything you want, more or less. It's totally up to you. You can, of course, use them to buy vegetables. In fact, I was a vegetarian the entire time I was on food stamps!

It's just so odd to me as someone who has actually been very poor that according you (and seemingly the rest of the professional managerial class) I was at that time completely without agency. Nothing I did or didn't do was in my control, apparently. I was but flotsam in an ocean of systemic effects. I have to tell you, that's not how it felt to me.

I felt like a person making choices.

Poor people typically know lots of other poor people. I knew a lot of poor people. Some of them made good choices. Many of them made very bad choices. The ones who made good choices are universally doing well 20 years later.

bryanrasmussen3• 4 years ago

I have actually been on food stamps.

yeah, were you a family on food stamps? Two adults, one kid? Or were you a single person on food stamps? I was a single person and like you I did pretty well, I sort of have the feeling that the dynamic would be different for a family though, it seems from what I know of family life is more problems show up and then you don't manage to take care of it the way you can as a single young person.

throwaway22032• 4 years ago

I'm pretty much here with you as a UK prole, for what it's worth.

I constantly feel like middle class individuals just don't "get" what it's like to be poor. It's really common for there to be this sort of "woe is them" mindset, as if they're talking about farm animals or something that fundamentally has less intelligence/autonomy.

The vast majority of my schoolfriends who worked hard, focused on the correct things, and budgeted well, did well. The ones that went to prison or had children at age 18 didn't. None of us are billionaires, but neither are we all some sort of sub-human, toothless, brainless mass.

One of the amusing things about having money now, is that I have to "play along" to some extent. I can't just tell someone that they're an idiot for trying to find a place in London when they're a single person without any real income to speak of, even though 99% of people back in my hometown not only think that's not unreasonable, but that it's completely self-evident.

Some people face real barriers. Try being born into a country in which a Western visa costs a month or more of your wages. Hell, try just being on an H1-B. The way we talk about "poverty" in the West makes an absolute mockery of that.

paganel• 4 years ago

My family became suddenly very poor when I was in highschool and then in the first years of me going to uni. Like living in a half-finished house in the countryside with no electrical power for a couple of months-poor (when things had really become bad).

That was happening 20 to 25 years ago, and in the meantime I have managed to attain a middle-class status, sort of (I still don't own an apartment, never mind an actual house), enough to say that I can't complain about my present financial situation.

Even so, I'm fully and acutely aware that my choices alone wouldn't have made all that possible. I also needed luck, lots of it, and the presence of people whom had no obligation to me whatsoever, at least on paper, but who nevertheless helped me at some crucial points in my past. Yes, it was my choice to make good on that help and to take advantage of some of the luck I had, but, again, my choices alone, without said luck and without those people that have helped me would have meant nothing.

civopsec• 4 years ago

Makes me think of the “delayed gratification” experiments. Someone who is of means probably has an easier time delaying gratification because they have the means to figuratively “break the fast”. They also know that they have the resources to get somewhere in life. But what if you don’t? What if that “instant gratification” is all that you can expect to get for a good while?

forgotusername6• 4 years ago

Relevant Orwell quote "And the peculiar evil is this, that the less money you have, the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food. A millionaire may enjoy breakfasting off orange juice and Ryvita biscuits; an unemployed man doesn't. Here the tendency of which I spoke at the end of the last chapter comes into play. When you are unemployed, which is to say when you are underfed, harassed, bored, and miserable, you don't want to eat dull wholesome food. You want something a little bit 'tasty'. There is always some cheaply pleasant thing to tempt you"

zimpenfish2• 4 years ago

Makes me think of the “delayed gratification” experiments.

Since debunked[1], mind you - "Celeste Kidd published The Marshmallow Study Revisited in which she disproved the conclusions made in the original Marshmallow experiment"

[1] https://medium.com/21st-century-tidbits/delayed-gratificatio...

opportune3• 4 years ago

My girlfriend has EBT and she eats just fine. Vegetables are much cheaper than processed food. Maybe at one point in time it was true that processed food was cheaper and a necessity to get by on food stamps but these days it’s much cheaper to buy and eat unprocessed food like rice, bread, peanut butter, and lentils.

Those are just things I eat because I’m not a great cook. My gf cooks things like pies and casseroles.

Another thing that weirds me out is how many different kinds of junk and processed foods are EBT eligible.

synu• 4 years ago

I wish there were more founders and investors who came from a background of intense poverty. I know why there aren’t many, and I know why the ones who are don’t speak about it, but because nobody talks about it everyone has to figure out how to “pass” and how not to fall into certain traps on our own, and there isn’t any systemic support out there. Or if there is/there are people talking about it, I’m just not aware.

gorbachev• 4 years ago

We also desperately need people like that as legislators.

Cori Bush was once homeless. I guarantee she will work harder for people in need than Nancy Pelosi ever will.

tjpnz• 4 years ago

What I do find strange is how much systemic support already exists for other marginalised groups in society. But given how pervasive the idea of a meritocracy is in capitalist societies I've wondered whether extending that support would mean confronting some uncomfortable truths.

Regardless of that there are benefits to be had here. Very few products (especially tech products) are targeted exclusively towards people from wealthy backgrounds.

Mezzie17• 4 years ago

They can't talk about it.

I'm a first generation college grad (both undergrad and grad school) raised by blue collar peeps (sort of - it's complicated). In professional environments, talking about your life or the impacts of poverty will get you pushed out. You're not a 'culture fit', you make people uncomfortable, the upper-middle class/PMC assume that if you have poverty problems you can't work as well, etc.

It is 100% passing. I'm very good at it, because my mother was a defector from that life and passed on the social mores for us to use, but I hate it, and the energy it takes up is immense. I didn't even realize until I worked in my first 'non-professional' job in retail. I don't have to hide everything about my life and childhood, I don't have to watch my language so I don't give away I grew up poorish, etc.

And I have it very, very good in my groups. (Poor-raised + disabled).

rcarr• 4 years ago

This passage:

In his week of eating like poor people, he had missed two crucial ingredients: fear and shame. While he was looking forward to breaking his fast that night, poor people don’t get to do that. They don’t get to look forward to the end of impoverishment, to a good meal. My friend would eat a healthy meal that night, and he had known throughout the week that he could stop whenever he wanted, that all he had to do if he missed healthy food was open his refrigerator.

Reminded me of Common People by Pulp:

Rent a flat above a shop

Cut your hair and get a job

Smoke some fags and play some pool

Pretend you never went to school

But still you'll never get it right

'Cause when you're laid in bed at night

Watching roaches climb the wall

If you called your dad he could stop it all, yeah

The entire song has some of the best lyrics I've ever heard. It pictures life in England's left behind towns perfectly and also the disconnect you experience when you have a rare encounter with one the bourgeoisie. Fun fact: Jarvis Cocker supposedly wrote that song about the wife of Yannis Varoufakis, the left wing Greek finance minister who was in charge during the EU bailouts.

finnh• 4 years ago

William Shatner (!) covered that song well IMO: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ainyK6fXku0

'cause everybody hates a tourist

roflyear2• 4 years ago

Yeah he actually did a good job here

pflenker• 4 years ago

One of the things that suck most about being poor is that you need to have money in order to save money. You need to have enough money to buy a certain level of quality, and if you don't have it, you're forced to buy cheap stuff that breaks more easily (thus spending more money in total). I found this aspect hard to understand for others, the attitude often seems to be: "you don't have to be poor, you simply need to invest wisely!" This is true if you are free to choose to buy a new shirt now or save a bit and buy it later. But if you are running out of shirts now, you don't have that choice.

kjellsbells2• 4 years ago

Terry Pratchett wrote about this, and apparently the concept has its own economic theory named for it now.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory

fbdab1032• 4 years ago

Might as well quote the relevant blurb,

The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles. But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet. This was the Captain Samuel Vimes "Boots" theory of socioeconomic unfairness.

roflyear2• 4 years ago

Isn't just that either. When you're poor you don't have the proper clothes. You ruin good clothes doing hard work.

Mezzie17• 4 years ago

And good luck getting a better job without nice clothes, a decent haircut, and some makeup (if you're female). But if you buy those things, you're being 'wasteful'.

bparsons• 4 years ago

Being poor is really expensive. This is something rich and middle upper class people never can really grasp.

The cost of credit, unstable housing situations, having a car that breaks down all the time etc. all conspires to keep you poor. As the OP points out, when you are below the threshold needed for "basics", the interest on your debt is always higher than any return on any hypothetical investment you might make with savings (which you can never justify allocating).

American society is great at convincing people that this is their personal moral failing, rather than a system designed to keep the maximum number of people as debt slaves.

ReactiveJelly• 4 years ago

I think this is part of why buying a house is cheaper than renting - The credit check and down payment just filters out poor people.

klenwell• 4 years ago

Good example of that here:

https://www.cnn.com/2015/03/06/us/ferguson-missouri-racism-t...

So began an odyssey with Ferguson police, municipal court and city hall that left her with $1,200 in fines that to this day she still doesn’t fully understand. She paid the sum because endless court hearings about the car wore her down.

“I don’t have a lawyer. I’m not a lawyer. It’s me going up against the city of Ferguson when the attorneys won’t help,” Hoskin said this week.

From a NPR story:

Earlier this year, in the series Guilty and Charged, NPR's investigations unit found that the practices in Ferguson are common across the country. The series reported that nationwide, the costs of the justice system are billed increasingly to defendants and offenders, and that this creates harsher treatment of the poor. Because people with money can pay their hundreds or thousands of dollars in fines and fees right away, they are usually done with the court system.

https://www.npr.org/2014/08/25/343143937/in-ferguson-court-f...

It's one of things that boiled over with a lot of the civil rights protests.

anonymouskimmer6• 4 years ago

"the interest on your debt is always higher than any return on any hypothetical investment you might make with savings (which you can never justify allocating)."

This wouldn't necessarily be the case if poor people had access to 401(k)s with matching contributions. But even when they do have "access" to investment accounts it's really rare to have matching contributions of any kind.

And yeah, even if they had it they still couldn't necessarily afford to pay into it.

When I finally had excess income I got a guaranteed ~10% rate of return by paying off my credit card debt. And that's what I did instead of investing. (That, and buying a new mattress.)

troupe3• 4 years ago

It is a similar situation with buying a car for $500 that will require lots of repairs vs. a more expensive car that will give you a lower cost per mile.

While this does add some drag, in most of the situations I've actually seen, it isn't the main barrier to getting out of poverty. The main barrier seems to be a culture or mindset that prioritizes short term benefit/feelings over long term benefits even when there are other options. For example, things like getting a dog, signing up for cable TV, getting an unnecessarily expensive new phone, spending money on going out to eat, etc.

For many people in poverty, their experiences make these decisions feel very rational so it is hard to think any differently.

bluedino6• 4 years ago

For example, things like getting a dog, signing up for cable TV, getting an unnecessarily expensive new phone, spending money on going out to eat, etc.

In a way, people without a lot of money need to "learn how to be poor"

When you're low on money, you eat sandwiches and ramen and beans and potatoes. You don't eat McDonald's or get Starbucks.

orev2• 4 years ago

a culture or mindset that prioritizes short term benefit/feelings over long term benefits even when there are other options. For example, things like getting a dog, signing up for cable TV, getting an unnecessarily expensive new phone, spending money on going out to eat, etc.

While there are definitely elements of spending badly, this idea that they spend money on the “wrong” things gets dangerously close to dehumanizing the impoverished. Those people are still people, and they like to have the joys and feel included in society like everyone else. There’s a huge mental health aspect to that which can mean the difference between being motivated to change your situation vs just accepting it.

Having cable TV gives you access to unlimited entertainment. A smartphone gives you access to all known human knowledge, and is essentially required now to access benefits, banking, etc. Dogs are widely recognized as being one of the most beneficial things to help with general mood and mental health.

The decisions people are making are rational, their just not aimed at the goal you think they should be aiming for (getting out of poverty).

Mezzie17• 4 years ago

The main barrier seems to be a culture or mindset that prioritizes short term benefit/feelings over long term benefits even when there are other options.

Interesting because the main barriers I see are how the system creates perverse incentives for poor people re: getting to be not poor. For example, people on SSI aren't allowed to save. If my sister makes more than ~1k/mo or I save too much (as she's my dependent) she loses her healthcare which is what keeps her from going full Kanye. If I make/save much, I stop getting assistance for my MS meds. Basically, working to get out of poverty wouldn't actually get us out of poverty, we'd just end up giving our money to healthcare companies instead of buying ourselves little luxuries. Another example is that often assistance programs won't help you unless you empty your savings. So if you have 200 dollars and can't make rent, they'll take it from you before they help. So it's more 'rational' to spend that 200 on something else.

Disability, chronic health conditions, and unexpected dependents (be it children, elderly parents, or (in my case) a sibling who manifested a severe mental illness in their 20s) are huge factors in poverty.

TeaDrunk3• 4 years ago

The main barrier to poverty is that there is a statistically almost no way to meaningfully save up enough money to get out of poverty, by onesself, just by forgoing anything that doesn't contribute directly to food and shelter.

Literally: what is the point of saving up 5$/wk? That's less than 300$ by the year. What can you realistically do to get yourself out of poverty for a one-time payment of 300$? You can't even afford therapy to help you get yourself out of immense, soul-crushing burnout because you've been doing nothing to enrich yourself psychologically such as companionship, entertainment, or gifting yourself a nice meal all year.

10$/wk is $520. You can't even start a business selling soap on etsy for 520$. You can maybe get a loan to do so, but now you're on the hook for even more debt for entrepreneurship and the majority of businesses fail.

This is assuming you never have a health problem, you never need medical care, you never have someone you love need medical care, and you have superhuman discipline to go without love, joy, and little pleasures in life for a year.

all2well• 4 years ago

All the poorer people I know are very skilled at saving small amounts of money on things, e.g. pirating shows, using a cheap old phone, knowing where to find the cheapest groceries, and so on. I know that I've gotten a lot lazier about stuff like pirating a show vs just paying three dollars or whatever to watch it as my income has gone up.

The things that prevent poor people from becoming not poor, in my experience, are things like chronic health conditions and abusive upbringings. The things that have gotten people I know out of poverty have usually been education. I don't know a single person who got out of poverty by cancelling netflix. Where are you getting this idea from?

majormajor• 4 years ago

For example, things like getting a dog, signing up for cable TV, getting an unnecessarily expensive new phone, spending money on going out to eat, etc.

How much money do you think it takes to get out of poverty? Is not buying an iPhone and having an extra $1k, even - let's say they went big on the phone - "out of poverty"? That may not even be a month's rent, depending on location... to have security, you need many multiples of that.

jl62• 4 years ago

Ironic that hire-purchase / instalment plans are designed to solve this problem but end up making it worse because they're usually only available at predatory rates, due to the huge risk of default.

Lenders and borrowers alike can’t rely on the borrower having a source of income at all.

For most people on a low income, it could be better to be on an even lower income if in exchange that income could be made more reliable. The instability and stress of precarious employment is worse than the low pay.

josephcsible6• 4 years ago

they're usually only available at predatory rates, due to the huge risk of default.

This seems contradictory: if rates are sky-high, but they need to be that high to avoid the lenders losing money due to the huge risk of default, then they're not predatory.

retrac• 4 years ago

The lack of reward for planning (by virtue of not having the resources since they're always insufficient and tied up in more immediate concerns) similarly promotes a very detached and immediate lifestyle. I have $50. $50 can mean I have fun tonight. $50 does nothing for me next week except maybe let me buy some food, which I can probably scrape together another way. So I'm going to have some fun tonight. The notion that they should save this and set it aside is unrealistic (it's going to go to some surprise expense that always exceed total income). The norm is always having insufficient resources to meet needs under constant anxiety. So check out from time to time when you have the means to briefly alleviate this by splurging and pretending for 6 hours that you're not in this circumstance. From that perspective, the alternative is being just as poor and not having the brief splurge. Living for the day is quite a sensible life philosophy in such circumstances, really.

Mezzie17• 4 years ago

Yes. Also the advice to scrimp assumes there is a way that the person will ever NOT be poor/in poverty, and that isn't true for some/most poor people.

I'm a disabled American who is the breadwinner for myself and another disabled person. Saving would punish us: My sister would lose her health care and I would lose the financial assistance I get for my MS meds. Even if I make more money, it's all going to medical costs, so what's the point?

opportune3• 4 years ago

I can see the reasoning but I still don’t see it as sensible per se. Having a buffer of just $1-3k at the end of the year instead of blowing $50 here and there could make a huge difference as far as anxiety and ability to weather unforeseen issues.

Yes, unforeseen things will still arise but you’d rather have the $1k you need to deal with it than not.

I’m more partial to the argument that splurges allow people to temporarily feel like they aren’t poor

nescioquid• 4 years ago

Had humans the life-span of a mayfly, it might be tolerable to have this discussion every season.

Nearly 30 years ago, Clinton's "welfare as we know it" reforms were being normalized by the likes of the New Yorker/Atlantic/NPR smart set who were doing the heavy "interpretive labor" of explaining why poor trash waste hundreds of dollars (careful, those are 1990's dollars!) on crap like track suits and sneakers which ultimately reduced to so much status-quo-affirming "empathy". These discussions focused primarily on black people, not more generally on poor, disenfranchised people. The message was that you needn't worry about it because it was a "minority" problem.

Since then, how has the conversation permuted? It has simply become more performative and more mired in the vocabulary of race. Now that it is a problem of race, not class, one merely needs to be "empathetic", which, incidentally, is free.

During Clinton's reign, the discussion about the regression to a society with classes like the 30's (upstairs/downstairs) was handled more abstrusely than the easy pre-chewed treacle about racism/welfare (much easier to mouth platitudes or diatribes about black people or the villian du jour than address the fundamental unfairness between capital and labor). Whatever is systemic has to do with power, and power cares not a whit what you look like, how you talk, or what hole you prefer to fuck or be fucked in. People need to stop looking at the color or location of their fuck-hole and simply find solidarity in the fact they are fucked.

But this, like the possibility of the public lending-library being invented today, is nil.

agumonkey• 4 years ago

Totally. And sadly it's a universal principle. Under a certain threshold everything becomes exponentially harder. Same goes the other way, having just enough capital gives you life altering contexts, you have time, multiple attempts, less risk/higher comfort, advice, network..

CobaltFire4• 4 years ago

See “The Sam Vimes “Boots” Theory of Socioeconomic Unfairness”:

The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles. But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet. This was the Captain Samuel Vimes "Boots" theory of socioeconomic unfairness.

-Sir Terry Pratchett

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory

Aunche3• 4 years ago

It's easier to make economic theories that fit science fiction rather than real life. The Vimes boots problem has already been solved by financing. Services like Affirm would allow Sam Vimes to pay the $50 boots in 4 biweekly installments of $12.50. If the theory were correct, then buy-now-pay-later programs would help alleviate poverty, but what we see instead is that it worsens it by enabling consumerist purchases.

treis3• 4 years ago

This annoys me every time I see it. Good boots don't cost 1.5 months of a worker's salary. They cost a day's or less. And if you buy used stuff you can live cheaper than ever. In that respect it's a golden age for the poor.

The problems for the poor in modern America are health care, education, and rent.

b59831• 4 years ago

Another thing about being poor is that, even if you buy the 50$ boots, there's then a good chance someone will steal them from you.

j7ake• 4 years ago

I remember reading an old Cracked article describing how expensive it was to be poor. Eg overdraft fees, bad quality goods, no access to proper healthcare…

eimrine• 4 years ago

One of the things that suck most about being poor is that you need to have money in order to save money.
This is true if you are free to choose to buy a new shirt now or save a bit and buy it later. But if you are running out of shirts now, you don't have that choice.

Do you have any better example? Shirts can be bought used. I do not consider myself as being in poverty but often I use to buy something used, especially if I know how to fix what is broken.

ianai• 4 years ago

“A warm man can never understand a cold man.” From “one day in the life of Ivan D.”

Telling poor people to simply make better choices is downright shameful. Close though is the “effective altruism” crap when it goes so far that even holocausts can be excused. We should be trying to make the current moment sustainable and better for all. Aim for giving people enough stability to actually make decent decisions before worrying about petty things and far off futures.

tomcam• 4 years ago

Closely related: people who say money can't buy happiness. Yeah fuck you. No one who was ever poor says that.

blackgirldev4• 4 years ago

No, money doesn't buy happiness. A combination of hope, access, and money support happiness.

Without those three ingredients, you have a serious handicap to a stable life.

I make more money now than I ever did, and expected to be much happier. My pandemic "depression" has killed my hope and that money is not making me happy.

Anecdote is not data: understood.

edelans• 4 years ago

"It's expensive to be poor"

teddyh• 4 years ago

I often link to these articles:

• 5 Things Nobody Tells You About Being Poor, May 27, 2011: https://web.archive.org/web/20221021114455/https://www.crack...

• The 5 Stupidest Habits You Develop Growing Up Poor, January 19, 2012: https://web.archive.org/web/20220607063905/https://www.crack...

• 4 Things Politicians Will Never Understand About Poor People, February 21, 2013: https://web.archive.org/web/20220904014612/https://www.crack...

tpmoney• 4 years ago

Overall a good read, but I would propose that if the author truly doesn't "know any poor person who is a Republican." then she might need to spend some time traveling outside of the north east.

llaolleh• 4 years ago

People who have not grown up poor can't really understand it. It's not only about the money. It's about the constant stress and fear whether or not you're going to make it.

Just work hard in school to get out is actually pretty hard. Learning is like swimming through molasses because of the constant stress. It gives you a lifetime of trauma and damage.

angarg12• 4 years ago

I work in a big tech company making > 5 times the average salary. People think I'm really fortunate, rich, and that I got it easy.

What they don't see is how I spent half of my career working for a poverty level wage. Making a top 5% income now doesn't erase years of dread every morning going to work, stress of choosing which bill you will and won't pay this month, or constant fear of having an unexpected expense.

madaxe_again• 4 years ago

It’s also a trauma that gets handed down. My parents, when they had me, were by absolutely no means poor - in fact, they were relatively wealthy - but my mother, and her parents before her, grew up in absolutely grinding poverty, and she has been fundamentally shaped by her experiences to the extent that I inherited much of her mindset. My father came from a family that had been wealthy in the colonies, and suddenly found themselves penniless in Portsmouth. The shame, the fear, the what will people think, the make do and mend, the “oh that’s not for me, that’s for real people” attitude. They’d send me to boarding school with no pocket money, which was utterly quixotic to me as a kid - they could afford thousands a term on my schooling, but not £10 a term for me to not be a social outcast? I had to beg, borrow, or steal to pay for field trips, books, and uniform. It screwed them both up. It screwed me up, as while they’d gotten free of the financial poverty trap, they were still there in their minds. I worked out of school like I had the fires of hell on my heels, and kept grinding until, bar the apocalypse, I do not need to worry about money. I still make do and mend. I still feel like an imposter practically everywhere. I still see brown letters and feel the sweat prick down my spine.

It took me a long time to understand where it came from in myself - until I spent time with folks who themselves grew up in actual poverty, and had similar experiences to mine.

nathias• 4 years ago

poverty is visceral it is the stench of mold and an unsatiable appetite for risk

bluedino6• 4 years ago

The holidays are always a good time to reflect on this. My father is one of ten children. They all grew up in a 900sq ft house. Most of them dropped out of high school, none of them went to college.

Now that they are all grown up (the youngest is 48?) it's interesting to see how they all ended up.

Some worked a factory job for years, and ended up with a nice house, retirement, etc. some worked the exact same job and are still paycheck to paycheck.

None of them were really skilled workers, professionals, etc. My one aunt has never had much more than a minimum wage job, had five children with three different fathers, and she's probably in the worst position of them all. She's been given cars etc by the others but always screws up. Her children (and grandchildren) have carried on the tradition.

Looking in from the outside, it seems like the big factors are your work ethic, who your friends are, and what you with your spare time.

My dad has a great work ethic but he's an example of work smarter not harder.

You seem to be an average of your friends, and my aunt for example, hangs out with some real winners.

Spare time is related to your friends a bit, but spending all of your time and money at the casino doesn't get you anywhere, and neither does hanging out drinking until 2am.

dionidium7• 4 years ago

I come from a family with a lot of poverty. Whenever I hear people who have never been poor talk about poverty it sounds like they're from Mars. I understand that there's a certain amount of this that's just manners/politeness, but if your position on poverty is that everybody's doing their best and lack of success is never the result of individual choices or effort, then I just assume you've never actually met any poor folks.

And remember that I'm talking about my family here! These are the people I love the most in the world. I don't want them to starve. I'm glad there's a social safety net and I'd like to see it expanded. But these are not people who are giving it their all and coming up short in a society that's structurally in opposition to them. They're drug addicts and alcoholics and the ones who aren't watch 14 hours of TV every day. I never knew my grandparents to have even an ounce of ambition. My grandfather had a "nervous break down" in his 30s and never tried to work again. (He was by all appearances entirely capable of working.) I don't think my mother ever once made a plan for the future. Etc, etc.

nobodyandproud• 4 years ago

Non-white and urban here (NYC raised).

This essay resonates with me as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30043719#30047716

Today, I never feel like I fit in with my colleagues or direct reports.

The mindset itself is limiting and I fear I’ve passed along this same mindset to my children.

lcuff• 4 years ago

A really good book I read was "Bridges out of Poverty", aimed at social workers etc, but very informative to the lay reader. One of the several things I learned: If a poor person 'comes in' to some money, they are likely to give a decent portion away, because other people know about it and hit them up ("I need glasses and you just got some money"), and in order to be helped themselves by their community when they are in need down the road, they need to be responsive when they have 'extra'.

A poverty mentality is about 'today'. Food, rent, clothes. So education and planning for the future get pushed down in the stack of what's important.

Also had interesting stuff about humor among the impoverished, the middle class and the rich.

A personal observation: The poor in my community don't know how to 'work' the system. There are free (used) computers available to school kids, but the parents don't make use of them. Super-low cost internet access is available, but I saw one family succumb to an 'up-sell' to TV and Cable access, which they couldn't afford (oh yeah, installation cost too, we didn't remember to tell you about that) and in the end, default on the payment, which disqualified them from the low-cost program for a year. Living with three families/12 people in a two bedroom apartment means the child qualifies for benefits for the homeless, but no-one knows, the benefits don't get used.

woodruffw2• 4 years ago

It’s a bummer to see many people on here not respond to the two phenomena that the author explicitly identifies: fear and shame.

Nothing good comes from shaming struggling people for making short-term financial decisions. It only breeds more shame, makes people afraid to express their needs, and pushes the poor even further out of the public’s eye.

treis3• 4 years ago

I kind of feel like this is a self selecting population. In that those that feel shame are going to do something about their situation and escape. Because I've definitely seen some shameful shit done by people that appeared quite shameless.

woodruffw2• 4 years ago

The author’s entire point is that shame is self-reinforcing, not constructive. You can’t shame gay people into being straight, and you can’t shame poor people into “escaping” poverty.

automatic6131• 4 years ago

A small rant about being poor* and food.

Healthy, tasty food is cheap. It really, truly is. If you have a smartphone, you can learn how to make cheap, tasty and filling food. And you can afford it.

Here's what you can't afford: the time, the equipment, the space. Can't buy frozen meats because the freezer is broken. Or it's small. Or it's already full of your flatmates shite that they've had in there for 15 months and never going to eat. Same with the fridge, you can't shop for a week (but you wouldn't anyway because you don't have a car) because it's already full of your f**ing flatmates rotting, half eaten yogurts, rancid meats and leftovers. So you buy what you have to eat for a day, today.

Also you're tired because your commute was 80 minutes on two buses, each way. And your feet hurt anyway because you stand or walk for 7 hours every day. And your back hurts.

But even if you weren't tired and in pain, you don't have a chopping board, or a knife that isn't blunt as a spoon, or pan that isn't rusty, or a large cast iron cooking pot. You have whatever random collection of burnt, greasy, mouse dropping covered (Yay London!) weird iron pots were in the cupboard when you moved in. And why buy anything nice? Your flatmates will use it, not wash it, scrape off sauces with metal cutlery on a non stick pan (really!) and generally mistreat anything there. And you have exactly one working hot plate left and even that's got dodgy heat.

Rant over.

The Capex (equipment, use of a large, working kitchen) for cooking healthy is expensive. The time Opex for cooking healthy is expensive. The human willpower for cooking healthy is expensive. The ingredients, however, are not. Neither, actually, are the skills and knowledge of how to do it.

* minimum wage UK in London, no ability to get credit.

xyzzyz• 4 years ago

Seems like you’re saying that one of the worst parts of being poor is living around other poor people.

plsbenice34• 4 years ago

It is.

jdmtheNth• 4 years ago

David Sedaris says that the best thing you can do for poor people is to not become one.

Scoundreller• 4 years ago

The cookbook and other guides here are excellent:

https://efficiencyiseverything.com/food/

3pt14159• 4 years ago

When I was poor[0] it wasn't really the food that got to me. No, rice kept well and I'd cut up some hotdogs into it or melt some butter or oil or something. The problem was the crushing depression of thinking of every single quarter.

Things you take for granted like wanting to read a book or going downtown Toronto to visit friends. Every drive with the car was a gamble. It's this sort of constant pressure that eats up so much of your mental energy.

Healthy food on a budget is easy if you're not depressed. Bake some sweet potatoes. Raw carrots with hummus. Eggs. The problem is that you didn't clean the kitchen because you hate your life and now there are all these little ants all over the place. And now you don't want to be home to cook and you can't really go anywhere either because you're broke. But you do anyway, because you want to be around people, and so you stretch that $5 pint of Labatt 50 across as long as you can.

It's not a fun life. I don't recommend it.

[0] Startup poor in 2009, as in, my startup was failing but I could get an above average job with little more than a resume. I understand that this is not the same thing as proper poor, but it sure felt horrible anyway.

hinkley• 4 years ago

I don’t think my family would have made it through the 80’s without a chest freezer. I own a smaller one now that has occasionally been awkward to site when I was an apartment dweller but it’s still worth it.

When bread was on sale, often 3 for 2 sales, we’d buy six loaves and stick them in the freezer. Meat was almost always whatever was on sale.

They are not expensive, but they take planning or at least putting off some other big ticket item u til they pay for themselves. What the poor also can’t do is afford to experiment on things that may or may not pay off. That money could have been spent on something else. Including a little bit of fun. VCs aiming for a one in ten success rate sound like madmen. To this day I still scratch my head at that.

s3000• 4 years ago

What does it take to leave such a mindset behind? There was this submission 3 days ago:

We are sorry to inform you that you are in a cult [1,2]

If this were a honest approach, and depending on interpretation, not a way to lure somebody into another cult, what could such a rehabilitation program do to make somebody successful?

[1] https://labskausleben.bearblog.dev/youre-in-a-cult/

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33688913

CobaltFire4• 4 years ago

Reading this hit home for me.

Today I’m thankful I’m not poor, and my family doesn’t know what it’s like. But I struggle every day with exactly the long term effects she talked about.

Existenceblinks2• 4 years ago

Being poor is that everything on daily basis is draining time resource. And that everything is likely to be needed. For example, watching stupid TV shows for entertainment, because after work it's already painful, don't have energy to study anything. Some of developers don't code on weekend and free time .. because they need to be chilled!

JanisErdmanis2• 4 years ago

Sometimes I wonder if decision to work such high-skill draining jobs is caused by an upbringing in poverty. Like they are bending on peer pressure to get the biggest wages to fit in with their spending habits because investment in yourself is not valued. It's as if poor people only see a community based on money. It's the thinking that still haunts them.

Existenceblinks2• 4 years ago

I have a thought model that fits your explanation. That is a size of choices. Once they see peers have more choices to be happy, they know they have too small ways to be happy, and then trying to expand that choices. Ignorance is bliss is kinda stuck in local maximum is bliss.

notacoward• 4 years ago

Having grown up poor myself and now moving in more affluent circles, I see these differences almost every day. Food is a big one. Most people remain forever attached to the kinds of foods they grew up with. A once-poor person might no longer like boxed macaroni and cheese or Taco Bell burritos, preferring more upscale versions of both, but a never-poor person will curl their lip in disgust at the very idea. How do you decorate (or not)? What kinds of vacations do you take (or not)? Are there any things that you hoard, even though there's no longer a point? How are your teeth? These little markers are everywhere, if you know what to look at. Even the fact that people don't talk about their childhood, especially what kind of schools they went to or what sports/activities (if any) they were involved in, can be a big tip-off. I can usually tell within ten minutes or so whether someone I'm talking to is once-poor or never-poor, even if they're both in the same economic stratum now. And I definitely feel more affinity for the first group.

BTW, a lot of these markers - especially food and hoarding - are pretty well known for people who survived the Great Depression, too. Those habits die hard.

Tade0• 4 years ago

This brought back some painful memories.

The shame and fear is real, but the "passing" bit is no less important.

Even if you get out of this, you can't relate to e.g. your current co-workers, because you didn't have the same upbringing.

It's much like being an immigrant - I've been one too and it was a similar feeling.

azalemeth• 4 years ago

I was brought up primarily by a single parent on state benefits and her mother. At times, with both my parents unemployed and one of them not around much, I recall getting things like a pen for Christmas -- to be used at school in a few weeks time -- and being such a regular at the library that all the staff knew me by name. The first birthday party I had was when I was 21, on a relatively generous scholarship at Oxford. Meeting other students made me painting aware that many of their private schools had better facilities than the county where I grew up, and their parents didn't have long and painful arguments about shopping. This article, although American, really resonated more than I thought it would initially -- my mum was on benefits and we just made it through, a situation I think is rather rare in the states.

I'm now much older, and my partner's family are lovely but, to my mind, rich. She spends so much money on frivolities that I continually have to bite my tongue and accept this is normal. Going shopping is a totally different experience with any of them. I love them all dearly and give my mother money per month to live on, but this feeling that I shouldn't spend money on myself, should be sure to always maximize value per unit in the strictest possible sense (including longevity) and repair rather than replace things lives on. I often wear clothes until they break, and then continue to wear them until they become literally unusable. My partner has two double wardrobes filled with clothes and many shoes and handbags.

It's a very different path through the world.

sh-zam• 4 years ago

Starting out from a lower point is always a struggle and most attempts to get out of it leaves you with internal scars (like Frodo had in LOTR). And the internal scars always hurt and I don't know how long they continue to hurt.

Sometimes I wonder if it is even worth to do anything about it on an individual level. As an atheist I can only say, may the unknown save us from the world of known.

blackgirldev4• 4 years ago

As someone who grew up solidly middle class and went to a near Ivy private university and dropped out, I thought I was under educated about "life" and felt the need to enlist in the military.

There, I found out that people who grow up poor looked at me like I was a total idiot. There were daily reminders that I grew up privileged. That my brief stint as an enlisted scrub were not enough to understand what it meant when the military was your only option.

That said, I benefited greatly by not having an actual war during my tenure, having access to distance learning education, and finishing a degree there. I learned that I could get a super low rate VA mortgage as well. These things made a lot of difference and saved me at least a decade of working shit jobs to catch up with my peers after getting out of the military.

In contrast, my fellow enlisted from poverty never aspired to anything more than Chief (US Navy) (edit - nothing wrong with Chief Petty Officer - enlisted vs officer was a real class thing as I recall and it stays with me, sorry). That is, if they made it past the DUIs, economic/financial shame of buying expensive cars and crashing them, bad relationships with rampant abuse, etc.

As someone who could "see hope" because I wasn't mired in poverty's terrible view, I could actually take advantage of what military life offered.

I cannot adequately describe what it is like to be surrounded by people from poverty: to live with them, experience their pain vicariously, and not understand WHY they couldn't do what I was able to do.

The mindset is a real handicap. Changing your mindset is the core of moving from one place in life to another. I will never forget that lesson. Come to think of it, I know wealthy people stuck in detrimental mindsets. But that is another discussion.

akie• 4 years ago

Am I correct in understanding that you concluded that poverty is primarily a mindset issue?

humbleguy• 4 years ago

cauefcr• 4 years ago

How can someone read the post's article and write GP's comment, I wonder.

Fezzik• 4 years ago

Having grown up relatively poor (single-mother, section 8 housing) I read it as the commenter saying there is a mindset that accompanies poverty that you can only experience and appreciate having been poor. Not that the mindset causes poverty. This is true, in my experience.

throwuwu• 4 years ago

No, they correctly identify it as learned helplessness which is a real behaviour common to many animals including humans. If you experience repeated misery, set backs, abuse, discrimination, and even just bad luck it conditions you to believe that no matter what you do you will always fall victim to the worst outcome so you just give up and stay where you are and endure it the best you can. That is not saying that the reason people are poor is due to that conditioning, it’s saying that they were conditioned to act that way because they were poor and now even if you provide them a way out they are so beaten down and demoralized that they will just stay where they are and not even try. It’s almost impossible for people who have not experienced that level of abuse to imagine what this feels like or follow the reasoning behind it.

Karrot_Kream2• 4 years ago

Yeah when I left where I grew up and finally had the space to synthesize my experiences in poverty, I began to call the attitude I saw when growing up "learned helplessness." When everything that can go wrong does, you learn to stop striving, as high expectations just lead to failure and shame (like the article's volcano anecdote.)

I was lucky. I was able to leverage the US education system to rise far above where I grew up, so I left at 18 when I was still young and hadn't been permanently ground down. Even though I've had a very successful career (beyond anything I could dream of as a kid, truly) I still struggle socially a bit in tech. So many American tech people grew up in the same milieu of upper-middle class American suburbia that their attitudes, (not voting but simply interpersonal) politics, and experiences are both homogeneous and yet extremely different from mine. So many smart people I work with and am friends with talk about their exhausting childhood being pushed from activity to activity that I can never connect with. And yes, sometimes I'm insensitive that friends of mine complain about parental pressure because my parents never had the resources to even send me to any of those activities. That I had parents in a stable marriage itself was a virtue where I grew up.

It's still crazy to me that I work with engineers who are second, sometimes third generation programmers. I had friends who couldn't even afford a computer until adulthood.

blackgirldev4• 4 years ago

Yes that's the term "learned helplessness".

I am curious: what made you able to leverage the US education system? Was there a relative that influenced you to study? A teacher? Were you a part of a community program? What do you think got you out of the cycle?

virtualwhys• 4 years ago

Phenomenal, visceral lived experience -- great piece, well worth the read

drekipus• 4 years ago

My sister and I both grew up poor. The stories in the OP resonates a lot with what we experience.

The annoying thing for me, is that I got out and I can't seem to help get my sister out. I was using a shitty "hustle" / "self-improvement" mindset that eventually taught me about delayed gratification, skilling, fake-it-until-you-make it, eating and cleaning-up well (part of self-improvement was also tied with "I'm very lonely how do I attract girls" -- dealing with shame and self-value.) -- now I have a very good job, wife, kid, and working on savings myself.

But what worked for me is polar opposite to what my sister needs. She already has a partner and 3 kids, and they're effectively re-living the story (after a long slog, partner does work now, so there's improvement there.) things can go sour quickly, and it'll be disruptive to her kids.

I was thinking of sending her some of my paycheque automatically each week/month (ala UBI) mainly as I'm skeptical of the UBI model myself, so I would look at it like a sort of experiment in to how does it improve things.

I've sent her "once-off" lump sums, which just get spent on "paying back [partner's] family members" or buying a mini quad-bike / latest xbox / massive TV, etc, for the good times.

We live in Australia, so healthcare, education, etc, are all provided for us as long as she actually goes to it. There is a large mental barrier to everything, and sometimes even going to the doctor is just "a huge drama" that is not worth it. The kids have changed school maybe 3 times in the past 2 years.

another_devy• 4 years ago

The experience I had while growing up and still today is very similar. I moved from India to Europe, my father was sole provider of the house. He earned just par what you would call minimum wage as there was no such concept in India, still not today. By no means you could term us under poverty but I never felt my situation better than that, in-fact I remember many times I wished we were poor so I will at least have close friends who will stand for me or understand how I felt. The school was government subsidised but we had lot of middle class or higher middle class kids. I cycled 6km in morning and after school, initially it felt more fun but eventually I realised with 2nd hand bicycle I was saving school bus money. I remember the day when I was 11 years old and 1st time went for 3 days school trip, my father gave me ₹100 ($1.20). It was not that small amount 2-3 kids also had around same but many of other brought ₹500 in fact there was a kid with ₹2000 and teachers were worried if he will lose it or someone might steal it. I only spent half of it cause I was saving for Nintendo Super Game Boy for both me and my 5 years younger brother. I got the Nintendo! but I was 15 then and wanted a PC. All my childhood was eventual despair of longing for anything. For my brother it was a bit better but he never got anything new or shiny, always whatever I had used. We never went out for food except for my, my brother’s and mother’s birthday, father never wanted to go out on his birthday citing he loves few select meals that mother makes which always infuriated me but after 12 or 14 I realised why he never wanted. Being older I got exposed to our situation very early and there was always this impatience and frustration I felt building in me, I use to express it on mother and brother but I never truly learned why it was there until I got my first job. I was grateful for my parents that I was able to graduate and can now live better financially, but my childhood shame never left me. Till today I secretly go to McDonalds, KFC without telling my wife or kids just to have that feeling that I can eat at those places whenever I want, not because these are fine dining or my wife will be upset but for me those are golf course sessions. Whenever I want to buy any electronics I first look for what is most expensive then reviews and finally decide what I should buy so I won’t look tech junky.

Limited financial resources in my childhood limits me now in my life, work. So many time I truly can’t connect to lunch or coffee conversations between colleagues because those feels like two persons in car fighting or waiving to each other while I look through bus window on the roadside.

I was financial limited then and because of that I’m cognitively restrained now.

‘Some things never leave you’: Poverty’s indelible marks

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