In my situation, problem was caused by two main issues:

* Alcoholism. My dad functioned well, so it wasn't necessarily a matter of drinking up all the money, as much as getting to the drink was a primary objective, leaving little room for motivation to do more in life. He was quite intelligent, but didn't care. (I've personally taken a few trips down that road myself, but have fortunately gotten out of it, and am currently 15 months sober)

* Mental health. My mom had serious undiagnosed mental health issues. Like talking to people who weren't there, the inability to function as seemingly routine tasks, explosive temper at virtually nothing. Like the alcoholism, I can see elements of this in myself as well.

I'm obviously on HN because I'm a developer, and doing well for myself, but these issues are still there, and I still feel "poor". My family still is, and I put as much distance between me and that situation as possible. I could possibly help them be a little less poor, but it's not a money thing. It's a mentality thing.

Congratulations!

And 'tech conferences'? Loserville. No offence. I like techies, and like talking tech. But getting drunk with nerds is not fun.

And entrepreneurship isn't going to soften the tumble. It requires intervention of a different kind.

They can migrate to the American southwest and do agricultural labor, competing with the illegal immigrants doing jobs that "Americans just won't do". They can migrate to the distant outskirts of high productivity cities (e.g. NY, SF), then commute in and provide domestic labor to high productivity individuals. There is plenty of opportunity out there; if there weren't then people from around the world wouldn't be desperately attempting to enter the US.

Hundreds of millions of Indians, Chinese and others engage in internal migration, moving themselves to where the jobs are. Americans could too.

This is just not a fix that Silicon Valley can do; if a man doesn't want to fix himself, then Peter Thiel can't build an app to do it for him.

So your answer is to work on farms for $5 an hour with no benefits, no worker protections?

Is that satire?

You do realize that Americans will 'do those jobs' once wages and working conditions rise to the acceptable, but they will never be so long as mass illegal immigration is kept in place?

Illegal immigration is a very corrosive trap: once one farmer, in economic trouble hires illegals and cuts his costs, all of the others have to follow suite - it's a thin margin game. And then it's a trap the industry cannot get out of.

Most farmers would happily employ Americans for higher wages and better conditions if economics allowed for it. But so long as there are tons of illegals, and 5% of farmers who will take advantage of it - the rest have to follow suit.

Open border / illegal immigration is a very corrosive thing.

Also - the Asians that come to America are not 'mobile'. They don't go to Alabama and Georgia, generally. They go to areas where there are many other Asian people, which is rational on their part. I don't think it's fair to compare people who have lived in some area for 5 generations to newcomers.

Jobs for the less skilled are not plentiful in America. There is a lot of opportunity for the upper 50%, but it's not the same for others.

Also - the greatest wave of automation happened long ago, in the industrial revolution. We managed to find jobs for people then, we will now.

Even someone applying for food stamps has to jump so many hurdles, sometimes including in-person interviews! As if someone who has difficulty affording food every day has an excess of time and reliable transportation. (Then again, these people aren't easily monetized, unless you're comfortable exploiting them. c.f. check cashing.)

I'm hopeful for initiatives like the US Digital Service. And I wish our culture stopped glamorizing startups for being worth a lot of pretend money, and instead valued them on how much they did to advance us as an equitable society.

> And I wish our culture stopped glamorizing startups for being worth a lot of pretend money, and instead valued them on how much they did to advance us as an equitable society.

It is not the job of businesses to pursue social engineering goals like an equitable society. That is the job of government, and government needs money to do those things, which can come from taxing successful businesses.

People who suggest that businesses ought to pursue social goals don't fully understand what would happen if they got what they wished for -- a world where social goods and services are privatized -- provided by unaccountable private companies instead of elected governments.

For example, consider the state of public transit in Silicon Valley. There isn't much of it, and what there is sucks. So companies have started paying for their own bus routes, which are only open to their own employees. Taken together, those bus routes would comprise a very comprehensive public transit solution. But the general public can't use them. This is what happens when companies do the government's job.

Consider also the backlash against Bill Gates' education initiatives in Seattle: http://www.prwatch.org/news/2016/04/13085/charitable-plutocr...

Besides, if we rely on corporations for social progress, they could easily promote right-wing policies, which is the opposite of what you seem to want.

It's really much better when businesses stay out of politics entirely and maximize their wealth creation, and the government redistributes that wealth to the extent necessary to accomplish its social goals.

Want to see education improved? Have the Feds take over funding, and give each school the same amount of money. The quality of schools in poor neighborhoods would increase dramatically, and the quality of schools in rich neighborhoods would decrease. Maybe then, the rich would be convinced to support increased educational funding.

In other countries, people don't think about the quality of the local school district when they buy a home, because the districts are all similar in quality. Again, a matter of funding.

In the process, it is struggling with the area's incumbent zoning laws, not enough new construction, high cost of living, and, higher than average gap between the rich and the poor. They've concentrated so much capital and opportunity that it doesn't translate well to other places, despite attempts to incubate the same thing in Austin, Seattle, Raleigh, and the like. And if you were referring to "app-based" solutions as opposed to proven injection of capital, you're in uncharted waters.

Before Silicon Valley, the miracle non-extraction-based economic engine of the country was Detroit; before then it was Akron, Pittsburgh, Chicago, Buffalo, Rochester, and New York. If history is of any lesson, in the future we'll fondly remember Silicon Valley's "IT boom" of a couple decades, before the circumstances and realities of the situation changed and the next big thing after automobiles, rubber, steel, railroads and meatpacking, electricity, and shipping (respectively) came along.

We've had quite a lot of articles on HN about how bad the filter of using certain University enrollments to select a companies job seeks is for diversity in general. Economic diversity is also problematic when you only hire from top 25 schools.

Ok, so their new hires go through a filter that has some serious diversity problems. This means that the culture of the company skews towards the demographic they are hiring.

> Once you have a decent résumé in the industry, it doesn't really matter where you went to school, or even if you did.

How exactly does one get that decent resume when the bigger players are off limits? How does the culture of the company favor more new hires from selected institutions versus these upstarts. Let's also remember that our industry has a rather large ageist streak. A person who starts at Google is going to have a lot better prospects than someone working their way through smaller, probably local to their state, players.

The Bay Area only represents 4.5% of US GDP, so the impact on employment is small so far, but as software eats the world and companies become less like Kodak and more like Google, that's going to put a lot of people out of work.

A military coup followed by a dictatorship, in which massive, forcible wealth redistribution would take place.

Silicon Valley, as the country's second greatest concentration of wealth, would not survive this.

The solution is dictated by the boundary conditions. Politics is a desperate struggle for who gets what.

We can't bring the manufacturing jobs back for these people, either. Let's dispel the notion that the collapse of manufacturing jobs in the rust belt, where many of these people live, was the result of political choices. It was inevitable -- the rise of China, southeast Asia, and Latin American countries has revealed the truth that US manufacturing was not globally competitive, but merely sheltered. NAFTA sent some jobs to Mexico, but in the absence of NAFTA, those jobs would have gone to Asia instead. If the US government had decided to protect US manufacturing jobs at all costs, we would have quickly learned what "all costs" means -- the cost of protecting those jobs would have risen quickly over the years until we could not have afforded it anymore. The tariffs required to do so would have been an enormous drag on the economy, and on the well-being of most Americans, and therefore unsustainable economically and politically. So the political choices involved in the collapse of manufacturing jobs could at best have delayed the inevitable.

So, whatever we can do for these people is by degrees -- improve the free public education they already have, improve the welfare benefits they already have, maybe cut their taxes, if they earn enough to pay taxes. We can't bring the jobs back, and it's naive of them to believe candidates who promise that they can.

But maybe we shouldn't feel sorry for these people, who grew up in the richest country in the world, with free education, and have nothing to offer to anyone. A lot has been done for them already, and unlike almost any other group in this country, they cannot point to any injustices visited upon them as an excuse for their current state of affairs. Let's keep in mind that they were never enslaved, and that they were sheltered from competition from non-whites and foreigners for decades. They have managed to fail in a country designed to promote the success of white people, often at the expense of other groups. Their lives are significantly better, more comfortable, and more secure than those of people in many countries of the world. Billions of people live in poverty these poor white Americans could never imagine. These Americans have housing, enough to eat, clothes to wear, cars, TVs, video game consoles, government-provided health care (Medicaid) and welfare payments in many cases -- all the trappings of middle-class life in many parts of the world. What else do we owe them? Self-actualization?

Frankly, I'd rather give my money to some of the billions of people in the world who live in ramshackle houses with dirt floors, no electricity, no education, and no way out. These white Americans have enough that I don't see how they are entitled to any more unless they earn it themselves.

Also you are glorifying and over generalizing the opportunities to the Americans you disdain. Just because one has electricity does not mean one has opportunity. I think you'd be surprised to find that many Americans have no realistic way to know where to earn something themselves. 2 Hrs from NYC can be just as cut off from opportunity as 2000 miles.

Do you think this person will be stuck in poverty forever, given that he's cut off from opportunity by a 2 hour train ride?

Also, I find your claim that people in New Haven or Poughkeepsie (approx 2 hours away) don't know they could find work in NYC simply implausible. I've had random conversations in broken Hindi with auto drivers; when they ask where I'm from and I tell them "New York", they immediately recognize it. Random people in South America, SE Asia, etc all seem to have a pretty good picture of what NYC is. Yet somehow someone from Allentown, PA doesn't?

That implies that it's the American's choices, rather than his circumstances, which cause him to be poor. How is that irrelevant?

They have TV, and the internet. It's not like they are cut off from civilization, with no knowledge of life outside of their immediate surroundings. They know that places like NYC are where the rich people live, and where the jobs are. They just can't do those jobs.

I'm sure we would be better off if all of these people were successful and productive, but it's unrealistic to assume that would happen, for the reasons I've enumerated in my comment. The bottom line is that they have had many advantages, and they have failed in a country that was designed to help white people succeed. Every country has people like this. Look at England.

People tend to assume that if someone is poor, they must be a victim of injustice, and that opportunities need to be created for them. That is sometimes true, but not always. This is one of those cases where it isn't.

What solutions do you propose that could turn these people into successful, productive, happy members of society?

Not often. Regardless, my solutions would start with chipping away at the disdain, indiffernece, and exploitation by privileged Americans. Wealth inequality creates a lot of the problems. Offshoring wealth to Ireland by Apple, FB, etc. to avoid taxes if you want to get even more granular.

Actually, almost everyone in America has TV and internet access, including the very poorest.

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/teens-baltimore-poorer-health...

"DR. ROBERT BLUM, JOHNS HOPKINS URBAN HEALTH INSTITUTE: Well, first of all, just to put that in perspective, if Baltimore were a country, we would be 75th in the world for infant mortality, below every industrialize country and many low and middle-income countries."

That is an American neighborhood. Tell me how Medicare and welfare payments make everything alright again?

--

I don't know if you've looked at how much gov't assistance is paying out, but it's not enough to live on. There's a plethora of data contradicting everything you say, but it doesn't fit with your moralizing narrative.

Why don't you cite some of it, then?

I can certainly cite plenty of data showing he's mostly right. For example, the poor mostly do not work, they mostly have good quality housing, and they have lots of food.

http://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publication...

http://www.census.gov/prod/2008pubs/h150-07.pdf

https://www.brookings.edu/2015/01/08/weight-and-social-mobil...

Concretely, what do you think he's wrong about, and where is the data supporting your claims?

Also, your second link is literally 642 pages, please point to the relevant part.

For example (table 2-2, page 48), 2.75% of poor households have a sagging roof. 66% of poor households (table 2-3, page 50) have at least 2 rooms/person and 94% have at least 1 room/person. 3.5% (table 2-4, page 52) lack a complete kitchen.

I don't know of any single characteristic to cite to prove that the conditions of poor people's housing are good; but whatever specific characteristic you want info on, you can probably find it in that document.

> I don't know if you've looked at how much gov't assistance is paying out, but it's not enough to live on.

Clearly it is, because these people don't have jobs and are able to afford housing, cars, TVs, Playstations, etc. How else are they paying for these things? Do you think they stole them? Clearly, the money they receive from the government is enough to live on. Maybe not enough to live comfortably, but enough.

Food deserts. Lead paint poisoning. Lack of access to healthcare.

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/editorial/bs-ed-hea...

"Take, for instance, Sharlene Adams who recently needed a blood pressure cuff. To buy one required no less than four bus rides, a stop at her doctor's office for his signature, a visit to two different pharmacies and a side trip to borrow money to make the required co-pay. The 55-year-old eventually got her hands on the $40 item in East Baltimore 5 1/2 hours after starting on her quest, the Maryland students documented."

https://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=2513561

Or see the Oregon experiment: https://www.nber.org/oregon/

Food deserts are actually the result of people's consumption choices - poor folks choose not to buy healthy food, so no one sells it to them. Making healthy food available does not change this behavior.

http://theincidentaleconomist.com/wordpress/giving-people-ac...

The thing I suspect is that the violence these people visit on themselves contributes more to their situation than lack of access to government services. I didn't say that more government services wouldn't help at all.

By the way, the Baltimore Sun article you cited is not about poor white people. It is about poor urban blacks in West Baltimore. That's not really relevant to this discussion, because blacks have faced enslavement and discrimination for centuries in this country. Discrimination against blacks, especially in hiring practices, has helped the poor white people we are talking about. Having to now compete against non-whites for jobs is a significant component of the poor white anger in this country, although many don't want to admit that.

So, whites deserve nothing from the institutions of their own country, except the "privilege" to be permanently tainted by a kind of Original Sin, and neglected in favor of literally every other ethnic group? Got it.

And people wonder where working-class rage comes from...

First of all, I said that these people already get plenty of help, and are not entitled to even more help.

Second, I did not say that "everyone else on Earth" was deserving of help. I said that some people are, because they are poorer than the Americans we are talking about.

Third, I did not say that our country should give money to anyone. I said that I would prefer to give my money to the poorest people in the world, and they are not Americans.

Fourth, I never said that anyone was evil. I did not even imply it.

I suspect you are intentionally making an uncharitable interpretation of my words, because no reasonable person would interpret them in such a twisted way.

And anyway, it's clear from your explanation that if these people were not white, you might have some sympathy for them. How else are we to interpret statements like: "they cannot point to any injustices visited upon them as an excuse for their current state of affairs" and that "these people have nothing to offer to anyone" a few lines after you elucidate how the US Govt did nothing to protect American manufacturing jobs? What exactly do foreign manual laborers "have to offer" that white Americans don't, aside from being cheaper?

No, it isn't. It is simply a recognition that some people are treated better than others because of their race. It says nothing about the legitimacy of a group's interests, and it certainly has nothing to do with the concepts of evil or sin.

Basic math and science research now is the soil Silicon Valley needs in the future. But government budgets are cut, and there's a philosophy that predominates that government is not the answer.

So Larry Page has Google do research and development. But there is the beginning of a stockholder rebellion. The trend is toward focus on short term ever-increasing stock returns each quarter. The powers-that-be want funding for basic math and science research trimmed down to nothing - both government and corporate.

Plus treaties like TPP are being pushed. If Silicon Valley profits on the increased spread of information, the TPP tries to tie down information in rules which seem out-of-date.

Also telcos (read AT&T and Verizon) are using their last-mile land/airwave monopoly power to redirect bad DNS calls to ads, hijack sessions and place cookies on them, they want to use their monopolies to charge upstreams fees etc.

Then there's the Eastern District of Texas patent racket.

An example of this discussed recently - in the years after World War II, the transistor was implemented and Moore's Law took effect. As everyone knows, that has slowed down in recent years and soon the current methods will hit a brick wall.

If you look at constant non-military R&D dollars coming from the federal budget, they are less this year than they were in 2003. The population is growing, the economy is growing and becoming more complex, but federal R&D dollars are shrinking.

Also, you talk as if wasting human capital was not an intention of our current mode of production and economic system. Look at this 1999 Businessweek article, "When is the jobless rate too low?" ( http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/1999-10-31/when-is-th... ). The worry by the people controlling the economy starts when unemployment gets too low, not when it's too high. Of course, if it starts climbing up to 25% like it did in 1932 in the US, turmoil starts to take hold, so in that respect they're against high unemployment on the other end.

Why do you assume wasted human capital is the concern of those making the economic decisions? By the people making the economic decisions, I mean the people pressuring Larry Page to cut Alphabet/Google R&D, who pressured Facebook to go public, who beat the drums for years for Apple to have a special dividend etc. Wasted human capital, unemployment - the existence of a reserve army of labor is a cornerstone of the existing economic system.

Do you know what stops the very poor in such a rich country from simply moving to a better state or city with more jobs and resources? Is it fear? sadness? lack of confidence? lack of expense to move? too much attachment to the place they grew up in?

Studies have repeatedly shown that metropolises are the future. Big cities have the jobs, healthcare, education, networks to help everyone, especially the needy. Why aren't more needy people moving?

1. It may be very hard to interview for a job at your destination. It's disingenuous to tell someone on the poverty line "Move, start paying out a ton of cash, and hopefully pick up a job". It's even harder to do that if you don't have the family structure to help you out.

2. Many people may have equity tied up in homes in dying communities. Yeah, it's not worth very much - but it's paid for, and way cheaper than rent in a much more expensive city.

3. The skills you have may not be in demand in cities. If you're a steel worker, moving to New York City isn't going to help you out very much.

1.) If you were born in the country, you gotta have at least 1 relative that lives in a rich state. (if you don't even have that, there are lots of charities and programs in cities like LA, SF, New York that can give you some initial help). And why would it be disingenuous? If there is a good chance to get out of poverty, why not at least try once?

2.) You can sell the house or get a line of credit against it and use it to see if you can move

3.) so learn a new skill then move, or just do manual labor for a while in the big city

They are especially brutal if you move to them with little money and no connections to decent jobs. Then you have the worst of both worlds.

The work ethic in what is called "white trash" societies is very strong. Most are unafraid of manual labor. But moving everyone to cities is not the answer, since it ignores a lot of things that rural people find valuable.

1. A device that allows knowledge uploading would make most of education obsolete - everyone could know everything there is to know (which is not the same as understanding, but I don't think it's possible to teach understanding anyway, only help someone understand).

2. An equivalent of a drug gland from the Culture series would fix most mental problems, especially motivation and lack of self discipline.

3. An implantable electric powered CO2 to glucose/triglycerides converter would decrease basic survival costs by orders of magnitude, at the same time freeing lots of agricultural land for other use. With no risk of starving everybody would be much more entrepreneurial.

1 requires sf technology, but 2 and 3 is 'just' an engineering problem.