I think it depends. Is $1 enough to grant you housing, food, healthcare, and free time to see your family?

It's enough to get a can of Coke (not everywhere though).

I think the point is that $1 a day is acceptable if it provides shelter/food etc.

Which it doesn’t.

It does in many very poor nations. What's the significance of the $1 figure anyway? Whose point hinges on this number?

> What's the significance of the $1 figure anyway?

This article gives a bit of background about that figure: http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-17312819

It doesn't IF it doesn't provide for said things. That's the point.

I got the parent’s point; you missed mine ;)

I was talking about the second part of the comment: $1 doesn’t provide you shelter/food/etc.

No. $1 is not enough.

That's my point though. Talking dollar amounts isn't the end goal. The end goal is what you can get for the money.

If they literally are "stuck" . Here we get into a nasty debate about spectrum of probability vs effort and the multipliers that should be reachable by end of life.

I definitely agree that a 0 probability despite maximum effort is unfair. In between is a grey area though.

Effort is irrelevant though, if they spend their effort on something that could never succeed or is useless or irrelevant to the market then their effort should obviously fail and it is not unfair. So it matters a lot what they choose to apply effort to. Generally life is an IQ test and rewards those who make optimal choices WRT events in their life.

> Generally life is an IQ test and rewards those who make optimal choices WRT events in their life.

Do you think that if you'd been born in a slum you would have a decent chance of winning in the IQ test & optimal choice events in your life? I would imagine that almost anyone reading these comments has been unbelievably fortunate to be born into relatively wealthy circumstances & had things like "books" around to help bolster their IQ.

Being born in a slum more than likely means that your parents failed the IQ test, which is a strong signal about your IQ.

That is completely untrue. When researchers have actually taken the time to do IQ testing in poor communities, they find a similar distribution of high and low IQ's as in the general population. There are a lot of 130 IQ people living in the slums.

I hope that was meant to be ironic. If not that was one of the most depressing statements I have seen in a while.

Americans went from riches to soup lines (living in slums/squalor) over various periods of time. Though their IQ did not vary over that same time period.

A strong signal IQ is not, maybe a nice tailwind, but that doesn't help much if you are born in the bogs.

This is just downright stupid. Slums are societal issues which ant individual has little control over.

Perhaps you failed the IQ test too?

When you get to the bottom of this kind of thinking, there's always some form of a just world fallacy. Despite the fact that the wealthy engineer circumstances to keep the poor in their diminished condition for their own profit, it's never "unfair" because of this foundational error. See also programmers thinking they're "highly paid" despite years of collusion by tech giants to reduce their salaries and capital owners eroding what they do earn through rent-seeking real estate investments.

The term "rent" in the phrase "rent-seeking" has nothing to do with the meaning of the term "rent" as payment pursuant to a lease.

Rather, the phrase rent-seeking refers to seeking money without actually providing any economic value. It would be more accurate to view such payments as taxes (often levied by a private entity). Adam Smith categorizes income into profit, wages, and rent. Rent-seeking refers to the last one of these.

In a traditional residential lease, the landlord is responsible for the maintenance and upkeep of the property along with property taxes and, sometimes, some of the utility payments. Residential rent is based upon the value of the property as a residence, along with maintenance, taxes, etc that the landlord is responsible for. The income the landlord receive, according to Adam Smith's classification, is profit rather than rent.

Capital owners typically receive profit by controlling profitable assets such as stocks, bonds, and real estate.

I might be misunderstanding, but it seems like the landlord's income would include economic rent as well as profit by this definition.

You might imagine a residential lease where you agree to perform maintenance and upkeep and pay property taxes in return for a reduction in the lease cost. But this wouldn't reduce your lease cost to $0 - you're still paying for the privilege of being allowed to live there, so doesn't this fall under the traditional definition of "economic rent"?

>Despite the fact that the wealthy engineer circumstances to keep the poor in their diminished condition for their own profit

Is there anything specifically you think the author has done to "keep the poor in their diminished condition"? Or is the act of owning rental property oppressing? What should the author do in his circumstance? He could stop investing in rental property, but would his investment in other areas be oppressive? Should he quit teaching rich people in Qatar so that he doesn't earn enough to engage in investments?