I have a safety net and it has enabled me to take risks I never would have if failure meant homelessness for my family.

I think that's why all the trimmings of a "socialist" society are so attractive to me.

I hear what you're saying. You felt motivated because there was nothing to enable your coasting. But it can also work in the other direction.

Unfortunately taking risks to better yourself and having it work out are the exception not the rule. And I have to assume that a non-socialist society supports this better in almost every way, based on historical evidence in my own head. (flawed as that may be)

Not taking risks (doing nothing) will never "work out".

Those who do not have the capital cannot take risks in the first place.

Is it not possible to make something "work out" without taking risks? A quote from the olden (perhaps wiser) days, was "don't quit your day job", has this sage advice been lost?

Unless we are going to avoid widely classifing a "risk" as something "scary" or "hard", then isn't changing jobs risky?

I think the definition of a risk is very relative though. If someone is barely making ends meet (with no signs of improving their situation if they keep their same routine), then taking time to educate themselves (a vocation school, getting resources on how to stretch a dollar, etc.) may seem like a risk. When you don't have education, time, or money every decision you take on your day to day is a risk.

I'm not going to pretend that some people don't thrive when looking at the poverty void -- they are the exception to the rule. There are also those who coast on gov't funding. There's probably many reasons why someone would coast, but if I'm in a system that has so thoroughly forgotten about me since birth (e.g. not having any opportunities for better education for one), why would I want to partake in it? I think the cost of a few people not trying to make changes for the better is by far outweighed by helping those you need support in their most desperate time.

It's not about giving people a safety net when the have moonshot ideas to start a business. It's to have a safety net when they need a bit of time to improve themselves, which when you have little time and money is a huge risk.

>I think the definition of a risk is very relative though.

That was part of my point, though I worded it poorly.

>then taking time to educate themselves (a vocation school, getting resources on how to stretch a dollar, etc.) may seem like a risk.

I think the biggest issue here is kids. I taught at a local community college, and I can say that almost everyone there was taking a risk of some kind to get through school. But the moms that had to leave class early to pick up their kid from one place and bring them to another place and then go to Walmart for work to make ends meet.

I had a student who was homeless, and now has a good job. He worked harder than 99% of the other students. (I taught for about 12 years)

I also had a student that was watching porn and left his baby in the tub and it drowned.

These are the people that would benefit from help, but the problems that I see are that they have help right now. I know this because I was a homeless teen on the streets for a while. And there's help all over the place.

I think people that have never been homeless don't understand it at all. It's a totally foreign world. But half the people that were my friends were trying to get off the streets, and the other half were not. Drugs were pervasive, and one friend was this happy, carefree kid, and a year later when I was back in town, he was on meth and was mugging people.

What people are missing is good parents that could teach their kids how to live, especially when it gets hard. Save money, don't waste your life on drugs, work hard, be decent to people.

Many of my friends were happy being on the streets (I was for a time) because home life was so wretched.

What would happen if all these kids got a chunk of money every month? Drugs and entertainment, I gurantee you that. Why? Because they saw no hope in spending it wisely when many couldn't look further than a day in the future. Misery an hopelessness was their daily life.

Some kids would get some money, and they go to a fancy restaurant for a single meal. One time a bunch of kids spanged (spare changing) for a whole day just to get a night at the Hilton hotel and bunch of them took showers there. (there are showers at the shelter, and they still did this) And yes, the shelter was totally safe (some theft) but it was kids, not crazed adults. I think the adults lives are just an extension of what the teens experience, but a more realistic outlook, and hopelessness is spread out over time differently. (I was homeless as an adult for awhile as well)

The kids that made it out were the ones looking for jobs and housing, even when all they had was a local shelter and general mailbox and phone service provided by a local volunteer house for homeless kids.

Risk plays no part in helping any of these kids, or me when I was there. There daily life is full of risk. There were kids selling drugs, a few prostituted themselves in various ways. (though this gets worse the longer you are out there) I finally got a job, but had nothing to spend money on. I had hundreds of dollars in my pocket at one point, and was still homeless.

Unless you have 10k or more, what "risk" could you possibly take without family or a huge support network? And if you did have that money, but no support, it would be insane to take a risk. I think talking about risks in regards to helping the needing is red herring, a strawman, and distraction.

What these people need is real hope, so that when they change from spending $30 a day at McDonalds, to spending $100 a week at a grociery store, that they truly believe and understand they are making their future better.

I have so much more to say about this, but I will pause. I find many comments about the poor and downtrodden to be based on faulty understanding of these people's reality. It reminds me of white people arguing about what black people experience. Can they? Of course, but they often sound silly and misinformed.

i grew up poor, and it was frustrating to see the stupid mistakes my family and people around me would make over, and over, and over. then people like the researchers in this article say infuriating things like 'their bad decisions are just because they are cognitively tired, and actually many of them could be even considered shrewd!"

being cognitively tired does play a role, but more so because they are cognitively lazy. their bad / lazy decisions are confounded by the fact they are trying to solve problems caused by making bad decisions in the first place. on top of that, most dont value education.

i typed a long story but deleted it. in short, 4/6 of us siblings dropped out of school, those same 4 had a large life insurance policy from the airforce which they blew almost immediately.

we have so many opportunities in this country, but it still does require that we go to school, work, and use our head. i am aghast on how so many people simply refuse to THINK. so many people with money problems have no idea how much money annually they spend on ANYTHING. how can you even begin to talk to someone about getting out of poverty, if they wont even calculate how much they are spending on that 5$ starbucks and 600$ phone.

Also grew up poor, and seen people of all income levels be cognitively lazy. I felt like I really started to get the way success works when I saw successful people waste money. I saw individuals make flippant decisions to throw away 50,000$ on software that their organization will never use. MSDN licenses for 100 people that can't and never will code. I've seen a salary man whose job it was to install software on tablets one day a year, the rest of the year he watched Netflix.

I'm aghast when I see well off people just burn money. There is an entire population of people who find success via a different road than intelligence or intrinsic value.

I've seen things that would make your blood boil.

But there's a difference. That company wasting $50k is the equivalent of a poor person buying the brand name bread instead of store brand. Not a life altering decision. Make that a $5m purchase and the higher ups in the company will probably spend a great deal of time weighing the pros and cons.

I have seen people in fire situations get a one time windfall of $8,000 dollars and spend all of it for a down payment on an expensive car. That's the kind of decision making that keeps you poor.

As income inequality increases, relative percentage comparisons like this become more infuriating than comforting.

The more money you have, the dumber you can be with it and still be guaranteed survival. At a certain level of poverty, you have to operate at peak financial efficiency to live a mean lifespan.

50,000$ properly spent could change the course of human history. It could supply the nearby treatment center for children with behavioral/emotional problems for years!

I could buy a few mig welders, some angle grinders, associated PPE, several hundred pounds of scrap metal, and still have enough left over to pay two unemployed people in rural Missouri to make tiny metal sculptures for model towns for 6-12 months.

The above is my goofballs, no thought business plan for 50k. I'm not even trying and the ROI on that hairbrained stupid plan is better than atleast 10 different decisions I've seen made over 50k.

I'm not even being creative or thoughtful. For someone like me to see someone be told "We don't need this." and them respond "eh fuck it, it's just 50k" is...

It's astounding. It's mind altering. It's the name brand bread vs. human lives metaphor in your face and on fire.

So yeah there is a difference.

You act like spending $50k on something you don't need is the equivalent of lighting the cash on fire. That money goes back into the economy. It provides jobs, it increases money velocity. For the economy as a whole, it's really good that the wealthy or large companies aren't super frugal with their money. After all, someone has a business employing people to make custom leather interiors for private jets, when the standard interior (or first class commercial) will do just fine.

I have very often thought what would happen if I was to suddenly come into a substantial amount of wealth and this is what I would do with a no holds barred method of paying skilled people to do cool things that they do not have the money to do otherwise. There are incredibly talented people that if given 20k to make their Magnus opus they would make the most breathtaking and increadible stuff imagined.

The trouble is finding those people.

Most people I meet are literally stereotypical consumers and couldn't come up with a unique idea to save themselves.

>pay two unemployed people in rural Missouri to make tiny metal sculptures for model towns for 6-12 months.

Wait... what?

Something to consider:

On HN a few weeks back, I read someone's comment that some poor people are poor because they own cheap cars that cost a fortune in repairs because they're always breaking down, preventing them from saving up for a better one that won't need repaired so often, which would allow them to save and get ahead.

Maybe that's not always the kind of decision-making that keeps you poor after all.

I don't buy that argument outright. I have a six figure savings account and six fig investments going on in my mid 30s earned on my lonesome in the low-wage midwest, and I've always been taken advantage of here on top of it (low paid even for here). Frugality is my game because I care not about materialism. I believe one has to have a brain the size of a pea, to be impressed by someone's possessions. I coudln't care less about someone having a Mercedes. The Europeans have the right idea, being a big spender is actually extremely tacky and anti-social in my view.

One of my cars is terrible (2000 Mazda). I waste, but not much. I'm repairing it quite often. A single $500 repair is one (very cheap) car payment on a new one. I'm way ahead keeping the old beast going. I can replace the whole car 3 to 6 times over before I get to the price of a new one.

What I do pay with is inconvenience and my time to drag it into the shop. That's value too, but purely financial costs I'm winning.

Overall in the end, I'm going to pickup a cheap (15K), affordable car to replace it with. Toyota Corolla, Honda Civic, Hyundai Elantra range of vehicles. At those prices, the financial gain is outweighed by convenience for me. So we all "have a price". At least until more of those Tesla Model 3's have been out a while, I'll spend more than I normally would on one of those beauties. :)

A lot of people say it's not worth fixing a car that's worth less than the repair. I disagree, it's money in vs money out. Same concept as calories in calories out. Obviously, the comment you quoted would be correct when you start dealing with outliers/extremes. There's money pits, then there's real money pits.

Sounds like the "Sam Vimes 'Boots' theory of economic injustice", from the Discworld novels.

https://wiki.lspace.org/mediawiki/Sam_Vimes_Theory_of_Econom... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Vimes#Boots_theory_of_soci...

I don't knnow how accurate it is, but it does make sense for some things, such as shoes, and thinking about it, train tickets (season tickets are better value for money but very expensive), and essentially anything where bulk/long term is better value, but only being affordable to some people, and I think the space to store things comes into play as well...

I don't think the problem is that they cost a fortune. Overall the money spent is probably the same.

The problem is that an unreliable car is far more likely to cause sudden "emergency" events that require a lot of liquid money upfront and if you don't have that money this might cause a chain reaction so you lose your job and then your home.

On the other hand (at least where I live) expensive cars means expensive repairs and maintainance.

Simply isn't true-if that were the case companies that make millions would never go bankrupt-yet they do. Why? According to you, they'd spend a great deal of time weighing pros and cons...

The fact is you can't always weigh pros and cons and always get a positive outcome. There are many poor people that will always be poor-but entire industries have spent decades making decisions weighing pros and cons and completely collapsed because of things outside of their control. Why can this principle not apply to a portion of the poor?

I'm sure it does apply to a great deal of the poor. My comment was simply that some people make terrible financial decisions. Are you implying that no one is poor due to their own decisions? It's all just things outside their control?

What's your method of assessing whether the bad choices come from being cognitively tired or cognitively lazy? What's the marker you look for?

I resonate the feeling and agree that people need to also take responsibility, however I see people all the time making poor choices, and it isn't just poor people. If you're down on your luck, that $6 coffee ritual may be not sound so bad at the moment. Someone who is exhausted, and probably malnourished (surprisingly common in America), will say to themselves... I'm craving a delicious coffee and hopefully it'll give me enough energy to keep going, and sometimes it does work temporarily.

You're exactly describing how an irrational spending is hard to shake off, even at the moment when you need every dime.

Rational thinking under stress is hard. It can be a trap, and often is.

That's why I try to maintain the same lifestyle no matter how much I do or don't have. Once you adjust your spending habits, it's very difficult to change them. I just think out what makes sense, how far I have to be happy, then build a routine around sensible choices. Half of the time, the sensible choices are the healthiest anyway (like taking lunch to work vs fattening fast food). Nailed it on the head that rational thinking under stress is hard, so people should get their affairs in order when they get a lull in life where they can step back and setup a healthy (financially & otherwise) routine.

I agree with all you said - I could have written it myself.

But I do suspect that, like myself, you are well-educated and probably from a stable home with parents that were good role models.

Someone whose home life was chaos probably wasn't lucky enough to been demonstrated those life skills.

It's sad, but I don't want to pay for people making totally avoidable bad decisions. I don't know the solution but whatever we can do to avoid kids being raised in chaotic home situations would help in the future.

Yes and no on my background. My immediate family can only be defined as white trash, which from a parental point of view I'd define as- simply do not care what happens to their kids. It was an oppressive patriarchy for sure, my dad was concerned with himself and not my mom or his kids. He came first, and that was the end of it. Very ignored, and tormented daily in my house physically and verbally by a sibling. Even facing violent confrontations into my 20s. I had to punch my brother to the floor at 25, who for essentially no reason started swinging at me, in front of our mom. It never ended, till I cut them all off in just the past couple years. Enough is enough once the same patterns continue into middle age, they're incapable of having any semblance of a normal relationship with me. I have repercussions and issues from that, someday I'll have to deal with. Till then I just carry the frustration and anger that I have inside for no easily identifiable reason.

My extended family, grandparents, cousins, etc, are mostly doctors, holding PHDs or otherwise very wealthy from successful businesses. I was motivated out of a sense of feeling unworthy, thanks to my narcissistic dad. For education I was marked as a genius in junior high, that fell apart at 13 though, just no guidance at all. College, I loaded up my stuff myself into a borrowed pickup truck, carried it into the dorm myself, organized my loans myself, organized classes and how to graduate myself. Worked 30 hours a week throughout to pay my bills. I never had help for anything. For someone my age to be raised in cloth diapers as I was, and growing up in a house with no air conditioning, gives you an idea on how it was. I'm a product of the 1930s, not 80s. Had they not had a Commodore they initially bought for taxes in the house, I would've been screwed like these other kids. I've also worked nonstop since 12 years of age. I'm tired, and not even that old today. I'm not complaining, others have it worse, just explaining that no, I'm not one of the well-connected, pampered white boys. It sounds odd, but I barely identify with being white as a social class. The way I see life is that we're born alone, and we die alone. It's just the way it really is, the rest is someone who loves you blowing smoke up your ass.

So for me, good genes, bad immediate family. Most of these poor folks have bad genes and a bad family. So I may have escaped, but I know what you mean with your comment. I will say I'm probably more sympathetic than you are, I will pay for others' mistakes. Due to my experiences, I probably have more legit, heartfelt sympathy for the underclass than these fly-by-night liberal types that do lots of virtue signaling on social media. It may be why I married a Mexican woman, she's very smart and being how I view life, she's my reason I don't just say ciao and put a bullet in my head. She brings some emotion out of me, I love her, and we were both tossed out. It's all good and easy when half your needs are handled for you by someone else. I'd settle to just have someone to talk to that cared about me (my wife fills that void, but I mean in my family otherwise). When times get tough and they're truly on their own, a lot of these people, who are weak, will be goosestepping or whatever is the next easiest grease they can walk on. We're seeing the rise of that already, for another class, who thinks they're forgotten.

To fix the home solution that you mention, I have a bit of experience there. I think the turn key easy fix is making parents criminally liable for their children until 21 or 25 years of age. They'll either pay attention like good parents and raise them right, or at least turn them in to mental health when they're building bombs or amassing an arsenal. It's what I came to, given my experiences and what I hear from my wife, who is a public school teacher.

Of course, that's not a real, holistic fix for a failed society like mine (USA). Most people are interested in quick solutions to problems (take the guns etc), and more parental responsibility should solve a lot of problems at once for a society that clearly isn't civilized and has a smorgasbord of issues to address. If you read this far, congrats.

I did read it all. Your background sounds far less privileged than mine. Good on you for overcoming that by choosing to make sensible decisions.

> but more so because they are cognitively lazy.

Do you have any data, studies, or real references as to why this is, or do you simply call them lazy to feel better about yourself?

You've clearly outlined a trend-are we really to believe that the poor are simply more cognitively lazy than every other population? That is why they are poor? Quite the claim.

It seemed that he was talking about himself or his own family. So I took that as an anecdote. I doubt he relishes bashing his own family but called it like he believes he sees it.

My stance is close to what you're getting at. I don't think they're purposefully lazy most of the time. Though I agree with the OP that some have to be, there's no way. I'm intellectually lazy oftentimes, why wouldn't a discouraged, down on their luck poor person be? Makes zero sense that they wouldn't.

Being paid less and less in my life, while others around me make more, has been extremely demotivating. I can't imagine how the life gets sucked out of people with lesser will-power than others have.

I think it's not a claim that some people simply can't be bothered to go to school and better themselves. They just don't care. It's either stemming from their psychological profile, childhood abuse, or other factors that took down their motivation and self-esteem. They're giving themselves what they deserve, in their mind, accepted their social status.

Many of us do it. I accepted that I'm "working class" long ago and strongly identify with it. Even forgoing clothing that is outside of my class status. I'm a sturdy rural guy that even though I live in one of the largest cities in the US, prefer my blue jeans and work shirts (old fashioned Scottish plaid button ups for a country boy like myself) with work boots (think a black pair of Doc Martens). So I can completely see how others adopt their possibly lower socio-economic status as well. I like mine, it's part of my identity and I'm comfortable in my own skin that way. Maybe they are too, even if it doesn't benefit them.

You being 17 when that happened helped a lot too. If the same happens when you are 40 or 45 getting out of the gutter would be nigh on impossible.

I agree with this. I was destitute when I was 18, but I managed to come back through a series of part time jobs. I've always lived within my means but since my job do not really pay much anyway, it's very hard to save.

Now that I'm 40 and poor again (lost my job due to cutbacks), it is impossible for me to recover. Getting new jobs are much harder and people are pretty discriminative towards my age. Nowadays, even employers choose younger people for part-time jobs, since I'm over the hill agewise and overqualified.

Why impossible? It's just a mindset. People do switch careers at >40 years, it's far from impossible.

The social pressure can be overwhelming, unless you're not super-super strong, mentally. We cannot assume the average person to be so strong.

Why is the social pressure overwhelming? Socially sometimes it seems that it's better to crawl into a cave and never be seen in your poverty, than be seen as a 40-45+ year old doing janitorial work (or other kinds of jobs most people find degrading, despite the fact that to your face they will deny it), by your friends and family. Also a lot of people can't accept the downturn in their lives. That's how you get alcoholism, depression, drug abuse. It's much harder to wake up and say: I've failed all these years, I need to start over.

If we go by anecdotes, I knew only two persons who switched careers at mid life successfully: one was a woman and the other a man and both had a spouse who brought decent money to the household and was supportive.

100% of society can't be brought out of poverty. Here's an example: If we motivated everyone to get a college education, we would have people flipping burgers who are college educated making min wage and living in poverty while struggling to put food on the table.

Why not? If you define poverty as being below the Xth percentile of wealth, then it is tautological that we cannot reach 100% non-poverty.

However, if you define poverty in absolute terms, then there is no fundamental reason why we cannot reach 100% non poverty. All that is necessary is for society to produce enough "stuff" that, when divided by the total population, is still greater than the poverty threshold.

In practice, the much harder problem is distributing that stuff such that everyone actually gets enough to put them beyond the poverty threshold. This is certainly a hard problem, but I don't see any reason to think that it is fundamentally unsolvable.

> Why not? If you define poverty as being below the Xth percentile of wealth, then it is tautological that we cannot reach 100% non-poverty.

This is indeed how it is defined in many wellfare states eg in Europe.

"People are considered at risk of monetary poverty when their equivalised disposable income (after social transfers) is below the at-risk-of-poverty threshold. This is set at 60 % of the national median equivalised disposable income after social transfers."

http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/...

There will always be poor people with this definition.

No. "60% of the national median" is not the same thing as fixing a percentile, and it is perfectly possible to not have poverty under that definition.

For example, in a country with ten people whose incomes are 7, 7, 8, 8, 10, 10, 12, 50, 47212 and 4000000000000000, there is no poverty after that definition (the median would be 10). As you can see, it doesn't even need to be a very egalitarian society!

"60% of the Median" can easily be a zero number of elements from the set.

In this case, median means "sorted by income, at which point have we divided the entire dataset in half". For a dataset with more than 2 elements (so 3 elements minimum), you can construct a dataset for which any below-100% of the median of the dataset is not represented in the dataset.

The easiest example would be using "99% of the median" and [9.999, 10, 11]. Median is 10, 99% of the median is 9.9, the smallest sample is 9.999.

60% of the median income basically means "the lowest 50% income bracket should not have more than 40% deviation". Or rather; the lowest possible income is bigger than 60% of the lowest earner of the top 50% of society.

There is also the issue that even if all of the money were split between everyone--some people would spend all of theirs and some would save theirs. Wealth is accumulated money, not income.

You're being too generous because you're only considering 1st worlders. 71% of the world's population lives on less than $10/day. If we're going to try to flatten out quality of life among everyone then impoverished Americans are going to take a lifestyle cut.

We're not going to have humans flipping burgers in a few years. A lot of these low-wage, low-skill jobs are finally on the brink of being automated. There will be new opportunities to replace them, as there always are. I'm pretty optimistic about the future of the economy - we have a huge number of skill-demanding fields that are growing, and many of them are facing real difficulty, which is exactly what creates demand.

How many people will be employed by the companies that replace all these low-wage low-skilled jobs? What will those formerly low-wage low-skilled laborers do after they are replaced? Buy a college education? Learn robotics?

As those jobs are automated, who will patronize those businesses? eg what fraction of McDonalds customers are high-income high-skill laborers vs lower-wage low-skill?

Few, study and get news jobs, maybe, maybe. There are always more jobs and opportunity for growth (even in a bad economy).

The companies will evolve or die as they always have if their customer base disappears.

I guess my questions boil down to this:

Human cognitive abilities follow a normal distribution. Some low-skilled laborers never had an opportunity to reach their potential, others lack the capacity to perform higher skill jobs... and some people are incapable of even "low-skill" labor.

Is automation maintaining or reducing the number of jobs for less capable people? Are we slowly raising the unemployable-threshold?

Those are good questions. Our challenge becomes ensuring that people are capable. How many of those displaced workers are less capable because of something intrinsic (some mental defect or insufficiency), and how many just need to be trained? I'm not sure if we'll ever reach a point where the "average" person is unemployable, but we can imagine a future where that is the case. But there's such little genetic variation within humanity that it seems likely that our education system could be made much more rigorous and suitable to ensure that everyone comes out of it at a very high level of capability.

But no matter how you slice it, pay is a function of supply and demand. Nothing more, nothing less. Burger flipping is low-wage because everyone is willing to do it, and people will undercut each other to secure that they get the job over someone else. The changing economy may make all jobs more difficult, but there will still be jobs that the masses gravitate to, and those jobs will remain low-wage as a result.

The malthusian argument. People outgrow their capacity to feed themselves.

Good thing it is not true at all, and has been debunked and ridiculed by economists over a century ago.

Debunked by economists who are the joke of the Nobel laureates. Even the Peace prize is more respectable. 100 years in human history? Nothing. The Roman Empire took half a millennium to decay.

The Malthusian argument is a thermodynamic argument. If we grow without bound (either by number or per capita consumption) we will run out of resources like any other biological system.

The only thing that allows us to escape this is human's unique ability to transcend our biological nature - i.e. breed responsibly (Gd I hate that) and consume less.

Mainstream economics is enamored with boundless growth, therefore, we're on a crash course.

Right, because food today is more expensive than food yesterday, since we are growing so much outside our means, we are clearly consuming all the natural resources and devouring each other for that last piece of corn.

Human behavior is not thermodynamics. To the very least, the day were all the resources in the universe have been consumed by its living beings is so far away that it is absolutely irrelevant and inapplicable to our society.

Malthusian economics are garbage.

Sorry, what's the point of the universe? We're bound to Earth by any rational understanding of physics and physiology.

"Right, because food today is more expensive than food yesterday" Love the sarcasm, not the shallow argument (I appreciate that food is, seemingly, cheaper than yesterday).

Human behavior is not thermodynamics. Agriculture is. Food is cheaper today because:

1) N2 fixation thanks to Dr. Haber 2) Large scale potash mining and shipping. 3) Unsustainable use of other necessary agricultural inputs

Point 1) is fairly stable in the medium term (i.e. my daughter's potential children's life span ~ next 100 years to 400 years) because energy is cheap and effectively getting cheaper. Population won't grow too fast as to run out of energy, if it did we're really f.ed, and global energy use has stabilized and might decline.

Point 2), however, is a nasty one. Run out of potash, then you run out of K and therefore food production above carrying capacity. You can turn to (say) oceans to mine K, but that's expensive.

I appreciate the econ argument that "you can't run out of resources because the price goes up until you don't want to use them" but that ultimately trash. You won't go hungry, because you might afford a doubling in price of your groceries. It's the Ethiopian kids whose lives balance everything out.

Point 3) Acquirers are running out so, for example, California's agricultural production is in peril.

See... thermo!

Are there alternatives that are more "sustainable"? Sure. But they all come with (an unknown to me) maximum carrying capacity.

As to human behavior not being modeled by thermo... that's irrelevant. People will shift preferences to eat lower quality, higher yield crops due to prices changes and all.

Of course those prices changes are (partly) due to... thermodynamics!

We could still give everyone guaranteed basic income for example and solve the problem that way. Not everyone needs to work to ensure as a society that everyone has a warm roof over their head and decently healthy food. It's just a matter of will.

That is not an example of anything - "We can't eliminate poverty! If we gave everyone a college education, some people would still be in poverty". There is no cause and effect.

Maybe the main crux is the definition of wealth. Flipping burgers and being college educated would be fine if one could still live a life that's measurably a fulfilling life.

Why is it necessary that burger flippers be poor?

The work they do is of low value because almost anybody can do it. Morally they may not deserve to be poor, but nobody is going to pay them a lot of money to perform that work.

That shows that pure free market solutions won’t fix it, but that seems pretty obvious already.

That's not true. Burger flippers aren't low paid because it is easy, thry are low paid because the supply of people willing to do the work is too high. If other, better opportunities become available for a large number of those employees, wages will go up.

Look at Walmart, they aren't raising wages out of the goodness of their hearts, they need to raise wages to keep good employees. (and probably a little PR and politics too)

Not everyone needs college, there are trade schools and the like that can help you get a better job.

Why can’t minimum wage be raised to provide a better standard of living?

Minimum wage only really encourages businesses to hire fewer people and train those fewer people to do more and be more productive, if not to raise prices. There are many small bookstores and mom-and-pop stores that are going to be closed when the minimum wage is raised because they literally can’t raise prices any more or hire fewer people.

That’s why in some other countries, instead of a minimum wage, which is the government forcing businesses to pay a certain wage, the government itself makes up the difference between the actual wage and a desired wage. So if the government decides that everyone should earn at least $15/h but the market price for flipping burgers is only $10/h, the government itself will provide the additional $5/h. This effectively raises the standard of living without pressuring businesses and also without the adverse effects like pushing up prices or creating more unemployment.

To some degree there will be cases like that, but that is not really what happens on a macro level though. In aggregate, there tends to be no statistical correlation between the minimum wage level and employment levels. Companies try to be efficient, so they try not to have any more or less people than they need (based mostly on demand). The desire to pay as few people to do as much work as possible always exists. Higher minimum wages may put some extra emphasis on this, but it's likely that the extra demand from consumers having more income balances this out.

What's your source for this? If there's no statistical correlation between the minimum wage and the unemployment rate (and I thought I had read otherwise) then I suspect the statistics aren't telling the whole story.

Your explanation of what's going on at the micro level contradicts my experience as a business owner who's been signing paychecks for many years. All businesses have inefficiencies, and in general the larger the check, the more scrutiny the expense will receive. Internally this manifests as having higher expectations for a higher paid employee, and prioritizing automation, offshoring, or other business decisions when labor costs get too high. Externally, when we expand our relationship with a client, we fully expect that it will receive more scrutiny from various stakeholders at the company simply because the check getting written to us is bigger, even if we deliver proportionately more value.

The government in the US already subsidizes businesses that can’t or won’t pay a living wage - with food stamps and such for their workers. Perhaps having government make up the difference in pay, as you say they do in other countries, would be better.

Yep

Keeping minimum wage low is $153B/year "corporate welfare" check.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/04/1...

> Minimum wage only really encourages

No, it also means those people are paid a liveable wage, as opposed to a pittance.

Depends on one's definition of "livable wage." Minimum wage and "decent standard of living" are often conflated but minimum wage was not imposed and has never been intended to provide that. It's always been a wage that was at or slightly above the federal poverty line.

The lowest minimum wage I remember hearing about as a kid was $1.50/hr. I thought that sounded like a lot of money at the time, but I probably was not even 10 years old.

That would have been in the first half of the 1970's when the federal poverty line was around $2,500. So working full time, you'd make $3,000 or about 120% of the poverty level.

Today, the federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour and the poverty level (2016) is $12,200. So still, a full-time minimum wage worker earns nearly 120% of the poverty level.

Source: Table 1, https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/income-p....

True, but minimum wage work typically isn't full-time. That link didn't work for me, but are those numbers inflation-adjusted?

You could call it corporate welfare. Or you could consider the 3 to 4% profit margins these companies have and assume that they might not sustain that number of employees at a higher wage.

This comment implies that these companies going out of business would be a bad thing. In the short term, definitely.

But jobs are just means to an end for most people. Why can't government aim to simply provide those ends?

The obvious counterargument is that the free market is more efficient. But the US government has shown itself to be very capable in providing some services to the entire country. The military has done a great job keep the country safe. There just doesn't seem to be the willpower to create the navy/army/airforce of food, shelter, healthcare and education.

I guess the issue is that it's hard to get elected if you promise to make things better 20 years from now.

Hilarious that you use the word "efficient" and then in the next sentence make the claim that the US military has done a great job at keeping the country safe. Yes, they do a good job. But the US military is one of the most bloated, over-funded organizations in human history.

I'd like to stretch some ideas for the sake of exploration. Curious to hear what you think:

I think you could interpret the US military's success despite "waste" to mean that a federal government can get away with a lot of inefficiency and still beat the "free market."

History already showed us what private military is like. I believe it's essentially feudalism and warlords. I.e. true poverty for 90% of the population. A powerful federal millitary that follows the laws of democratically elected officials gives people in the US historically unprecedented safety.

It's not clear to me why the federal government couldn't build a military-like organizations for addressing food, shelter, health care, and education.

The fundamental issue seems to be that the free market is the best means for deciding resource allocation towards those other goals. So why not simply implement UBI pegged to prices in LCOL areas?

It's not really success despite waste. It's one of the principal factor's bankrupting the nation. Apply that to other major issues as you listed and we are bankrupt even faster.

Because when you raise minimum wage, that means employers of the minimum wage earners need to push up their prices so that they're still making the same profits. (Actually, the same is not good enough, the profits need to exceed the previous years). The price of everything ends up inflating and minimum wage earners end up getting less for their money, despite having "more of it".

That would only be true if the goods minimum wage workers produce are being bought only by minimum wage workers. In reality the price also goes up for incomes above minimum wage so in a sense raising the minimum wage is a transfer of money from higher earners to lower earners.

In reality what happens, is those jobs go away (jobs like retail) and they are replaced with slightly higher paying jobs (like Amazon warehouse worker) except at a rate of about 1 new job for every 10 previous jobs.

Yes, but you're acting as if they're not better off. Minimum wage workers will be better of despite a slight increase in the price of goods.

Anytime you artificially set price floors and ceilings you have unintended consequences. Why put the burden on private businesses?

There is a better answer - keep the minimum wage where it is until it becomes meaningless because of inflation and increase the Earned Income Tax Credit and make it easier for employers to pass it on to workers each month. They already take out taxes, it shouldn't be hard to do the opposite.

The EITC has historically been supported by both Republican and Democratic presidents.

I've been watching a lot of Jordan Peterson lately, and your story sounds exactly like part a lecture he'd give. It's sad that you figured it out the hard way.

You were temporarily embarrassed and broke for a little while.

That isn't poverty.

You also need to take into consideration how incredibly lucky you were. "Pulling oneself up by one's bootstraps" is a myth and always has been.

You've heard the saying, give a man a fish, he eats for a day, teach a man to fish, he eats for a lifetime?

It's kind of like that. I coasted through most of my 20s, wasted a lot of time. I decided some years ago that I wanted to work as a dev, so I studied for a couple years and made it happen. But I have a large number of friends from early 20s to 40 (many of whom come from middle or upper-middle class families) that are perfectly happy coasting through life - they work in restaurants, bike shops, strip clubs, or take bouts of unemployment while on food stamps, etc. These are the urban equivalent of the trope of coal miners that refuse to learn new skills. Why are they like this? Because they are comfortable. You can live and be perfectly happily in a major city on 25k/year, living with roommates and on/off government assistance (though you'll never save money or advance). I'd raise the minimum wage significantly to help battle some of this (food stamps or housing assistance for people that work is corporate welfare in my eyes). But much change must come from within, and we have to find a way to motivate people.

So yes, help the poor - by providing education, healthcare, and time and opportunity to learn new skills when they are unemployed. But everything should be designed to encourage people to learn and contribute productively to society. No, it's not easy to make money, no, it's REALLY not easy to become comfortable, and yes, it's really, really difficult to become wealthy for 99% of people. But it's everyone's responsibility to try to contribute to society and we owe it to ourselves to strive for more.

"I think comments like these are more likely propaganda than real experiences."

You would be incorrect. I'm right here, a real person, with real experiences.

"You read the parent comment and think the poor and just lazy and all your have to do is work yourself a slave and suck corporate dick."

I assume your trying to say "the poor `are` just lazy" and that wasn't what I said or was trying to say.

To the contrary, I think it's much harder to dig yourself out of a hole once your in it. In my case, during that period, I went from working in a high-rise to applying at Jack-in-the-Box because it was the only thing within walking distance and I couldn't even get that job.

I for one got lucky and found some opportunity, but that wasn't my point. My point was that, for me, hitting rock bottom, having a minimal safety net (i.e. not sleeping outdoors), was just enough for me to change my life perspective.

If you want to talk about your experiences or opinions, go for it, but don't dismiss mine as "propaganda".

I'm not so sure, it is just that this is HN and that is the one place you will find people for which the "American Dream" did actually work or it is actually looking good.

Survival bias is always going to be strong here.

This is why I hate the movie "The Pursuit of Happyness"[0] with a passion. Really hate it.

[0]: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0454921/

Really? I know lots of people that work hard and are doing pretty good. Not rich, but doing ok.

I also know people who are doing poorly and a good deal of them (not all!) are that way through poor choices (and would admit it).

Of course I also know people who are doing poorly through no fault of their (poor health, caretaker burden, etc). For those folks I'm glad we social programs to help them.

> I think comments like these are more likely propaganda than real experiences.

That's a pretty bad thing to say without knowing for sure.

How is America statistically worse than before? Compared to when?

Compared to a time when minimum wage provided a decent standard of living.

It never really did, nor was it ever intended to do that. It's always been a wage that was at or slightly above the federal poverty line.

The lowest minimum wage I remember hearing about as a kid was $1.50/hr. I thought that sounded like a lot of money at the time, but I probably was not even 10 years old.

That would have been in the first half of the 1970's when the federal poverty line was around $2,500. So working full time, you'd make $3,000 or about 120% of the poverty level.

Today, the federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour and the poverty level (2016) is $12,200. So still, a full-time minimum wage worker earns nearly 120% of the poverty level.

Source: Table 1, https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/income-p...

> I think comments like these are more likely propaganda than real experiences.

So you are calling redm a liar. Do you have anything to back up that accusation? Or are you calling them a liar purely because it suits your poorly-constructed narrative?

> When we all know statistically America is worse than ever before.

"We all know..." is false. What you mean is probably more along the lines of "This is what I think, without having done any research to support my wild claim."

> You read the parent comment and think the poor and just lazy

Where did the GP call the poor lazy?

> and all your have to do is work yourself a slave and suck corporate dick.

See above.

> Nope, it's always the corporate stooge.

Why are you accusing redm of being a 'corporate stooge'?

We've been helping the poor for a long long time and we still have them. Either we are doing the wrong things (though we keep doing them, and asking for more of the same) or it's evidence that kind of help actually incentivizes what it's ostensibly trying to eradicate.

You're leaving out the option where the market is changing and requiring more education from people at the bottom.

On the flip side, I have never experienced poverty, and don't have the motivation of "looking into oblivion" to push me into another dead-end job.

But does that mean I deserve that experience? Should I be put in a situation where I have to fight to survive? I think that is unreasonable.

There exist better motivations. I am capable of work that is much more attractive to me than entry-level labor jobs. The idea that I am less valuable as a person because I am dependent; or that I ought to be compelled by my social situation to do stressful unfulfilling work does not sit well with me. That is where I strongly disagree with Sen. Hatch.

We are capable as a society of helping more than the most destitute. We should promote individual liberty, so that people can do work they are passionate about. I don't believe that those living on welfare should be compelled to do work that they have no desire to do. We should instead work to provide them opportunity and counsel so that they can find their passion and follow it.

Taxation is theft, but the current Republican party (including Sen. Hatch) has used that as an excuse to push an agenda that works against those who are barely getting by, while working for those who have inherited obscene amounts of wealth. That, in my opinion, is worse than the theft itself.

> Taxation is theft, but the current Republican party (including Sen. Hatch) has used that as an excuse to push an agenda that works against those who are barely getting by, while working for those who have inherited obscene amounts of wealth. That, in my opinion, is worse than the theft itself.

I don't understand how you can hold this view in light of what you said before that paragraph. How do you suppose we come up with creative solutions to social problems, and of helping the destitute and others, without any wealth or income? Our taxes are what fund those programs.

I'm not sure you understood me clearly.

I believe taxation is theft, but that that fact is no excuse for allocating spending of tax dollars unwisely.

What the Republican Party, and many Libertarians seem to think is that because taxation is theft, anything that depends on taxation is immoral, and therefore taxes are free to be allocated immorally. That conclusion is fallacious, absurd, and malicious.

You can disagree with me on the fine point of taxes being immoral in the first place, but that is precisely not my point.

> I believe taxation is theft, but that that fact is no excuse for allocating spending of tax dollars unwisely.

So your position is: Oh its stealing money, but lets spend the stolen money better?

> What the Republican Party, and many Libertarians seem to think is that because taxation is theft, anything that depends on taxation is immoral, and therefore taxes are free to be allocated immorally. That conclusion is fallacious, absurd, and malicious.

No they don't. Its a talking point that they've conveniently latched on to since you need to have a reason for doing the terrible things that they do without admitting it explicitly. I'll give them credit for exploiting the worst parts of individualism in the US to convince many (seemingly you included) of the "evil of taxation and government". But it is not an ideology that they believe in. Nor, I will point out, are any of their solutions backed by any kind of experience or evidence.

> So your position is: Oh its stealing money, but lets spend the stolen money better?

So your position is: If I find the source (taxation) to be unethical, I am not allowed to have any opinion on spending?

My point is that that is absurd.

> But it is not an ideology that they believe in

That is my point: It's a vain representation of ideology that is used as an excuse. You don't need to fight the ideology itself to understand that.

Rather than freaking out every time you read the phase "taxation is theft", maybe you could actually read what I am saying, and understand that we are in violent agreement on every other point.