I bought a 7 yr old $8000 dollar car, that's still going strong 12 years later, if I'd bought a $40000 car, could I expect it to last 512= 60 years? And that's being generous and assuming a linear relationship. If we use the example from the book, spending 5 times as much should give me a car that lasts up to 10 times* as long, so 120 years!
These are people who definitely could not get together the $8,000 for a 7 year old car in good condition, or get a loan at all besides a Payday one. They live paycheck to paycheck.
The question is not just a quantitative one of the car cost, depreciation, years of use. It’s a qualitative one, as in quality of life. A poor person who can only afford to take the bus loses time sitting on a bus instead of grocery shopping, taking care of their kids, etc. and needs to exert mental energy to plan their day around bus rides and schedules. They generally “pay” in numerous ways besides the pure value of the vehicle vs. some other more expensive vehicle. Above all, they pay in mental bandwidth. They spend most of their mental energy worrying, planning, and stressing about being poor. That distinction can help clarify this argument a lot, and that old boot example doesn’t capture that.
Or medical costs because your low-paying job offers minimal health insurance.
Or extra costs because the government system designed to help those with low income is crushed under the weight of COVID, so your benefits take months longer to arrange and arrive (something a friend of mine is battling right now).
I also thought it was a bit funny that the parent poster cited an $8k purchase in a discussion about poverty. But either you're being a bit disingenuous yourself here or else you are similarly out of touch. Since you should know one can get a well-functioning used car for a lot less than that.
Also in many countries, people take public transit at all income brackets. I've done it in the US for long periods myself. Personally I find it less stressful than driving in traffic.
Certainly. It is well-documented that the supermarket chains that pop up in economically disadvantaged parts of the USA while established supermarkets pull out, are actually more expensive. While the package on the shelf might seem the same price as in a more mainstream supermarket, it in fact holds less contents.
They are often just the same packages at higher prices, the more “upscale” supermarkets can make up for the lower margin on goods both stores sell with higher margin goods that wealthier clientele will buy alongside core goods (things like in-store cut deli meats and cheeses, high-end alcoholic beverages, gourmet cheeses, in-store kitchen prepared ready-to-eat food, etc. When both kinds of stores exist within a radius where they compete with customers—the wealthier being more mobile—they use this fact in marketing, too, because this also let's them win same-good price comparisons.
My Mephistos are excellent shoes, which I wore constantly around the world. Not so much as a stitch is out of place. When the soles wear out, they can be repaired.
Going on four years now, my father had a pair for two decades. If I were wearing sneakers from Payless, I'd be a few pairs in by now, no question about it.
That particular brand is a bit on the luxury side of the tradeoff spectrum, but it remains the case that you can spend a couple hundred on lifetime shoes, or fifty bucks on shoes for a season.
A lot of things are like this. Cars aren't one of them.
A $20 shovel is going to be more durable than a $1 shovel. A $15000 solid gold shovel is not going to be, as you arent paying for durability anymore.
It doesn’t have to be a durable good, it can be a service.
I live in NYC. A monthly unlimited subway pass is 120 dollars. If you can’t afford that lump sum all at one, you can 2.75 pay per trip. If you use the subway 2 times a day (to and from work) for 30 days, that’s 165 dollars... more than the upfront of an unlimited pass.
They lend you $120, and ask for slightly less than $165 back - let's say $145. So you save up the money you normally would have spent on tickets daily and at the end of the month, you pay back the $145, and you have saved yourself $20, while the lender made a return on investment of about 20% (a very respectable amount, given it's unsecured).
For taking on the risk of an unsecured lender, they get a very high interest rate - ~20% a month! That's almost illegal!
That’s why merchant credit card fees are painful for small shops. Ie 3% + 35 cents isn’t so much until your average ticket size is $5 and all of the sudden 10% of your revenue is going to intermediary.
There’s fixed cost associated with moving cash around so that 20% return is likely negative under current infrastructure.
What you do get though is freedom from thinking about the cost of rides, which is pretty great.
But that step is a hell of a lot lower down the price ladder than your "stereotypical average yuppie" with their 4Runner full of Whole Foods groceries they're gonna mix in their Kitchenaid says it is.
It's not true of food.
It's not really true of shelter except maybe rent vs buy.
It's not true of cars, health insurance, or entertainment.
with shelter think about having to live farther from the business district spending more money on a longer bus to get to work.
cars i buy a junker cause that's all i can afford it breaks, i spend more money to fix it all because i couldn't afford the extra 1000 to buy a slightly more reliable car.
....
The point of this story is to let the upper middle class feel smug about driving 4Runner instead of SantaFes and wearing Levis instead of Walmart jeans. It's saying that consuming "nice" things is right and justified by the numbers. The "the rich get richer, the poor get poorer" theme is just a sideshow for plausible deniability. The upper middle class love the quote because it's telling them they're doing it right. The fact that it may confirm their biases is tangential.
As a very real example, my family was not very well off growing up. My parents could typically only afford used Chrysler cars. The result was invariably getting stuck with vehicles that quite frankly were at least as expensive as the competition after repair costs and extra insurance.
And, speaking as someone who thankfully doesn't have to worry nearly as much about such things thanks to the sacrifices my parents made...
The DIFFERENCE in quality of life changes too. Its not just the cost of buying the cheap stuff every time, it is also that frustration of watching it break over and over.
Also, dare I say. One of the biggest silent accelerators of our class divide (financially) is this dilemma.
In the 40s-60s stuff was built to last. Lower income families could save and buy an expensive appliance but know it would last or at least be repairable. A fridge was a real investment. A set of silverware had the extra couple mm of thickness or even a square handle so it wouldn't bend at the first sign of trouble.
Now? Its all disposable, so those who have money to keep up with planned obsolescence will pull ahead. Consumers save 5-10$ on a 100$ tool, but now it lasts 3-5 years instead of 30-50
> In the 40s-60s stuff was built to last.
On the surface, I assign this to nostalgia and maybe survival bias;
Automobiles alone provide an example where, in the the 80s, Japanese manufacturers began dumping automobiles in the the U.S. market (and making cheap quality products in the U.S. in the 90s) where the base model could last 2-3x as many miles as the prior domestics (GM, Chryslers).
I also make this statement with a 25 year old refrigerator, washer, and dryer) and a 16 year old luxury import automobile with 180k miles on the original clutch (that I bought used) and have spent very little on preventative maintenance on.
*Side anecdote on cars and unwise subscription to brand loyalty. A 1989 Mazda (made in Japan) that I bought used in 2005, had more security (key encoding, immobilizer) features than two friend's 10+ year newer Chryslers that were stolen in ~2010
In fact, you can save so much energy that at least one utility I've had over the years has a program to pay people to replace appliances, because it turns out that's cheaper than new power generation and transmission.
There's some aspect of truth to it in some industries (though not cars, as you say). Kind of. So a washing machine that you buy now probably won't last as long as a washing machine that you bought in 1980 (though it will be cheaper to run). The catch is that the purchase price is, in real terms, _much_ lower. And you can actually buy washing machines that last a long time today, but most people simply aren't willing to spend thousands on one.
The modern machine costs a few hundred euro and if the drum goes, well, that's the end, buy another one. You can get one with a replaceable drum for maybe 1500 euro, but you're probably not going to, realistically.
i don't believe that. A company selling washing machines have incentive to make one that breaks _just_ after the warranty expires, so as to enable more sales. It can't be both true that the consumer saves money, and the company maximizing profit. One of the have to suffer - and it's usually the consumer.
It's not rocket science; to make a reliable maintainable washing machine, you need to make one where all important parts are feasibly replaceable. In particular, if a machine has replaceable drum bearings, that's a good sign.
A 1989 Mazda is old enough to not have anything worth stealing (ie. airbags) and with few cars still running no one has bothered to even try and crack the immobilizer. Your friends' late model Chryslers probably have $3000-$6000 worth of airbags alone.
When brand is meaningless what other signals will consumers use to filter? Will we all need test machinery to vet every purchase?
Buying a car, you can try to shop by brand but surveys by Edmunds and Consumer Reports have the car companies trading places frequently year over year. Even perennial favorites Lexus and Toyota have model/year combinations that perform worse than other brands.
I'm not even sure that drop-shippers are hocking lower quality items. The items are so similar to name brand kit that I'm pretty sure they're using the same supply chains to source a lot of that stuff.
It’s just basic mathematics: when reliability depends on hundreds of parts, their individual failure rates are amplified. You need either extremely tight tolerances (today), or design with so much excess that it raises mean time to failure far beyond your intended minimum.
https://www.amazon.com/Unheavenly-City-Nature-Future-Crisis/...
Search them for future and time and you'll hit upon the main thesis quickly, eg:
Banfield carefully defined class membership, not in terms of income status,
such as government statistical poverty levels, but in terms of orientation toward the future, or time preference.
If that's the case, I disagree strongly. It seems like a post-hoc conclusion; if you are wealthy, you can afford to plan for the long term; if you are poor, often you can only orient your behavior towards immediate needs and survival. Poor people know that its better to save for a house than pay rent to a landlord - they're not stupid. But your kid has a cavity that need filling, the rent you are paying is due, and god help you if you have an unexpected expense like your car breaks down.
Does the author account for decades of wage suppression that prevents all from sharing in the nation's wealth? The systematic erosion of labor rights? The (I'm assuming the author's American) carceral state that makes people unhireable and takes away some of their most productive years for earning and saving? In the case of the Black community, does he account for the generational effects of centuries of stolen labor? The list goes on.
Poverty is a cycle[1] and is worthy of serious study and consideration. Paternalistic victim blaming has no place. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cycle_of_poverty
These days I'd say the highest quality cars are definitely not the most expensive. At least in the US where it seems like the biggest luxury brands require the most maintenance and depreciate the fastest. If you want to lose the least money by depreciation, buy an unimpressive used toyota.
For that matter I can't really think of anywhere significant that the little parable applies. The way to get rich is to spend like you're poor, and save your income.
Part of me also thinks that this Nostalgia is related to maintenance ideology.
Ie, it's not that Washers, Dryers, TVs, Cars never went bad, but they had repairable parts and were worth the money to have repaired.
This is not unrelated to ongoing maintenance at a house; Derelict houses (and popular poverty highlight - hookworm related Septic maintenance) are maintenance items that still need to be done; having these maintained creates jobs; but are derelict.
As someone who used to flip $200-$2k cars and still drives those kind of cars I feel very, very comfortable saying that the difference between a Carvan and a Sienna is more or less "pay as you go" vs "lump sum up front". The difference is that the guy with the Sienna never says anything bad about it because they have all this up front money tied up in it and would feel stupid bad mouthing it.
I think this well intentioned advice can actually act as a hindrance to escaping poverty. If you spend a ton of your time walking through the grocery story saving a couple bucks buying cheaper eggs you really lost a lot of your potential earns in that time you spent. Because this is a behavior you will repeat and repeat and the accumulation of this time is a net minus on what you could have saved if you spent that time learning a valuable skill. I think that's why any major uptick in peoples wealth is usually (not always) correlated by education. Places with smarter people tend to have more money because smart people generally speaking know how to create value.
For example, if you notice that X is equivalent to Y and costs less, it may take some time to notice, but afterwards buying Y is just as simple as buying X, once you develop the new habit. Or if there are two shops in the same distance, and you spend some time researching which one sells more cheaply the stuff you usually buy. (Or a more distant shop, that is so much cheaper that you can afford to pay for having the stuff delivered to your home, and still save money.)
Are those a good buy? If you do a lot of hiking, yes. (Though they're big and heavy so I only wear them for some things.) In any case, they may be at best 10x of the cheapest pair of boots you can buy at Walmart, which are incredibly cheap footwear historically.
But then there were LeBron Nikes made in China with cheap labor and sold for $225. Those were the kind of shoes poor people bought using their credit cards.
While a generalisation it is true that some economically disadvantaged spend a lot on 'luxuries' like shoes or cars. Often this is for social signally and sometimes because it's a luxury they can afford now vs those which appear completely unattainable forever.
Some rich people too spend extravagantly beyond their means. It's just less obvious since they aren't obviously hurting for money on other ways.
The cars that lined the other side of the street were uniformly nice. Every time I remarked about that, my roommates would dump on the working poor for buying showy cars they couldn't afford.
They never once considered that the street was used as free overflow parking by university employees, which even cursory observation showed to be the case.
So yes, "they buy nice cars they can't afford" is a mean cliche, even if I'm sure you can find some case of it being true.
https://local.theonion.com/troubled-teens-mock-social-worker...
A lot of people on HN are from Upper-Middle-class backgrounds and it's funny how the same just-so stories and excuses come up when discussing the poor. The idea that poor folk are going to use their UBI to buy the 24 pack of eggs instead of the 12 pack, or the leather boots instead of the faux-leather boots, and spend the long-term savings towards a Coursera subscription just isn't realistic, howsoever common.
"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 the 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."