It took a long time to get out of that, and material problems were an issue for sure, but I would say the biggest obstacle for me was that I had no rolemodel and was forced to discover everything on my own. In retrospect I had plenty of opportunities to get out of my situation way earlier and I could have done a lot of things better, and it was pretty common sense to most normal/functioning people - but I didn't have a lot of those arround me.
And that wouldn't change if you gave my parents money - after my grandparents died my mother inherited some land and a house, in a year she managed to squander it away with terrible spending decisions and no long term planning (coupled with the sense of entitlement and expectation that things will just work out).
I also never viewed school as something relevant, teachers were hardly authoritative figures (from my perspective their job was to babysit me and they were poorly paid - why would I accept them as authority on anything).
So I don't think it's something you can solve with money alone, having functional parents is always going to set you up to do better in life.
Reading your comment nearly made me cry, because it (strikingly) reminded me of my own story. You are not alone.
Keep your head up (as you seem to always have done), and if you can, make peace with the past and your parents. This took me a LOT of time, but it helped me.
Thank you for sharing your story.
I was harsh on my parents in that post, they were dysfunctional but my mother loved all of us in her own way and spent her whole life arround us, and I can't say a lot of good things about my father - dealing with my mother in those days would break anyone.
I'm on good terms with them now and they are in a better place now that we're grown up and independent.
Hard to optimise through political solutions, unfortunately. Just handing out money probably won't help so much, like you observed. Generous parental leave rules might be useful.
I grew up in similar circumstances, and it still affects my mindset. It's changing, but slowly.
It helps a lot to read others' stories.
"Scarcity: Why having too little means so much" is a great book on this.
In essence it is not that people in poverty have less innate executive control / cognitive capacity, but that the situation of poverty causes anyone to lose some significant points of executive control / cognitive capacity.
There are some illuminating (but terryfing) experiments in the book, where they show you can literally sabotage a low income persons score on an IQ test by mentioning a hypothetical car repair of 2000 dollars before they take it.
Imagine two rooms, each with a caged bear. The bear is not happy being in a cage. A rich man, and a poor man, are ushered into their respective rooms, and told that the lock on the cage isn't all that reliable.
I'd wager that they'd both suffer roughly equally on a provided IQ test.
If you can't afford it, that car repair is an existential threat.
You don't get that car fixed, you don't get to work, you lose your job, and then everything else that goes with that. Not to mention figuring out what you're going to do while your car is in the shop. Maybe you skimp on the repair, just do what you need to get it running again, and hope it doesn't turn into a bigger problem down the road.
If you can afford it, it's an inconvenience.
You drop your car off with the mechanic, get a rental or just Uber it to work, and pick up your car when it's ready. You'll pay to fix things properly, of course, because you can.
I think it's not scarcity itself, but constantly living under existential fear that causes so many problems.
Correct: it's not money per-se, it's about desperately needing money in a society where money are crucial for survival.
Often economists make the mistake of equating poverty == no money.
Instead, not all economies are money-driven.
Modern humans have existed for something like 100,000 years give or take a few tens of thousands, and yet we only started building anything particularly innovative in the last ~10,000 or so. So we spent 90% of our species' history doing very little in the way of cognitively challenging innovation.
I wonder if this might not be the reason. Some have observed that hunter-gatherers often had better nutrition and were healthier than at least early civilized humans, but maybe they also lived under a perpetual cloud of fear about the next famine, raid, or plague. Maybe that basically shut down their capacity for higher cognition. Maybe they didn't have any time to sit down and think and do so free of concern about the future.
In my limited experience with these people, they are absolutely capable of higher cognition, including planning into the distant future.
So, what to do if you are conservative politician and want more voters? Do you try to make poor people better or worse off given these two data points (whose scientific validity I am not able to judge, but I have to admit, they do seem to make sense)?
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01602...
These days I‘m studying physics and mathematics while having a cushy engineering job and I‘m so genuinely happy that I can sit down and study for hours without having to worry about making ends meet at the end of the month. It’s a blessing.
I’m thinking of the story “The Chinese Farmer” as told by Alan Watts.
-People who wait with having children till their situation stabilizes are now subsidizing those who don't. I think this is simply immoral and will result in more productive/responible/better educated people having even fewer children.
-the money goes to often dysfunctional parents and is spent on pointless consumption and alcohol. It's not a meme that if you want to see a lot expensive brand clothes or shoes you just need to visit a poor part of the town (I live in a very homogeneous country so no race/religion/culture undertones there).
I would much prefer the money to be spent on infrastructure making life better for the kids. Making sure children can get quality food, educational materials, help from social workers, can spend quality time outside of their dysfunctional homes and maybe get exposed to different ways life could be would be in my view way more helpful.
Making sure preschool children have their needs met is a more difficult problem. Still I think giving people free access to quality nutrition, clothes, medical care, toys etc would be a better way.
Sure there is a % of people who w can manage money and prioritize their children but those people would do well anyway if the money came as free stuff you can get for your children instead of buying it yourself.
Since (very modest for western standard) ubi like program was introduced we have seen huge raise in tourism and alcohol consumption. The numbers are there. It's just people who end up in bottom % economically are usually very bad with money and decision making.
I guess we can live with that one we can afford ubi for everyone but for now the priorities should be about giving children of shitty parents a fair shot at life. Good unfortunate parents will be able to use other programs as well.
It is much easier for me to be functional and caring parent when I am happy and content. It gets harder when the period is stressful. I would be failing at that way more if I had one of those real big problems.
Do you think your parents being in poverty (if they were) or a similar situation made it as difficult for them as it was for you? It seems to be an obviously vicious cycle that is difficult to break without education and opportunity for people in these situations.
Emphasis mine. Pretty unambiguous that it says money is necessary but not sufficient. This is on you for misreading it.
Much worse problems. When I see people in the US advocating semi-socialist policies, I wince.
PS I grew up in Bulgaria. I live in the US since 2007.
The Nordics are not nearly as socialist as you might think. [1]
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Socialism-Sucks-Economists-Through-Un...
In the general case, I think a lot of the items you listed are good ideas.
The devil is in the details, as always.
• 5 Things Nobody Tells You About Being Poor, May 27, 2011: (https://www.cracked.com/blog/5-things-nobody-tells-you-about...)
• The 5 Stupidest Habits You Develop Growing Up Poor, January 19, 2012: (https://www.cracked.com/blog/4-things-politicians-will-never...)
• 4 Things Politicians Will Never Understand About Poor People, February 21, 2013: (https://www.cracked.com/blog/4-things-politicians-will-never...)
The 5 Stupidest Habits You Develop Growing Up Poor:
* (https://www.cracked.com/blog/the-5-stupidest-habits-you-deve...)
This is absolutely true!
> This is largely because families in poverty tend to also abuse their kids at higher rates (this includes mental abuse) or at least foster an extremely unhealthy environment due to the stress it causes.
This could be true with some families, but most parents try at least not to go below the financial level they are at. I remember my parent use to get all jittery even at a slight stress on the finances fearing that they will not be able to sustain. They had prioritised education, food, clothing in that order. Unfortunately, after education and food nothing was left! I remember wearing same set of clothes for almost a decade. Even now, even though I can afford to spend, I got into that habbit of wearing same clothes most of the time. I still use clothes that are almost 10 years old! I remember we(I and my friends, they too were from the same financial status) use to wear same worn-out/torn school uniforms by doing something called "rafoo". That made us kids understand value of money and the determination to get out of the situation as soon as possible. The problem we faced was lack of information and support network. We had to build it ourselves from scratch, most of the time stumbling. It also dents the confidence as you don't know how long it is going to take to achieve your goals, if at all it can be acheived!
Source?
https://stateofopportunity.michiganradio.org/post/poorest-ch... And this https://www.nber.org/digest/jan00/poverty-and-mistreatment-c...
Also, not to make excuses but I think in the mental abuse case people don't always know they are doing it. They do what their parents did or learned from those around them who also didn't know what they were doing.
Imo forget being "rich", just growing up in a relatively sane environment is an advantage.