Currently I'm in a Ph.D. program in a field I find extremely interesting, and am quite happy with my position relative to my goals and background. A few years ago, however, I was living in a one room apartment above an auto body shop, sharing a kitchen and bathroom with several tenants in various stages of socioeconomic distress (viz. social service dependence, street-level prostitution, drug addiction, &c.). My life was generally unpleasant. I was working as a day labourer in construction and drove my four hour daily commute in perpetual terror of being pulled over while driving on a suspended license (for failing to pay an old ticket that was sent to the wrong address). My "roommates" repeatedly stole my food and occasionally broke into my room to steal loose cash. I had no health insurance. When I bit the bullet and drove myself to the ER after receiving an inguinal hernia on the job (while carrying literal tons of demo debris down three flights of stairs in a Baltimore rowhouse in July), I was stuck with an 800 dollar medical bill that plagues my credit to this day. When my parked car was struck in a drug-related accident (remember I didn't live in the best part of town), the city ran my plates and booted my car, soon after which it was towed and I had to find another job. My life was brimming with problems, the solution to any which required money that I didn't have. Moreover, the concurrence of all of these problems seemed to frustrate action on any one of them: how do I work if I don't have a car? How do I recover and fix my car if I don't have any money? How do I find work if I can't lift heavy objects without aggravating the hernia? How do I treat the hernia without health insurance, which I don't have even if I had a job? I am not relating all of this in order to garner sympathy, but rather to explain the kinds of problems I encountered, and their apparent magnitude relative to my means then.

One aspect of poverty which is probably less salient to those not acquainted with it is that it alters parts of your personality that you previously considered stable. While I had always considered myself a relatively even and temperate guy, friends who saw me then would tell me that I seemed constantly angry and brooding. Things that I could have taken in stride before were usually occasions for despair.

Even my tastes changed. Whereas I had previously considered soda and individually wrapped danishes disgusting, I found I could hardly help myself in 7-11s on my way home from construction sites. I used to enjoy cooking, but could barely manage to throw a can of beans a 25 cent box of mac and artificial cheese when I got home. (I shopped at a discount off-brand grocery store full of security cameras, screaming children and expired fruit.)

There is a famous quote from Orwell's _Road to Wigan Pier_ which I had never understood until that point in my life:

"The basis of their diet, therefore, is white bread and margarine, corned beef, sugared tea and potatoes -- an appalling diet. Would it not be better if they spent more money on wholesome things like oranges and wholemeal bread or if they even, like the writer of the letter to the New Statesman, saved on fuel and ate their carrots raw? Yes, it would, but the point is that no ordinary human being is ever going to do such a thing. The ordinary human being would sooner starve than live on brown bread and raw carrots. And the peculiar evil is this, that the less money you have, the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food. A millionaire may enjoy breakfasting off orange juice and Ryvita biscuits; an unemployed man doesn't.… When you are unemployed … you don't want to eat dull wholesome food. You want something a little bit "tasty." There is always some cheaply pleasant thing to tempt you."

This is just about one of the most accurate and robust observations you can make about the psychology of poverty.

So that's why I'm no longer terribly impressed about the exhortations of the rich to "knuckle down and work really hard" in order to bootstrap oneself into economic security and material comfort. My situation wasn't nearly as destitute as that of a lot of people in this country alone, and when I came home from work I wanted--very badly--to blow money I didn't have on cheap comforts and postpone thoughts of tomorrow.

Secondly, it's important to acknowledge that even while living with junkies and hauling debris for $10/hr, I was much better off than many in my situation, for reasons that make me much less impressed with riches to rags to riches stories such as you describe. Let me explain.

When I first began applying for construction jobs, I was objectively under-qualified in comparison to almost any other applicant, of which there were many since construction jobs were becoming scarce around 2008. I remember one interview where I flatly failed the ``technical portion" and had over-estimated my competence to boot, demonstrating that I didn't even know what I didn't know. I was nevertheless hired because I "talked educated" (verbatim quote, I swear to god), which I assume meant either that I was white, or didn't come from the working class backgrounds of south Baltimore of the other applicants. About three months after my first day labor gig (which I only found because I had internet access and at-the-time reliable private transportation), I was running a crew under my boss. I was offered this not because I was an objectively knowledgeable and competent carpenter, but because 1) I had learned serviceable Spanish in an enrichment program as a kid, and 2) the college-educated owner felt that I was "more like him" than the Salvadoran guys who actually knew what they were doing.

I was also able to pull in some lucrative (to me) side gigs tutoring math and Latin in-home (again, internet and car), which ultimately allowed me to get out of construction and start teaching rich kids full time. That obviously would not ever have happened if I were a day labourer from west Baltimore, rather than a middle-class kid from the county who happened to be very down on his luck.

The differences that separated me from the people I met during that period were vast. If I had found myself in those circumstances without the advantages of white skin, middle-class education and secret-handshakes, and freedom from further complications like care-giving responsibilities (as you somehow manage to mention and dismiss the significance of), I'm not sure that things would have turned out the same way. Really, I'm not so sure that things were guaranteed to turn out the way they did for me at all.

So, calories, or not enough of them. Cooked food has more net calories than uncooked food. It's probably the same reason that, nowadays, poor people like to watch TV: it shuts your brain (20-30% of your metabolism) down harder than falling asleep. It's a decision that doesn't make any sense until you think of it calorically.

As for entertainment, the more wealthy enjoying turning off their brains as well. But they spend money on going to live performances at playhouses or symphonies. TV is comparatively cheap. Also with TV, you have more immediate choices (especially with something like Netflix): to watch more cerebral material or dumbed-down garbage.

Also, you have to factor in how much it costs in terms of time to prepare a meal from fresh, more-or-less whole ingredients compared to throwing something prepared into the microwave or onto the stove. If you have the time to cook after your job, wouldn't you be tempted to get a second job instead of cooking, if only to make your constant, grinding debt go away faster?

Then you get into 'cultural poverty', where someone flatly doesn't know how to cook because their parents never cooked and only ate at cheap restaurants (which isn't cheap) and used prepared food. You might say 'oh, just get a cookbook', but I know first-hand how much implied knowledge you have to have to get much out of a cookbook. Implied knowledge has to come from somewhere; if you didn't get it from your parents, you likely don't have it.

I think that the answer is a combination of bad memes and human nature. I ask almost every auto-rickshaw driver whose vehicle I sit in about their income and how do they live. I then listen to them and offer them suggestions that might help them out. It turns out that things just aren't that simple.

From the article;

>>> Indeed, they may well be more driven by ideas, simply because they have less information about the world outside and, therefore, feel a greater need to use their collective imagination to fill the gaps in their knowledge <<<

It's crucial to understand that these people haven't seen any examples to the contrary. They just don't have access to them. They live in societies that are highly stratified and tend to learn, quickly, to obey the hierarchy when it comes to outsiders, because if they "step out of bounds" the consequences can be ugly. So, they simply don't have access to people with good memes, and their minds are shaped by that narrow microcosm. Neither do they have the means to understand how to attain something better, because for them that's the only existence they know and it is what it is.

This might be maddeningly annoying for you and me, but think about how your upbringing and the social circles you run in have shaped you to thrive in your environment. How can someone use those metrics and ideas to eke out success in the hierarchy of a remote african tribe? (I'm talking about concrete, implementable ideas not abstract ones)Well, you say that you'll learn them, but if no one is around and you don't have the means to teach yourself said memes how will you ever learn? Yes, you'll scrape on by, but you just won't thrive.

They just don't know any better. Moreover, they don't even know that can be changed.

Think about it.

Here's what I think is the crucial ingredient;

>>> They don’t just need nutrition that will keep them alive longer—they also need a reason to want to live longer. Being healthier by denying yourself the little pleasures you can afford, a cup of tea or a bowl of steaming rice, makes little sense if you have nothing else to look forward to, <<<

That man had something to look forward to. They don't.

For them survival is ugly and fraught with absolutely no meaning and it's been that way their entire lives. Anyone would ponder suicide in their environment at least once. This helps them to keep sane and escape the drudgery, which is a bit like the rich and the middle class taking extravagant holidays, or going out to get drunk etc. It's something to look forward to, but for us we have other options that give us the same satisfaction. They don't. Partly because they can't visualise them, but mostly because of the daily grind to survive.

So, don't judge them. They are real people just like you and me.

Wait, what was this? He got faced with a situation he couldn't handle with wise decision-making, saving, and elbow grease and had to tap into his riches to get himself out?

You know, the real problem is that he got a nice apartment and car. If he lived in a shack and walked everywhere, I bet he'd have been able to help his family member out. Was he just not trying, or was he trying and making bad decisions?

Ironically, the referenced book (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scratch_Beginnings) was specifically written to rebut Barbara Ehrenreich's first person book on poverty, Nickel and Dimed. A major theme of that book is the debilitating impact of catastrophic costs, health care in particular, on the poor. "Without health insurance you risk a small cut becoming infected because you can afford neither a visit to the doctor nor antibiotics... [an] impacted wisdom tooth requir[ed] frantic calls to find a free dental clinic" was the NYTimes summary (http://www.nytimes.com/books/01/05/13/reviews/010513.13galla...)

So the book referenced by the grandparent comment was derailed exactly as predicted in the very book it was trying to rebut.

It is not only the poor who like "things that make life less boring." We all do, and I'd argue we all need these things for sanity. That's why I don't beat myself up too hard for occasionally wasting time doing things like, say, posting comments on Hackers News.

Had he actually been that poor (only 5k in his name at the time), then he would have been under no real obligation to drop everything and support that family member.

As it happens, his experiment might not actually be a failure, because what you're saying seems dubious -- people help sick relatives for all kinds of reasons beyond possessing money. If he quit the experiment to contribute love or support, for example, that does not conclusively prove it wrong (although it does raise the issue that it would be much harder for a poor person to contribute such support to a sick relative -- time is not free and quitting a job has more dire consequences when you're poor).

He could have continued to pretend like he only had 5k, and like someone with only that much money been unable to do a thing, but then he would be wrong. What he did was not, and what anyone else would have had to do wouldn't be either.

He also had the privilege of a good education and good upbringing. You are making way too many assumptions to think that all it takes is wisdom and good decisions. What we can think and do is strongly shaped by our environment, and getting yourself out of poverty is harder than you think.

And, anyhow, your story is about a single, healthy man, with a very clearly defined plan and an escape valve, not a bunch of trapped mothers trying to raise children.

The poor don't have an eject button. This is the whole fucking problem.

That being said, here's a book with a similar premise and a different outcome: http://www.amazon.com/Nickel-Dimed-Not-Getting-America/dp/08...

The author finds herself barely able to make it. Grant it, she approaches the situation rather pessimistically, the book still paints a decent picture as to why so many people are struggling.

From your comment history, I'd guess you are no more wealthy than I am, and much like me, you are not significantly more wealthy than your parents. Of course, this is just a guess based on little information, but the self-made rich people I know? they do rather than talking about doing.

It's actually fairly rare for people to change from their parent's class. Heck, most of the 'super rich' success stories are people who come from rich parents becoming super rich; I mean, I don't want to disparage Bill Gates achievements; but you need to recognize that he started with parents who could afford to send him to Harvard.

I mean, I think most people agree that a conscientious and hard working person can better their economic situation, but I don't think it's as cut and dried as you seem to think it is. First, going from middle class to upper class requires very different skills than going from abject poverty to the low end of working class and from there to middle class.

It's interesting, 'cause I've lived most of my life as an upper middle class person, but for the last few years I've been living on a working-class salary, as I'm trying to get my business of the ground. It's very different, and I can see how someone who wasn't particularly punctual about, saying, paying bills or tickets on time (something that doesn't matter at all as a sysadmin with a six figure salary) could easily get over their head on a working-class salary. Really, I'd be having a very hard time of it if I didn't have the business with it's reasonably large cashflow to give me a 'bonus' when I get into a really tight spot.

They say the first million is the hardest. Considering that is my current challenge, that's how I feel. But, I bet that if I didn't already have the skills to land a $100K+/year job, maybe I'd feel that the first hundred grand was the hardest. If I lived in Africa or India, maybe just saving a few hundred bucks would be difficult. Saving even just a year's salary when you aren't making a lot more than what you need to buy minimum food and shelter is a difficult task.

There certainly are many people in this world that are poor because of a series of very unfortunate incidences that put them at a disadvantage. However, I think it's pretty clear that despite how common that may be, it cannot begin to explain the majority of poverty in "1st world" societies.

The book is "Scratch Beginnings" by Adam Shepard, btw.

Chicken and egg problem?

From the wikipedia page on "Economic Mobility" [1]: "Children previously from lower-income families had only a 1% chance of having an income that ranks in the top 5%"

I can't imagine that making perfect decisions for one's entire life would change those odds too much. If you're born poor, you're probably going to stay poor. It seems that the decision for most poor people is "Do you want to struggle and deny yourself for a 1% chance at being rich, or do you just want to enjoy yourself while you're here?"

It's always made sense to me that poor people spend most of their money on making life less boring. It's not like they had bright futures lined up but they threw it all away for booze. Most of them were born screwed and had sense enough to see it.

[1] http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2006/04/Hertz_Mobilit...

That phrase is almost devoid of content. In the extreme, both that statistic and

   "Children previously from lower-income families had a
    90% chance of having an income that ranks in the top
    25%"

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_mobility#United_States

What country was built from foreign aid?

Cory Doctorow gives his books away for free. Cory Doctorow has achieved great financial and literary success. Therefore, everyone who gives books away for free will achieve great financial and literary success.

And yeah, most people who pull that of would properly experience success.

Agreed, but too few of the discussions I've encountered leave out that part and focus on the "Why don't you just give your books away for free?"

Isn't it also arguable that present day countries that started as colonies also benefited from a degree of aid/investment from the countries doing the colonizing? Setting up colonies was an expensive and risky business, indeed the country I am in was forced to unite with our larger and richer neighbor to the south largely because of a failed attempt to establish such colonies:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/civil_war_revolution/sc...

Re: colonialism, our fundamental difference may be that you may not believe wealth can be created (or destroyed), only redistributed. Is that a fair guess? No blame intended, the distinction between money (zero sum) and wealth (nonzero sum) is not trivial.

...and knowing wise choices exist. If you're brought up to just get by and the people all around you have the same mentality knowing that there's a superior mentality requires looking outside the box. This is where mentorship and real education (beyond education that conditions you to just show up on time) are valuable.

Now it looks like they have moved more to diversity, cultural, disability, and gender issues: http://www.dow.com/diversity/beliefs/outreach.htm

Working hard, despite much propaganda to the contrary, isn't a solution. I'm not even sure what it means in this context. Being poor is very hard work in and of itself, as taking care of the basic necessities of life takes a lot more time and effort when you can't use the expensive short cuts that middle-class people take for granted.

When you're poor, everything takes longer, everything associated with money causes anxiety, the social stigma can prevent you from making useful connections, healthcare becomes more difficult to access, you have to spend time fixing or working around broken items, if you have a job you likely work longer and/or more uncomfortable hours, if you don't have a job there's the added stress and stigma from that, many government programs in reality become traps due to their desire to control poor people's lives, you cannot afford and/or do not have the time or energy left to make healthy food, etc. There are many, many other factors, many of which can be trivially seen to magnify other factors.

[Edit: oops, someone else beat me to it]

Unexpected costs, such as medical costs, are one of the biggest hurdles to digging one's self out of poverty. Poor people don't access to insurance to help smooth out their costs. Of course, bad decisions play a part as well, but its not as easy as this guy's experiment made it seem to get out of poverty.

But surprisingly, many highly intelligent people (including many in this very thread) will actually deny that they have any natural cognitive advantages over the poor. They will readily admit they are smarter than those "idiots" who can't code Fizzbuzz, or the ones who comment at Youtube, or the software engineers who're still doing Cobol, or the tea partiers...but they won't admit they are naturally smarter than the average poor person.

In fact, they are actually more ready to characterize themselves (or others) as oppressors of some sort than to admit that they are gifted.

The book The Blank Slate was published almost a decade ago

http://www.amazon.com/Blank-Slate-Modern-Denial-Nature/dp/06...

and research has moved on. The chapter in The Blank Slate that has the most to do with heritability of cognitive abilities is largely based, as author Steven Pinker acknowledges in his bibliographic references, on the work of Eric Turkheimer. But Turkheimer has revised his point of view in the last decade, and if Pinker is still reading Turkheimer's writings, Pinker should too. I'll recommend here two articles from Turkheimer's faculty web page

http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/vita1_turkheimer.htm

that more readers of Pinker's book ought to know about, to bring their understanding of human behavioral genetics up to date.

Johnson, Wendy; Turkheimer, Eric; Gottesman, Irving I.; Bouchard Jr., Thomas (2009). Beyond Heritability: Twin Studies in Behavioral Research. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 18, 4, 217-220

http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Articles%20for%20O...

is an interesting paper that includes the statement "Moreover, even highly heritable traits can be strongly manipulated by the environment, so heritability has little if anything to do with controllability. For example, height is on the order of 90% heritable, yet North and South Koreans, who come from the same genetic background, presently differ in average height by a full 6 inches (Pak, 2004; Schwekendiek, 2008)."

Another interesting paper,

Turkheimer, E. (2008, Spring). A better way to use twins for developmental research. LIFE Newsletter, 2, 1-5

http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Articles%20for%20O...

admits the disappointment of behavioral genetics researchers.

"But back to the question: What does heritability mean? Almost everyone who has ever thought about heritability has reached a commonsense intuition about it: One way or another, heritability has to be some kind of index of how genetic a trait is. That intuition explains why so many thousands of heritability coefficients have been calculated over the years. Once the twin registries have been assembled, it’s easy and fun, like having a genoscope you can point at one trait after another to take a reading of how genetic things are. Height? Very genetic. Intelligence? Pretty genetic. Schizophrenia? That looks pretty genetic too. Personality? Yep, that too. And over multiple studies and traits the heritabilities go up and down, providing the basis for nearly infinite Talmudic revisions of the grand theories of the heritability of things, perfect grist for the wheels of social science.

"Unfortunately, that fundamental intuition is wrong. Heritability isn’t an index of how genetic a trait is. A great deal of time has been wasted in the effort of measuring the heritability of traits in the false expectation that somehow the genetic nature of psychological phenomena would be revealed. There are many reasons for making this strong statement, but the most important of them harkens back to the description of heritability as an effect size. An effect size of the R2 family is a standardized estimate of the proportion of the variance in one variable that is reduced when another variable is held constant statistically. In this case it is an estimate of how much the variance of a trait would be reduced if everyone were genetically identical. With a moment’s thought you can see that the answer to the question of how much variance would be reduced if everyone was genetically identical depends crucially on how genetically different everyone was in the first place."

I've enjoyed learning about this line of research from several well known behavioral geneticists, including some of the doyens of twin research, as I participate in the journal club in individual differences psychology and behavioral genetics

http://www.psych.umn.edu/courses/fall10/psy8935/default.htm

at the university where those researchers are based. There is always lively discussion on what the data show, and what the data don't show. Thus far, there are no data to show that poor people are poor solely because they lack academic ability (and anyway studies show

http://www.jkcf.org/assets/files/0000/0084/Achievement_Trap....

http://tcf.org/publications/pdfs/pb428/carnrose.pdf

http://reason.com/archives/2008/02/19/legacies-of-injustice

that poverty is a meaningful disadvantage even for high-ability young people).

Nor is there any predictable limit on how much poor people might be able to use their abilities, whatever their current ability level, to improve their condition in life if the undeniable disadvantages of lacking money were alleviated.

www.loni.ucla.edu/~thompson/HARDI-IQ/hardiIQ-PR.html

He and his colleagues can predict IQ from a 3D brain scan, a concrete dataset of voxels; it is not just about correlations between relatives any more.

Read his numerous papers and those of his peers; the heritability of intelligence is an empirical, easily verifiable fact based on direct scientific measurement. The observed associations between brain structure, inheritance, intelligence, and income exist even if one refuses to look at them.

The self-promoted study you kindly linked has many of the usual problems with study design

http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html

common in studies cited by the popular press about IQ. Try again when you can cite something meaningful, better peer-reviewed, and more on point to the subject of this thread (causes of poverty).

For whatever ideological reason you've convinced yourself that genes have nothing to do with brains, intelligence, or wealth.

This isn't a question of intelligence. It's a question of how people with different levels of wealth/status have different priorities. I've experienced it in periods of my own life, depending on how financially secure I've felt - and so far as I can tell, my intelligence hasn't changed. Abraham Maslow discussed the psychology behind this half a century ago. (1)

Of course there are many other issues affecting the poor, which this article doesn't address and which you completely ignore. The fact is that it's simply more expensive to be poor. Not having a car can mean you might have to sacrifice an entire day of work just to take your child to the doctor by bus (and this isn't an abstract hypothetical - I've treated these families). When you don't have extra money you sacrifice income to late fees, pay higher interest rates, are unable to benefit for long-term or bulk discounts. And don't even get me started on predatory services like check cashing or rent to own companies.

Bottom line, it's cheap to be rich, and expensive to be poor. And when every day is a struggle you see the world differently than a high paid yuppy with a secure tech job in an otherwise miserable economy (that's not a personal jab, I put myself in this category as well).

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs