http://www.gapminder.org/labs/gapminder-china/#$majorMode=ch...

Somehow hundreds of millions of people in China and elsewhere went from far more deprived conditions to first world status over the span of a few decades. Nothing in that game compares to the horrors of the Cultural Revolution or the mass starvation of the Great Leap Forward. So clearly it is possible for an entire civilization to pull itself up by its bootstraps through capitalism. [0]

Finally, as noted the game stacks the deck against reality. It starts you out as a single parent with no savings and evidently no family members who will help you out...without any acknowledgement of the fact that broken homes, divorce, out-of-wedlock births, a lack of a high school diploma, and a failure to save are the major causes of poverty. [1], [2]

If the game started a few years earlier and asked "do you want to complete high school" and "do you wait till you're financially stable before marrying & having children", the overall message would be very different. Indeed, the authors would likely be accused of having unfashionable political sympathies for simply advising that people mimic the behaviors of middle class Asian immigrant families.

[0] http://www.amazon.com/Third-World-First-Singapore-1965-2000/...

[1] http://www.ncpa.org/pub/ba428

[2] http://thf_media.s3.amazonaws.com/2010/pdf/bg2465.pdf

Some people find it useful to walk a mile in the shoes of those affected by the policies they support. Whether you might ever choose or have to wear those shoes personally is rather beside the point.

A dialogue tree that allowed the player to navigate life choices at an intellectual remove from real human life would simply reinforce our societal tendency to dodge the question of "what do we do with the struggling" by asserting that "I know better than them."

edit: effect/affect

Exactly which policies cause folks to get divorced (ie, get married young), have kids at a young age, and quit high school?

Apart, of course, from the policies intended to reduce the effects of those decisions....

I don't know about the rest of you, but I've actually had significant interaction with young unwed mothers.

Almost every one of them got pregnant intentionally. Yes, many will tell you a story at first, and "I couldn't afford it" does let them save face, which is pretty much all they've got left. But, after a while, it comes out that they knew exactly what they were doing.

So, why did they want to get pregnant?

A minor reason is that being a parent gets you some immediate respect.

However, the big reason is one of the saddest things I've ever heard.

"A baby has to love me."

> regressive taxation

The US doesn't have a regressive tax system. In fact, much of the volatility in tax revenues, which is killing CA, comes from being too progressive. (FWIW, EU countries tend to have a much flatter tax system.)

"progressive" = fraction of income going to taxes increases with income. (Marginal rates are almost irrelevant, revenue is the only thing that matters.)

The twist is that the less you contribute, the higher your return.

What other taxes are paid back to you later, in rough approximation to the amount that you paid?

The payback is entirely a function of the contribution stream (amounts and time).

> In any case, why should it make a difference what happens to the money after you pay it?

Because money collected for specific services rendered isn't much like money collected for general public services.

For example, many cities do garbage collection. While that money is collected by govt, it isn't much like property or sales tax.

Suppose that I'm looking to live in one of two cities. One has govt garbage collection and will charge me $100/month and the other has a private franchise providing garbage collection, again for $100/month. Would you really claim that the first city has higher taxes?

SS isn't just the basic retirement stuff. Other payments are available which vary based on disability, personal resources, and location and status of residence.

Even the basic retirement stuff depends greatly on how long you live. If you die just as you retire, your inheritors don't get any of your SS benefits.

> Suppose that I'm looking to live in one of two cities. One has govt garbage collection and will charge me $100/month and the other has a private franchise providing garbage collection, again for $100/month. Would you really claim that the first city has higher taxes?

Yes, as long as the $100/month is not optional. Gas taxes go to build highways that the driver uses, is that then not a tax? Tons of taxes are earmarked for specific purposes.

This is a succinct way to put it, and a good list. Can you say more about "social pressure against out-of-wedlock births"? You see this as another thing that encourages unsustainable lifestyles?

There's divorce, and then there's divorce.

No kids, not much of a problem. Economically, they're better off together, but ....

Unwed parents are a disaster for both society and the kid(s). It's pretty much a guarantee of long-term poverty.

Having kids is almost always a choice, a choice that has huge consequences.

That's how the statistics work out. We can argue about why that happens, but it's absurd to suggest that it doesn't.

Parents' choices, and having kids is almost always a choice, have consequences.

on what basis?

My partner and I had our 3 children out of wedlock. Who are you to say that unwed parents is a lock-in to food stamps and crime?

Next you'll be blaming unwed parents for the break down of the fabric of society.

You are way out of line.

Some states call it common law marriage, but even if they don't you are still effectively married.

Marriage is not a piece of paper, marriage is a family structure.

However many times people do chose to do the "fun" thing and instead of strive for a good job take the easy way out. That easy way is short-sighted.

Unfortunately we are seeing life from the walls of the castle, staring at the peasents saying "shame on you for not being royalty". However over the years I've grown to think that maybe 60%+ of the cause of people being poor is their fault. I see my friend partying every fucking night. She has no money. I have plenty of money yet cannot party because I have responsibilities. Yet when shit hits the fan, I have a buffer while she goes into a "shit my life is going nowhere" regression.

Sure her circumstances did not allow her to get the same living environment as I did, she is not a mathematically-inclined person, but she went to college, got a worthless degree after 4 yrs, and now complains how she has no money. She barely works, when she does its not for long periods of time, and is older than I am.

So yea, my sympathy has been declining. Shoulda finished high school. Shoulda gone to a community college and studied your ass off. Shoulda worn a rubber till you were ready. Now it's too late, and you are standing there with your arms in the air begging for help.

Almost all pregnancy is the result of a decision to have sex. Yes, contraceptives fail sometimes, but that doesn't explain teen pregnancy rates. And, in the US at least, contraceptives are free, and have been for decades. Yes, even in rural/backwoods US.

> but she went to college, got a worthless degree after 4 yrs, and now complains how she has no money.

I think that schools should be on the hook for student loans. Yes, including non-profit and state schools.

And no, grants shouldn't be increased. 4 years of effort should have some lifetime economic benefit.

You're right, policy decisions don't cause more people to have kids at a young age. They do however, have an effect on joblessness [1], just to name one facet of the economic environment that now exists in the US.

[1] http://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=z1ebjpgk2654c1_&...

'Abstinence only' sex education causes more people to have kids at a young age, because it prevents more people from learning what options there are available. Add into that the issue that young people have always been difficult to stop fucking each other throughout history, and combine with the highly sexualised modern society, and 'Abstinence only' sex education is, frankly, evil.

I have no doubts that the globalization of economic inputs produces higher global growth and a greater overall level of welfare, but I also have no doubt that this process produces winners and losers. One subset of the losers has been low/medium skilled Americans, who face stagnating wages and many of the challenges this game portrays (in an admittedly over-dramatic fashion). We can either accept this as the cost of doing business or work as a society to compensate the losers, but in either case we should acknowledge that there are some larger forces at play that make it harder for certain segments of the population to reach their own bootstraps.

I honestly feel disgusted by the fact that I am expected to feel sorry for people such as these. I managed to get to the end to the month all fine and dandy, and could see many things I could still do to improve my cash flow.

My kid may have not been given some meaningless luxuries that other kids got (I never went to school trips and the like myself), but my charisma and public services such as the library and the like would be more than enough to ensure he turns out a fine man.

Hell, if I wouldn't even have had a kid in the first place, until I could ensure that I could raise properly. Expecting me to feel sympathy for an individual who can't afford a kid, suffering from their own selfishness, is out of order. It's comparable to expecting me to pay for the treatment of some fool who didn't put on a condom when he knew he was have sexual intercourse with a - unique woman.

edit. Forgive me, due to my anger I lost focus on what I was initially trying to say. Basically, standard of living has improved dramatically. They may not be able to afford premium goods such as sparkly ipads and ps3's, but they can still afford a great deal of stuff.

It's cheaper to have a mobile phone nowadays than it is to have a land line. That's why mobile has really taken off in places like, say, Africa. Just because someone has a cell phone doesn't mean they're not struggling.

Given a choice between living as a corporate CEO (or even upper middle class professional) in the 1950s versus part of the welfare underclass today, I would almost certainly choose the former. Even sans cell phones.

Let's just consider health care. One reason health care is so much more expensive now compared to the 1950's is the roughly 60 years of technical innovation that has happened since then. In 1950, there were still outbreaks of polio. Cancer was a far more certain death sentence. MRI's didn't exist. The birth control pill was not yet available. There was no dialysis. There was no laser surgery. Heart surgery was very primitive: there was no bypass surgery, no replacement of heart valves, and no pacemaker. By and large, people died of diseases that could be treated today, and many of those treatments are available today even to the poor and uninsured. (In a move unthinkable in 1950, my state even subsidizes access to birth control for low-income single women.)

I'm having trouble finding hard health data. The closest thing is that in 1972, life expectancy for the bottom half was 77.7 and for the upper half 78.9, while in 2001 79.6 years for the bottom half and 85.4(!) for the top half. Which amounts to about the same for the top half in 1972 and bottom half in 2001.

The top half life expectancy would be lower in the 1950s than the 1970s, but at the same time today's welfare underclass is probably significantly worse off than the average person in the lower half. I expect those would end up being a wash, and life expectancies would be comparable, though probably with a slight edge for the underclass of today.

That's a trade that I think would be worth it, given all the exceptional benefits of relative wealth and status. Yeah, no iPhones, but drivers, maids, home-visiting doctors, nice single family homes in fun areas, economic security, and ability to eat out or go to shows whenever you want makes up for it for most people.

You only have to go back to the year 2000 to give up iPhones. Going back to 1990 you give up the Internet. Going back to 1980 you give up Mac and Windows. Going back to 1970 you give up microwave ovens and personal computers at all along with cable television. Going back to 1950 you give up birth control, open-heart surgery, commercial air travel, and color television.

That's just technology. There's a huge cultural gap, too. In 1950 segregation was the law, there was little to no access to foreign culture, atheism was distrusted and associated with Communism, pre-marital sex was taboo, and women by and large did not work outside of the household, especially not when they had children. None of the music that I listen to even existed back then. None of it would even be possible.

There are two separate issues: consumer goods and actual well being. I think you overestimate the difference in consumer goods between the ruling elite in the Fifties and the contemporary welfare underclass: the latter rarely, if ever, can take advantage of commercial air travel and have severely limited access to open-heart surgery. And barrier birth control and abortion were readily available (albeit significantly more expensive) to the rich in the 1950s, while in the modern day they (especially abortion) are somewhat difficult, though far from impossible, for the underclass to access.

But quibbling over those details can make us ignore the more central point. Access to consumer goods is only part of the picture, because power is a very strong and often superior substitute good for most of them. Roombas are accessible to the middle class today, but they are inferior to an actual person cleaning the house for you, even with an antiquated vacuum cleaner from midcentury. The vast majority of the population can text each other now, but a well-off member of management could very easily have a secretary do the same through a messenger boy. The latter is slower, but in some ways easier: he (invariably a he) had at will access to an intelligence superior to the most advanced AI now, without the burden of having to hit tiny keys, save phone numbers, or remember to charge his phone. A member of the upper class in the 1950's did not have to worry about employment; about housing; about having interesting work; about getting fired for drinking on the job (hell, your company would pay for your booze and cigarettes); about worrying how to pay the bills the next month; about sending your kids to a school with regular shootings; about visiting the social worker to prove you had sent out pro-forma applications to jobs you're incapable of performing so you can get your welfare check.

Some tradeoffs are less clear. The middle manager in 1955 had to worry about global thermonuclear war, but not about catastrophic climate change or poisoned soy sauce from China. We have hormonal birth control, but also HIV.

All of us are members of the professional upper middle class, so we're certainly better off. But an unemployed single parent living on the bad side of Hunter's Point? If I were forced to choose, yeah, I'd definitely go with the rich straight white guy in the 1950s with massive social privileges. Even with fewer gadgets and less sophisticated technology.

And frankly, the poor have much better access to health care thank you think. I know from personal experience that a poor, uninsured person can still get necessary or even largely elective surgeries that may not have even existed, and surely would not be performed with the same level of safety and quality, in 1950.

Oh yes--and abortion was actually illegal in the 1950's.

  > pre-marital sex was taboo

  > There was no dialysis.

  > we would be so much better off without dialysis
  > even existing

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/print/2010/12/-8220-god-...

Just saying that it's not all peaches and cream.

How about everything else? There's no such thing as a stable factory job anymore, if you can't code and don't have other white collar skills, you have a choice of Wal-mart and the gas station to work at. Neither gives you health insurance. You won't make enough to live in a nice school district.

Sympathy's the wrong way to look at it, although you could probably do with a little more empathy. The real point is that when enough people are struggling to get by, it hurts the economy at large and hurts you.

It's not the Lump of Labor fallacy to say that the economy has a limited appetite for low-skilled workers. In Australia, where illegal immigration is quite limited, it's not a choice of Wal-Mart and the gas station for folks without white-collar skills, there's also farming jobs, cleaning jobs, and best of all, tradesman jobs like builder, electrician or plumber. You'll need an apprenticeship for some of those, but can quickly work your way up from earning very little as an apprentice to earning six figures as a competent and fully-qualified tradesman. But in America, all the job categories which I mentioned are dominated by illegals, so it really is true that the uneducated have a really rough time.

If you look at states like Georgia (and i've seen similar articles about parts of the UK), there's a massive shortage of farm workers, and regardless of what the supply of illegal migrant workers is. Even after Georgia began holding farmers directly liable for employing illegal immigrants, local workers have not stepped up to fill the gap.

Besides, American immigration policy, rightly, allows white collar workers from other nations, especially Canada and Mexico into the country via NAFTA. That is, frankly, a good thing. All we're doing is keeping out a labor supply that is currently needed.

If you want to level the playing field for native low skill workers, require farmers and the like to pay all the taxes and health benefits for all their workers, illegal or not.

I've also seen reports in the news where Australia needs more seasonal agricultural workers, as Australians don't necessarily want to do the work. Most recently there's been a trial program to get pacific islanders in on temporary visas to work these farms. And traditionally it's been backpackers that have worked these fruit-picking and misc jobs.

So it seems to me that a lot of the population of the "developed" world, especially the native people, don't want to be doing those menial, labour intensive, and repetative jobs themselves. Also I don't believe that the immigrants that do these jobs now want their kids to be doing them. Therefore I would say that we should work harder to try and automate these kinds of menial mind-numbing jobs as best as we can.

Sitting on your behind is easier, regardless of pay.

Sources: BLS http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_nat.htm#45-0000 http://146.142.4.24/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=12.00&year1...

The Pew Hispanic Center estimates that in the 1980s the net advance of the undocumented population was at the 130,000 per year, increasing to 450,000 per year from 1990–1994, and further increasing to 750,000 per year from 1995–1999, and staying at 700,000–850,000+ per year since about 2000

(see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_immigrant_population_of... )

Why?

"Free trade" destroyed many US factory jobs, but it vaporized Mexican agriculture. Small proprietor farms were out of business overnight by the flood of cheap US corn.

The human element in illegal immigration is usually completely ignored. People don't pull up stakes and walk across a desert because they think that working in a poultry slaughterhouse is a great life. They do so because it is a better life than complete destitution that they face at home.

Either way, i think we're well served by including some specific claims (and that's why i cited the wikipedia page)

I feel like a path to citizenship would bring the wages for these jobs back above-ground and create a fair marketplace for labor where people could compete.

What's the other option, "ship them all back to latin america"? If you think that's a good idea, I'd invite you to think about what that enforcement action would look like, and if it fits into your concept of "America".

EDIT: Watches blanket downvotes without counter-proposal or likely even reading my comments. Whoever that is should run for the House.

(I agree with most of the rest of what you say in this post.)

Frankly, it seemed like the next obvious step from his initial complaint. We're talking about underemployment and he brings up immigrants out of nowhere as a scapegoat? Was that a prelude to an argument for amnesty? It's not my fault if it sounds bad.

And accusing me of quote "douchebaggery" while being high and mighty about what belongs on hacker news is a little rich.

I'm not actually even an American. I'm merely temporarily here on a visa. But once you've spent as much time and money on US visa renewals as I have, you don't have much sympathy for the line-jumpers who enter the country illegally.

1) quality education (including post-secondary, which would otherwise need to be saved-for) 2) portable, quality basic health care 3) inexpensive, safe, spartan-but-quality housing

No amount of TVs, computers, mobile phones, or iPods will make up for the fact that these three necessities are often pretty expensive in the U.S.

Kids have a way of happening even when you don't expect or want them. Combine that with social pressures against abortion, and your stance becomes a luxury.

Also, I'm a bit disturbed that you see field trips at school as a luxury rather than part of a solid, well-rounded education.

It's a luxury because one can't afford it, not because one sees it as a frippery.

My lad wants to do an after school club that the school has been promoting, wants to go to a uniformed group with his friends, etc.. These things would be good experiences, provide useful educational opportunities and best of all be fun. We can't afford them. They are luxuries in the sense that he won't be unloved, malnourished, unfit or uneducated without them.

Example: I'm a city boy, born and bred, but I spent summers on my uncle's farm. Due to that experience, I understand much better how rural people think and why, and the kinds of things that are more important to them.

If I had never spent time on the farm, I would not be 'uneducated', but those experiences have significantly improved my understanding of the people around me - I am much better educated for having these [lengthy] 'field trips'.

Replay this experience in shorter amounts more frequently in the form of field trips and you'll get a variety of different things to help broaden your experience and who knows, you may see something you're passionate about that you might not otherwise see.

So I guess it's a value judgement - you may see a well-rounded education as a luxury. I see it as a necessary building block for a healthy adult life.

Absolutely.

We do however always go out and about when we have family time. Thankfully the UK tax payer pays for the upkeep of key national museums - visiting them is one of the few things one can do for free. We do have a bent towards natural history, that's usually free too!

>So I guess it's a value judgement - you may see a well-rounded education as a luxury. I see it as a necessary building block for a healthy adult life. //

Oh believe me I'm all for well-rounded. I'm not at all arguing against the enormous value of such things. You say they're necessary things. But my resources don't stretch to paying for them and the society around doesn't value them enough to make them available to all without direct charge.

I'm doing what I can to provide a well rounded education as I see the enormous value a broad education has brought me. For example I studied Art History for only a term before studies for my degree got in the way but I found it immensely valuable as a catalyst to my own enquiry and as a lever in to understanding societal development.

However, I don't think you can really argue that such things are "necessary" for "healthy adult life". Possibly "a doorway to a fulfilling adult life"?

I'm not saying that those women (or men) are stupid, I'm saying that they are brought up badly due to the neglect. You're taking so much 'choices' for granted when they are actually educated choices. For example, finances (how much will a kid cost? Bigger car? Food? Rent?), job security (are the parent(s) comfortable?), time constraints (do they have time to spend with them?). Ironically, they may end up neglecting their own children despite best intentions (eg Working overtime on minimum wage so the kid can get into college for example but the kid ends up a drug addict).

The way USA's poverty is a form of a Spartan kid's bath. Many will suffer, a few will make it through and be strong. All the more while other countries provide social programs (Social governments) or strong families (Communal communities) to make it easier and more aware of the responsibilities of having a kid.

Throw into that mix 'abstinence-only' sex education, and your 'choices' disappear. If you don't know about protected sex, and it's clear that all this "choice" you mention is just illusion for a great many people.

You can't say "why didn't you use a condom?" if you block the information about condom use. Hell, in some parts of Africa, the Catholic Church is spreading information that condoms cause AIDS. Where's the choice there? Where is the 'luxury' there?

By the way, I didn't say the sex was the luxury, I said your stance was the luxury - this expectation that kids come along when you plan them. If you actually speak to parents, you'll find that kids frequently come along despite using high-reliability birth control, and sometimes never come along despite desperately trying for years.

What really is beyond ridiculous is your cold, calculating opinion of how humans operate, combined with this expectation that all humans have access to the information you have.

I think your mistake is to think everyone is capable of knowing the consequences of their actions. Letting all people suffer the full consequences of all their actions, when it would cost little to get them off the hook, seems wrong to me, and to many others.

Life isn't fair, and it never will be. But we, as intelligent human beings, can do a lot to make it more fair. I think that is an overall win for everyone.

Except for when you make life more fair by handicapping the high performers. See Kurt's Harrison Bergeron http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron

Sure, China had terrible problems with revolutionaries, before reforms leading to a remarkable rate of economic growth that nevertheless still leaves the average person in living conditions that would appal the average debt-ridden member of the American underclass. Mostly they "pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps" by being able to work for (or employ people on) the sort of wages that would leave Americans unable to eat, never mind have houses, cars and mobile phone contracts to owe repayments on. So they didn't do it in isolation[] and their model doesn't work for the US unemployed. Perspective is useful, but deeming freedom of choice and support for the poor in a rich democracy to be adequate by comparison with a poor country rapidly recovering from internal chaos is like judging the adequacy of a government by how many gulags they operate. By the standards of first world countries, the poor in the US get a relatively rough deal.

Singapore, since you cite it as an example, is a million miles away from a society where people pulled themselves up by their bootstraps from capitalism. For a start, the government cleared the slums by building 85% of the country's housing stock and fixed the rents and prices far below private-sector levels. They might be extremely business-friendly, but governments in democratic states don't get much more paternalistic than Singapore's.

[]Arguably the American poor have benefited far more from the resulting availability of cheap consumer goods than they lose from cheap Chinese labour pulling down on the bootstraps of the US manufacturing industry. But the availability of those jobs is still reduced.

"The poor are poor because all of their choices in life suck."

There are of course two completely different ways to read that. I find that the first interpretation that jumps out at people speaks volumes about their world-view.

Another person here mentioned people using check cashing services instead of service-charging banks. You know, as opposed to shopping around for a smaller bank or credit union that doesn't do that (another thing strangely lacking as an option in the game). What makes this even more pathetic is that the bank charge is usually LESS than the 3% they are paying from their paycheck to the check cashing service! Top it off with the tendency for poor people to withdraw small amounts of cash from ATMs and take the service charge hit (which, since it's a fixed price, increases the percentage loss the lower the amount you take out) and you can't but shake your head in disbelief.

And don't even get me started on the massive amounts of money stupid people spend on lottery tickets...

It's little things like this that make (and keep) people poor, and these things are so easy to avoid with a little planning and discipline. Wealth is a long term strategy that few consider seriously.

And once you have wealth, you need to protect it from your grandchildren, because it's a well known phenomena for the first generation to make the money, the second generation to keep the money, and the third generation to piss it away. Not to mention the incredibly stupid modern practice of splitting the inheritance between your children rather than passing it in its entirety to ONE child.

I'm not sure if this is a troll. What is incredibly stupid about the common practice of splitting inheritance equally between your children? What do you propose as a more optimal way to choose the single child who receives everything?

Every time you split your fortune, it becomes far less powerful. As generations pass, your "fortune" splits and splits until you've got a bunch of insignificant sums among your descendants.

This is why the powerful families choose ONE child who will receive the inheritance, while the rest must make their own way. The common practice is for the firstborn to take the inheritance, but the best practice is to wait and see how each of your children deal with money before deciding.

>They make high-end electronics, they make industrial equipment, [...] and manned spacecraft. //

Are you saying they don't employ minors in China at poverty wages in the manufacture of "cheap plastic shit"?

That would be news to me.

The upside? It distributes the risk and almost ensures that none of us will ever go broke.

The downside(for some people)? When one of us flips the company, the wealth will be equally distributed between my siblings, irrespective of whether they actually worked at the company or not.

Has it pushed you to take more financial risk due to the fact that you have fallbacks? Are there any other things that are shared in the trust, or just companies that you own?

So many questions.

It's really not about the companies nor is it even legally binding in most cases with these arrangements(there is a lot of argument for/against making it legally binding). This idea dates back generations when joint families were more common.

Also see this if you haven't: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3071593

Has it pushed you to take more financial risk due to the fact that you have fallbacks?

This plays out every single day in one way or the other.

Example 1: One of the core points which I grew up hearing from my dad is that my money isn't really mine--it's the family's. Where as in American culture we largely teach kids independence from an early age, my dad never made me feel like I have to work as a teenager to have pocketmoney. His money was mine. What if he didn't have money to give me? I'd be expected to be sensitive enough to understand and work - so I can help the family(not so much myself).

Example 2: Last year I was in school and my (normally well to do dad) hit a rough patch. Our entire family finances were fucked. So I picked up a few coding gigs, worked my ass off and made the checks go straight to my dad.

Of course, my school friends thought I should be loaded at the end of the project. When I told them 100% of the money went to my dad, they were shocked. Some even tried to tell me "bro you're stupid!" :) May be. But that's my culture :) And so far I love it!

Example 3: Earlier this year, I just packed my bags one day and moved to NYC to live with my brother indefinitely. As I understand, this is not common in American culture. And even when a really close friend lets you do it, it is seen as "owing" a favor. But in our case, I did not owe my brother a favor or explanation on why I was going to live with him in his one bedroom apartment. In fact, I'd have to give an explanation to my family if I decided not to live with him. It's expected that if you live in the same city, you live together if you are family.

Oh btw, I have a full-time job now but my brother pays 100% of the rent. And I'm saving up cash from my job so one of us can potentially quit in a few months and take a shot at the start-up game again. None of this is planned or negotiated well in advance. My Dad could call me tomorrow and ask me for 100% of the money in my account and I'd send it without reservation. He'd do the same for me--though out of respect for being the father, he has more right to question me about why I need money than my right to question him. =)

Few months ago I had a major financial disaster when a client turned out to be fraudulent, putting me over $10,000 in the red. That's a lot of money for a freelancer. This is when I was able to call up my dad and pretty much the problem was immediately taken care of(he's doing a lot better now financially than last yr).

In a few years, my dad will be retired. He won't be getting a social security check from the gov and he barely has savings for retirement because he mostly invested them in his kids--knowing they'd take care of him after retirement. So he'll be getting money transfers from all of his kids every month after retirement.

That's our social security =)

Would you mind disclosing your nationality?

This reduces the chance that any sibling will have a lifestyle that is relatively more affluent than the others. And when we get a freeloader, it encourages the other siblings to not give up on his life. It may be easier to give up if you can tell yourself "well he is getting what he deserves".

This assumes a great deal of good faith, obviously. It can easily go bad and turn into resentment if (a) we get a freeloader and (b) he remains a freeloader all his life. But even in that worst case scenario, the hope(from our cultural upbringing) is that there will be less resentment(for the financial unfairness) and more sadness/empathy for the sibling who went the wrong way all his life.

My father's brothers have been on this model for couple decades and it has mostly worked out. They've had multiple freeloaders at one point turn into super productive contributors a decade later(and after lots of hardwork by the non-freeloading siblings towards the freeloaders).

This model is most easy when you are still young and life is simple(as it is for us now). It becomes very challenging after we all have wives, children and grandchildren and different local interests and politics. It usually leads to (somewhat bitter) splitville where assets are divided. This is one area my siblings and me are most weary of and want to do a better job of than our prior generations.

It suggests that the success of Asian immigrants is not due to their race at all, it's due to their culture. And that this culture can be emulated by people of other races to achieve similar success. That's the exact opposite of the racist view, which would be that Asians are richer than black people because Asians are better than black people.

I don't think great things in civilization get done solely out of people needing to work the bare minimum to survive anyway; if that's all they were going to work, just paying them $10k subsistence is not a huge loss to society, and even pretty cheap by the standards of the other stuff we spend money on. Actually it'd be a pretty sad commentary on civilization if it were only the threat of literally being homeless/starving that inspired people to work; that's what it was like in subsistence-farming days, but surely a wealthy country can move beyond that, and make the baseline something higher, even if only "ramen + crappy apartment"? Plus, I think we'd make it back in how much it'd increase entrepreneurship if people felt more confident in a safety net being there if they failed (people from lower-class backgrounds w/o a family safety net, in particular, are very afraid to leave steady jobs if they have one).

I'm unconvinced by neoclassical arguments by Friedman et al. on "distorting" for two reasons. Firstly there's nothing inherently wrong with introducing further "distortion" into the market unless you subscribe to the evidently false proposition that no person's ability to optimise their spending habits with respect to their budget constraint can be improved upon; that you're making individuals and society worse off for buying them healthcare when they expressed more interest in a hire-purchase agreement for a state-of-the-art pickup truck. I believe quite the opposite: people receiving government money aren't entitled to spend it on anything they want, and even with imperfect information a technocrat, will often be better at allocating some of that cash than the average welfare recipient.

Secondly, given differences between incomes, propensities to consume and the ease of introducing new supply into the market, a simple flat subsidy can distort markets more than targeted payments. Converting payments such as government funded health insurance to cash would have the effect of inflating the prices of ramen and particularly crappy apartments (since welfare recipients can live without the health insurance, albeit for less long, and there's not enough decent apartments in many areas). Given the relatively fixed supply of housing, people who already owned rental property would capture more benefit than any other industry, ironically because they chose to use their capital in a relatively unproductive manner. On the other hand, hospitals might be worse off, losing part of their customer base and seeing cost increases (notably unskilled labour). Since the government has the choice in how they distort the market, I'd rather they subsidise healthcare professionals than slum landlords.

I totally agree with your point about bare minimum safety nets encouraging innovation. Even those poor who are never going to launch world-changing startups might consider a stab at freelancing in an area they're more capable in than dishwashing once the risk of not having regular income is removed.

Thats 30 million times ten times one thousand. Thats 300 billion dollars. That is ten times the cost for the war in Iraq back in 2001 and 2002 (both years). How on earth do you think the US could pay that considering that it has a deep deficit in the first place?

And in any case, one purpose is to be a replacement for the current piecemeal programs we have, which aren't cheap to begin with. Food stamps + Section 8 + EITC currently costs about $150 billion per year, plus some additional amount in bureaucracy and litigation due to complex rules, plus some additional economic damage caused by market distortion due to the fact that food stamps + section 8 aren't normal cash (EITC is better for that). That leaves maybe $100-150b, some of which is probably also redundant with existing welfare programs (I just picked three big ones), or about 3-4% of the federal budget.

If you want to keep it budget-neutral, how about an across-the-board 3-4% cut to all other budget categories in return? Or, we could just, as you point out, remove the temporary "overseas contingency operations" (Iraq/Afghanistan wars) supplement to the regular DoD budget, which is $125b in 2012, returning the DoD to its baseline budget. If I had a line-item veto pen I could pretty easily come up with another few hundred billion in savings if you'd like (cut agriculture subsidies, cut Medicare Part D, transition TSA/air-traffic-control to being fully user-fee-funded, do another round of domestic military-base closures through a BRAC-like process, etc., etc.). :)

And it's not like that $300 billion just disappears into a black hole. Because poor people need it to live they are spending it immediately, which multiplies out across the economy, certainly more so than a war does. And I'm not even counting the human life cost of war. So yes, just giving people $10K a year isn't that bad considering what we have done.

I just love the thinking though: "we've spent all this money to kill people for no reason and now you expect us to feed Americans?!?!"

[1] http://costsofwar.org/

You're correct that we do spend a lot of money piecemeal to get some semblance of a safety net, which is one reason even libertarians like Hayek and Friedman suggest it would be better to just actually provide a direct safety net, in a much less distorting way, instead of this crazy mixture of special-case and bureaucratic safety nets. The main people promoting those seem not to be libertarians but nanny-state conservatives who want to somehow make sure that someone's food stamps are spent on food and not beer. To me, as a more libertarian-leaning sort of person (albeit in teh Hayekian sense), if they're getting $100 in assistance, I don't give a damn what they do with it past that point. Give it in cash, and if they squander it on vodka instead of buying food, well then that's their problem at that point.

I don't really believe your threat. Is the only reason you work because you couldn't live a $10k/yr subsistence living otherwise? You're not actually interested in creating things, exchanging value with people, etc.? That's certainly not the case for myself or most people who care about technology; I couldn't imagine sitting around playing call of duty all day, living off ramen in a cheap hovel in a bad neighborhood, if that option were offered to me tomorrow. Taxes certainly aren't much of a deterrent; once you add up all the exclusions and whatever I pay an effective 20% tax rate or so, and I'm not even in one of the lowest tax brackets.

That's partly because being an immigrant in itself filters out the people to lazy to leave their home country.

In cases where that isn't true, Asian immigrants aren't generally any more successful than other immigrants. For example, the Hmong population in the U.S., who mainly came as refugees from the Southeast Asian wars, has a very high poverty rate even 35 years later (around 30%, versus a U.S. national average of 10%).

Edit: never mind - I read the wrong post.

If this was billed not as a poverty simulator but as an "Unluckiest person in America" simulator, I might see the point. Perhaps the game should just start off "You go to look for a job, but you get hit by a bus and die".

EDIT: Just tried it again and went with the hourly wage. The game said my supervisor cut it in half. Nice going, game.

Also, who starts smoking when they can't afford it?

People who are depressed, whose friends mostly smoke, and who can't see how they'll ever get out of this financial hole that seems deeper every month. Assuming it costs $80 a month to start smoking, the difference between $0 and $80 at the end of the month looms larger than the difference between -$100 and -$180. In the former case, you're going broke smoking. In the latter case, well, you were already broke, so hey, no change: still broke.

[Edit: I didn't actually play the game. I'm just responding to your comment about it. :) ]

The final impetus for me was realising that I was spending something close to £200 ($300) a month on cigarettes. Nearly 4 months now, and I reckon in a year or so I'll have enough to replace my macbook :)

I've been a smoker for 9 years now, and I still smoke at most 2 packs per month. I buy the most expensive cigarettes that are still mass-market, and still I only pay ~$20 per month for my habit.

If I were poor, I'd have to look more closely at that $20, but for anyone in the middle class $20 is the price of a good meal if that.

With the game, I found myself questioning a lot of the priors such as---why when I'm living <5 miles away from work, do I lose my job the moment I don't have a car? Can't I walk?

Why do I even have a car in the first place? Also, why do I have a mobile phone on monthly contract? Was pre-paid not available in my area?

It's just a game but it seems pretty unfair even for small choices.

That's atypical, the typical smoker smokes between a half pack and a pack a day. I'd even say you're not really a smoker, you just dabble in smoking.

A pack of 20 in the UK costs about £6, which is about $9.

It's going up in the next budget.

I guess you've never, um, opened your eyes and looked around.

Maybe the game needs some other measures to track or force you to react to, like morale, or depression level, or boredom, or popularity, or addiction?

So you ate up $850 in savings and have no way of paying rent the next day.

The game isn't realistic. It condenses in one month what could happen in the span of a year or more, but the result is the same though. you end up broke.

[1] ok ok, I know that sometimes this is unplanned or you already have children before you have no money

[2] often had to turn down things I wanted to do because I couldn't afford them

Although, I must add, I was soft-poor.

But, I always had a safety net: while I may have been low on money and even without money on occasion, I could always have borrowed money from family knowing that they would give it to me if I asked. But, I was saving that for if I ever really really needed it.

Being poor sucks, but this game is trying way to hard to make that point and actually backfires. The contrived situations make me less likely to emphasize with someone who is in that position.