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.