While this does add some drag, in most of the situations I've actually seen, it isn't the main barrier to getting out of poverty. The main barrier seems to be a culture or mindset that prioritizes short term benefit/feelings over long term benefits even when there are other options. For example, things like getting a dog, signing up for cable TV, getting an unnecessarily expensive new phone, spending money on going out to eat, etc.
For many people in poverty, their experiences make these decisions feel very rational so it is hard to think any differently.
In a way, people without a lot of money need to "learn how to be poor"
When you're low on money, you eat sandwiches and ramen and beans and potatoes. You don't eat McDonald's or get Starbucks.
A McDonald's for some of these people IS life. It's the point of being alive, now that they have so little. It's the special treat that they've worked hard for, and it's pretty much the lowest tier special treat.
I remember every single one I had; I didn’t have many.
I'm also not saying poor people do t get any joy. They just don't get to have every joy they want. Even if you're not poor you don't get to do that.
At what point do you see the irresponsibility? Applebees? Ruth's Chris? The French Laundry?
Definitely not the $2 burger special at Mcdonald's, that's for sure.
I'm not poor but I'm realizing just how insane it is to eat out regularly now.
When I was a grad student, my McD's trips were 'hey I found a toonie (Canada), I can treat myself to a McDouble'.
There are poor who are so exhausted and so without capacity to move up that a little enjoyment from fast food is what keeps them going.
And there are also poor who are wasting resources they could be using to move up. Such as young kids with stable homes working retail/hotel/other lower paying jobs, but instead of a making a healthy moong bean salad at home for $3 of ingredients and 30min of their time, they order a $25 chipotle meal from door dash everyday at work.
[1] I wouldn't say it was 100% true - McDonalds is a pretty cheap way of getting calories.
While there are definitely elements of spending badly, this idea that they spend money on the “wrong” things gets dangerously close to dehumanizing the impoverished. Those people are still people, and they like to have the joys and feel included in society like everyone else. There’s a huge mental health aspect to that which can mean the difference between being motivated to change your situation vs just accepting it.
Having cable TV gives you access to unlimited entertainment. A smartphone gives you access to all known human knowledge, and is essentially required now to access benefits, banking, etc. Dogs are widely recognized as being one of the most beneficial things to help with general mood and mental health.
The decisions people are making are rational, their just not aimed at the goal you think they should be aiming for (getting out of poverty).
So does having Internet access, and I don't think very many people pay for cable TV but not Internet.
> A smartphone gives you access to all known human knowledge, and is essentially required now to access benefits, banking, etc.
GP said "an unnecessarily expensive new phone", not "a smartphone". A $160 Samsung Galaxy A03s is perfectly capable of doing all of the things you mentioned. If you're having trouble making ends meet, there is zero excuse to ever buy the new $1000 iPhone.
> While there are definitely elements of spending badly, this idea that they spend money on the “wrong” things gets dangerously close to dehumanizing the impoverished.
Interesting because the main barriers I see are how the system creates perverse incentives for poor people re: getting to be not poor. For example, people on SSI aren't allowed to save. If my sister makes more than ~1k/mo or I save too much (as she's my dependent) she loses her healthcare which is what keeps her from going full Kanye. If I make/save much, I stop getting assistance for my MS meds. Basically, working to get out of poverty wouldn't actually get us out of poverty, we'd just end up giving our money to healthcare companies instead of buying ourselves little luxuries. Another example is that often assistance programs won't help you unless you empty your savings. So if you have 200 dollars and can't make rent, they'll take it from you before they help. So it's more 'rational' to spend that 200 on something else.
Disability, chronic health conditions, and unexpected dependents (be it children, elderly parents, or (in my case) a sibling who manifested a severe mental illness in their 20s) are huge factors in poverty.
Credit is most available and most advantageous to those higher up that get new money first, and creates a moving target that makes long term stability artificially difficult for those with no capital.
Material poverty was much more prevalent in the past than now, but the kind of housing instability and moving goalposts people experience is I think relatively new for the US. I’m not entirely sure/my history is not good enough to know, but I think local ties and familiarity with neighbors used to be much more instrumental for housing stability. Local banks used to be way different/loans were much more about community buy in and local sponsorship than the kind of disconnected financial blob it is now. That came with all kinds of cons, but I think there were some unappreciated pros we’ve forgotten about; I think the different social dynamics when banking was local is part of why housing was treated like more like a commodity than an investment.
A lot of the problems we have now seem to be a consequence of scale and increasing disconnect. Modern access to cheap low interest credit seems increasingly political and disconnected from the real economy, and responsible for keeping old, creaky, dysfunctional behemoths from imploding and restructuring.
That kind of credit heavy policy made sense when there was massive growth opportunity, but it seems increasingly perverse and going to maintaining existing systems instead of investing in new systems, and is I think partially responsible for the amount of centralization of assets we’ve been experiencing.
Without cheap credit, it’s much harder to suck up as many assets as have been centralized the past couple of decades, and wage decreases are much more transparent and difficult to get away with. Cheap credit also severely distorts prices signals/makes it hard for both consumers and producers to know what is getting cheaper to produce and what isn’t.
On the other hand, without cheap credit, a lot of capital intensive research heavy startup companies would be much more difficult to start, which is essential to lowering production costs. The material advances due to production efficiency are under-appreciated in the US, which makes sense when cost of living and basics keep expanding, but are still extremely beneficial, especially on a global scale.
I wish it was easier to know what a good solution was to lowering the cost of living without hampering innovation. They seem somewhat inversely related right now. But this stuff gets complicated and is not my area of expertise.
See Cantillon Effect [1].
> I wish it was easier to know what a good solution was to lowering the cost of living without hampering innovation.
I advocate opening real estate to true free market pressures over a couple decades. It now strands egregious amounts of capital in developed economies, is the most heavily-subsidized market in developed nations, is the lowest hanging fruit of middle class household budgets that can benefit the most from a deflationary adjustment transition to the asset class, and offers near-zero national competitive advantage in a future where cognitive leverage is the key to dominant power that will extend beyond the Earth's biosphere.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Cantillon#Monetary_the...
Obviously not a solution, and these options are worse in many respects than a basic savings account, but if a savings account isn't an option they may be a good idea. Assuming, of course, that total assets aren't accounted for by the assistance programs.
Jewelry is the classic go to for women.
Probably not, or rich people would already have abused the system, and a lawyer who could give advice on whether it was legal or not would cost too much.
Literally: what is the point of saving up 5$/wk? That's less than 300$ by the year. What can you realistically do to get yourself out of poverty for a one-time payment of 300$? You can't even afford therapy to help you get yourself out of immense, soul-crushing burnout because you've been doing nothing to enrich yourself psychologically such as companionship, entertainment, or gifting yourself a nice meal all year.
10$/wk is $520. You can't even start a business selling soap on etsy for 520$. You can maybe get a loan to do so, but now you're on the hook for even more debt for entrepreneurship and the majority of businesses fail.
This is assuming you never have a health problem, you never need medical care, you never have someone you love need medical care, and you have superhuman discipline to go without love, joy, and little pleasures in life for a year.
People who don't have thay ability make mistakes when emergencies inevitably come around.
Those 10$ a week after a year is enough to make up a small car repair, or problem with your paycheck.
Just last year I had an issue where my paycheck was short 1000$, because I wasn't spending everything as it came in, it wasn't a problem. I had a big enough buffer in income and emergency funds to make up for it.
If it had happened to my colleague who doesn't save up, he would have had to get a payday loan to put food on his families table.
That's how people stay poor.
The things that prevent poor people from becoming not poor, in my experience, are things like chronic health conditions and abusive upbringings. The things that have gotten people I know out of poverty have usually been education. I don't know a single person who got out of poverty by cancelling netflix. Where are you getting this idea from?
How much money do you think it takes to get out of poverty? Is not buying an iPhone and having an extra $1k, even - let's say they went big on the phone - "out of poverty"? That may not even be a month's rent, depending on location... to have security, you need many multiples of that.
> The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles. But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet. This was the Captain Samuel Vimes "Boots" theory of socioeconomic unfairness.
The cost of credit, unstable housing situations, having a car that breaks down all the time etc. all conspires to keep you poor. As the OP points out, when you are below the threshold needed for "basics", the interest on your debt is always higher than any return on any hypothetical investment you might make with savings (which you can never justify allocating).
American society is great at convincing people that this is their personal moral failing, rather than a system designed to keep the maximum number of people as debt slaves.
https://www.cnn.com/2015/03/06/us/ferguson-missouri-racism-t...
So began an odyssey with Ferguson police, municipal court and city hall that left her with $1,200 in fines that to this day she still doesn’t fully understand. She paid the sum because endless court hearings about the car wore her down.
“I don’t have a lawyer. I’m not a lawyer. It’s me going up against the city of Ferguson when the attorneys won’t help,” Hoskin said this week.
From a NPR story:
Earlier this year, in the series Guilty and Charged, NPR's investigations unit found that the practices in Ferguson are common across the country. The series reported that nationwide, the costs of the justice system are billed increasingly to defendants and offenders, and that this creates harsher treatment of the poor. Because people with money can pay their hundreds or thousands of dollars in fines and fees right away, they are usually done with the court system.
https://www.npr.org/2014/08/25/343143937/in-ferguson-court-f...
It's one of things that boiled over with a lot of the civil rights protests.
This wouldn't necessarily be the case if poor people had access to 401(k)s with matching contributions. But even when they do have "access" to investment accounts it's really rare to have matching contributions of any kind.
And yeah, even if they had it they still couldn't necessarily afford to pay into it.
When I finally had excess income I got a guaranteed ~10% rate of return by paying off my credit card debt. And that's what I did instead of investing. (That, and buying a new mattress.)
Lenders and borrowers alike can’t rely on the borrower having a source of income at all.
For most people on a low income, it could be better to be on an even lower income if in exchange that income could be made more reliable. The instability and stress of precarious employment is worse than the low pay.
This seems contradictory: if rates are sky-high, but they need to be that high to avoid the lenders losing money due to the huge risk of default, then they're not predatory.
Credit makes the modern economy run, but it churns out winners and losers. And some types of credit have more winners or more losers. At what point should society start banning such credit? Just once it crosses over into loan-sharking? Once it results in a net decrease of GDP? Have such analyses been done?
I'm a disabled American who is the breadwinner for myself and another disabled person. Saving would punish us: My sister would lose her health care and I would lose the financial assistance I get for my MS meds. Even if I make more money, it's all going to medical costs, so what's the point?
It is a horrific crime that the incentives are so perverse. I live in New Zealand and we have the same thing to some extent, but mostly not nearly as atrocious as the US systemic abuse.
Here’s hoping that modern medicine finally finds a solution to fix MS for you - disability is often invisible - an analogue to the author’s pervasive problems with poverty. All the best.
And yeah, I'm pulling for medicine! Pretty hopeful about it, though with my luck they'll figure it out when I'm 65-75 and I'll be able-bodied but too old to change my financial fortunes lol
Yes, unforeseen things will still arise but you’d rather have the $1k you need to deal with it than not.
I’m more partial to the argument that splurges allow people to temporarily feel like they aren’t poor
Recognizing everyone is different, the question is, how much hardship can you endure before you just give up?
If wealthy people would only spend their money wisely there wouldn't be a need for things like inheritance tax breaks and family trusts to prop up their wealth. :D
And a splurge for the impoverished isn't '$50 here and there'. My last 'splurge' was 12 dollars for a pair of fleece lined tights so I don't freeze on my way in to work (I walk to work). Or 3-4 bucks at McD's once every two weeks or so.
The $50 figure was what I was replying to. I don’t see how inexpensive clothes or $4 at McD’s is a splurge.
I'm supporting 2 people on 15/hr. Those are splurges. The 'splurge' is not being cold for 15 minutes on my way to work or having a night where I can choose what to eat for dinner.
Nearly 30 years ago, Clinton's "welfare as we know it" reforms were being normalized by the likes of the New Yorker/Atlantic/NPR smart set who were doing the heavy "interpretive labor" of explaining why poor trash waste hundreds of dollars (careful, those are 1990's dollars!) on crap like track suits and sneakers which ultimately reduced to so much status-quo-affirming "empathy". These discussions focused primarily on black people, not more generally on poor, disenfranchised people. The message was that you needn't worry about it because it was a "minority" problem.
Since then, how has the conversation permuted? It has simply become more performative and more mired in the vocabulary of race. Now that it is a problem of race, not class, one merely needs to be "empathetic", which, incidentally, is free.
During Clinton's reign, the discussion about the regression to a society with classes like the 30's (upstairs/downstairs) was handled more abstrusely than the easy pre-chewed treacle about racism/welfare (much easier to mouth platitudes or diatribes about black people or the villian du jour than address the fundamental unfairness between capital and labor). Whatever is systemic has to do with power, and power cares not a whit what you look like, how you talk, or what hole you prefer to fuck or be fucked in. People need to stop looking at the color or location of their fuck-hole and simply find solidarity in the fact they are fucked.
But this, like the possibility of the public lending-library being invented today, is nil.
The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles. But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet. This was the Captain Samuel Vimes "Boots" theory of socioeconomic unfairness.
-Sir Terry Pratchett
Credit cards and payday loans support all purchases and actually exacerbate this issue by extracting money from people. It makes sense after all, they are a service that has to make money and if rich people don't need their service, where is the money going to come from?
Affirm could work if it was not trying to make a profit (maybe off VC funds), but it is difficult for me to understand how it will solve this issue and be profitable.
The problems for the poor in modern America are health care, education, and rent.
Literature doesn’t have to write literally about something for the point to be made. The boots are a stand in for whatever the issue at hand IS (rent vice buying a house would be apt).
Health care: you can afford your insulin or you blood sugar goes out of whack and you end up in the ER.
Education: you can't afford the time to learn a new skill (or even attend school) so you can't move up out of your low-paying job.
Rent: you're paying high rent instead of owning.
The issues extend from these all the way down to the boots level.
Now. But in the past it was plausible. See this list of assorted wages and prices for items in the mid-19th century in the US [1].
Boots were around $25. There were many jobs that paid low enough that $25 would be in the neighborhood of 1.5 months worth of pay.
[1] http://anotherandrosphereblog.blogspot.com/2013/03/how-much-...
> This is true if you are free to choose to buy a new shirt now or save a bit and buy it later. But if you are running out of shirts now, you don't have that choice.
Do you have any better example? Shirts can be bought used. I do not consider myself as being in poverty but often I use to buy something used, especially if I know how to fix what is broken.
Telling poor people to simply make better choices is downright shameful. Close though is the “effective altruism” crap when it goes so far that even holocausts can be excused. We should be trying to make the current moment sustainable and better for all. Aim for giving people enough stability to actually make decent decisions before worrying about petty things and far off futures.
Without those three ingredients, you have a serious handicap to a stable life.
I make more money now than I ever did, and expected to be much happier. My pandemic "depression" has killed my hope and that money is not making me happy.
Anecdote is not data: understood.