I was about 11 and my mom fled a abusive relationship. Didn't really have a plan but we started in Oregon and ended up in Utah. We were getting survivors benefits from Social Security and ran out of cash. So we had to kill a few weeks in until the next check came in.
So we stayed at a battered woman's shelter in Cedar City. Lovely place, lovely people. Everyone helped out cooking. It was a small place, maybe 20 woman and children there and a few staff.
But one night my mom volunteered to make a cake. I remember this vividly. It was a Cherry Chip cake from a box and there was a thing of vanilla frosting. I ended up adding the ingredients and mixing them up. So the cake goes in the oven and bakes and something is wrong. I forgot to add eggs into the batter. So we ended up with gross sludge.
People were nice about but you could tell everyone was really disappointed. And cake was a luxury, it wasn't like we could go out and grab another one.
I'm going on 20+ years of mailing them cash with a note saying to buy cake.
Thank you for that story. The people who run these shelters are angels.
My wife escaped her ex by seeking shelter at a battered women's place. I owe her life to them.
There my wife met women of a completely different background. My wife is white, at the time already well educated, and very type A [0]. Her only "disadvantage" was that she was a recent immigrant to the US, with all the difficulties of being a recent immigrant. So the shelter is the only place in the past decade where she met people you never meet in the US; the others. She has very powerful memories of the people she met there.
They have one fundamental rule: you don't tell any men where it's located. Although I'm filled with curiosity (partially lack of discipline, partially to send them a cheque), I've never asked her where this place is; I don't want to put her in that position. Not to the place to which I owe her life.
[0] It's funny. She's very type-A, very much in charge, yet it took her manager, a black man, to force her to seek help. He told her either to go stay at a shelter or not come to work the next day.
Yeah.. That is pretty much rule #1 when a place takes you in. Don't tell anyone where you are at.
I have given about 50 old cell phones I collected to the battered woman's shelter here. Even if they don't have cell service they can still call 9-1-1.
I'm sorry if I misinterpret, but if only angels could handle such welfare works, there wouldn't be many shelters. I sometimes hear people say, in various ways, that a big heart is necessary and sufficient for these situations. It isn't. I believe a professional worker with little empathy helps more than most a purely nice persons. Even worse, some kind gestures can hurt precarious people. Of course, wonderful persons exist in the Welfare sector, either experienced or not. And even professional humanitarians can hurt more than they help, as it has been documented in Haiti or Thailand.
> This is interesting, it sounds like your wife went to an underground/unlisted type of women's shelter?
If i’m not mistaken, I believe that most shelters attempt to keep a cloak over their actual identity and purpose. They’re often vaguely named and are placed in non-obscure locations. Nonetheless, whether it’s listed or not, I’m glad their partner was able to get the help they needed.
I think this used to be more common when in the 60s and 70s, when shelters were basically run by small groups of women volunteers and relied on word-of-mouth to get the word out. A lot of shelters are now public, get funding, and have websites so women can find them easily. I'm not not really sure how common unlisted vs. public is nowadays.
I grew up with certain privileges. Dad's an engineer and a go-getter, mom has a masters. But we were a one income family (my mom's work doesn't cross intl. borders) with a bit of job insecurity when we first moved to N. America.
Most of my childhood anxiety was due to my parents being too honest with me (my dad got laid of twice in the early 90s' recessions, I was seven).
I remember every month I would lend my mom my savings (about 200) to help her get us get to the end of the month. Since my mom depended on this being available, I asked very solemnly when I used it to buy a CD burner. To this day I ask permission to my wife to buy most anything (she has a similar background and does the same).
I remember looking at a $20 and all the power it held. A tank of gas. Several days of food. Again, similar story for my wife - she lived on a $5/day food budget.
I remember that, on long drives, we'd fit the five of us into a two door car with four seat belts. My mom's $1000 k-car had unreliable breaks. An issue on the freeway. My father never drove faster than 50 mph on the freeway (the limit was 60 at the time)
I remember my dad joking about feeding the "black hole" our non-mortgage household debt. I have deep aversion to any type of debt.
Eventually my dad moved up the ranks and all this went away. When I entered college things changed and we ended up quite well off, to the point where I have no student debt thanks to my parents.
Trough all of this, though, my parents were very clear that no matter how "difficult" (they labeled us as "poor") things were, people were much worse off than us.
My family never owned a car, went on vacation or went out eating much (only on very fancy occasions). We stayed as 6 of us in a 2 bedroom apartment. And pocket money was never a thing. I especially remember that even gift money from others was something you handed over to mom for daily expenses.
But, it was all a conscious choice by my parents to allow us to have solid nutrition, good education and avoid debt.
They were always fully transparent about expenses in the house and what each rupee meant to them. Even when I asked for any money, it was always contextualized in number of meals or how many clothes that bought us.
I am doing well now, but it really does teach you to be mindful of money. It has had some adverse effects too, where it took a long time for me to stop being so visibly stingy.
Growing up knowing how much things cost and that we were still in the 90th percentile of our country (India in the 90s), helped me a lot in gaining empathy for those that I knew earned a lot less, and the hard decisions they might've had to make on a day to day basis.
> To this day I ask permission to my wife to buy most anything (she has a similar background and does the same).
This is such a beneficial personal finance habit. It prevents lots of unnecessary spending on stuff you don't really need that would take up space in your place of living.
Or both. Most times it gets paid back, but twice a year something falls through and the parents can't pay it back. The child is industrious / saver / works an after school job and manages to save about $200 every six months, but can never build up a long term balance. It's one of the things that can make growing up in a family in poverty feel like trying to escape a gravity well.
I've seen this play out over couple years between my younger brother (after I'd moved out) and my parents. I see the pattern repeat with my sister and her son. He, my nephew (13), stayed with my wife and me over Christmas. He said he had been making money with after school jobs and hoped to be able to save enough for a car when he's 16, but wasn't sure if that was going to be possible because his Mom and step Dad have to borrow (or "borrow") money from him every month.
I didn't tell him yet but I decided there that in 2 or 3 years I'm going to start fixing up a good 1st car for him.
If you’re living paycheck to paycheck it’s entirely possible to not be a budget problem, especially I f you’re spending almost exactly your income and just barely feeding and sheltering your family.
If you start any one pay period in a hole due to an unexpected expense; or if your bills become due earlier in the week/month than your paycheck arrives, you can cover your monthly expenses with your income but not with your cash on hand.
It’s the same as how a business can be making a profit but still go out of business due to cash flow problems.
Regardless of whether or not you are right, this is just not an appropriate way to respond to someone who has just shared a trauma. This is a case of "if you can't say something nice, then don't say anything at all".
No worries. I don't think its fair to say I'm traumatized. Just standard immigrant stories. We weren't rich, or comfortable, but never skipped a meal. Therefore we were actually very fortunate.
My wife, on the other hand, is from an ex commie country. She could write a book of her insane stories.
It's written by someone who became a paraplegic. You may have seen it on HN recently, but maybe not.
It's not something that you can consume in a few minutes. But it's worth reading in its entirety. It really, truly helps you appreciate just how much most of us have in life.
I apologize if this is tangential. But it was such an incredible experience to read it that I wanted to share it with someone. I haven't felt my perspective about life change that much by a single work before.
It's a longform essay on life, happiness, morals, philosophy, ethics, and someone's personal journey through the pits of hell. It's also an extended suicide note that might make you rethink certain aspects of society. But it also has a certain flavor of humor:
I have not been an author for long (and won’t be one for long!) ...
Thank you for sharing this. I think this is the most important thing I've been linked to in a long time.
This may be even more tangential, but I was really struck by how emphatic he is about pointing out his suffering, and how frustrated he is with other people that have his same injury minimizing the pain of living with it. I've seen that same discourse go on and on with people that suffer from my condition. Not "disabled" as such, but another issue that impacts your life in a large way and often needs medical intervention. Some people claiming that their condition doesn't limit them in any real way and shouldn't be considered a problem and in fact makes them stronger and others angry at them for even making claims like that when so much of our existence is this fundamental pain, and when medical intervention isn't always covered by insurance or researched as much as it could be. Then those first people mad at the second group for implying that everybody with this condition should feel limited, etc. I thought that the dialogue was unique but in retrospect all similar groups probably go through this to some extent for the reasons he pointed out.
Wow. When I clicked the link and saw its length I didn't think I would read it all but I just finished it in one sitting. Tremendously sad, yet I couldn't help but laugh at times. Clayton certainly has a way with words.
As an able-bodied young man I could never truly understand the depth of his suffering. I'm actually shocked at the emotional response I felt from reading this. Incredibly moving.
I just finished reading the whole thing. It was definitely an honest and transparent testament to his (and others') struggle. I wouldn't say I felt moved by it, but I take away a renewed perspective in life, an understanding of how good I have it, and insight into what potentially the worst possible fate is.
To anyone else that may see this link: use Firefox compatibility-view.
Growing up in poverty is much more than just going hungry every night. Poverty consumes each person that lives inside of it and strips them of their own individual identity. As the author said, if you look at the faces of people around you long enough, you will start to see pain, fear, uncertainty, and many more unspoken emotions that is tied to poverty.
Poverty makes a person begin questioning what it is they did in their life that brought them to this low of a point. Ignoring all of the economic reasons and social standings, poverty makes the person believe they are incapable of ever achieving anything more. It is when that same person begins to actually feel as if they can escape poverty that they also begin to have stronger fears of insecurity. For many, they feel as if they do not belong in a higher bracket. Trailer parks, frozen foods, and generic brands are all they ever knew and it’s all they should ever have.
Being around those with money who have never experienced this lack of worth is a terrible time for those who came from poverty. In their eyes, if they were given the opportunity to be so comfortable in life, they would do anything they could to spread joy to anyone who walked through their door. But for many families, a fridge full of groceries is common; an abundance of snack choices for your guests is nothing out of the ordinary. For those in poverty, this sense of wanting to give back to those who may need it more than you is something that is learned through hardship and life experiences.
I had the opposite experience growing up poor (although knew plenty of people who feel as you did). For me, I constantly felt that my situation was "wrong" and didn't fit me. I didn't want to eat frozen food or wear K-Mart sneakers, I thought I deserved better. It pushed me to fight hard to achieve what I considered a reasonable standard of living. Had I taken the advice or followed in the footsteps of those around me, it never would have happened. Instead I focused on my love of computers (even if it existed more in my head than real life since we couldn't afford one for a long time). That focused carried me out of poverty and then some.
I'm convinced some subset of poor people that are high achievers will always reject their environment and refuse to settle.
I've felt both extremes. As a child growing up in poverty, I felt my intellect didn't match the situation I found myself in. I remember being deeply angry watching other children squander opportunities/resources I would have taken 110% advantage of. As a young adult I based some (not all, but enough) of my life decisions on "what the hell do I need to do to ensure I am never in this situation again?"
Yet also as a reasonably successful adult, I still never entirely feel secure in my class position. Sometimes it's hard for me to tell whether I'm being responsibly frugal or still living in a mindset that I can't afford nice things. Or if I do buy something high end then I question if I actually splurged because of a mindset of not being able to hold onto money, if that makes sense.
My sister went to university in another city. I decided to get a software job immediately with 18 because I have a mental illness that prevents me from performing well in academia. I was still living with my mom. 3 years later she comes back. Turns out she lied and she didn't even take a single exam and my mom had to return thousands of € in child support payments (eligible until 25 if you are a student). Although I felt bad for mooching off my parents I managed to save a substantial amount of money and used it to buy a tiny apartment with the money.
Now the big question is: Why the hell am I the success story in my family? It should be the other way around!
I couldn't agree more. I fall squarely into this camp. I grew up with a father in prison and a school teacher mother that had to work 3 jobs to provide for myself and my three brothers. I always knew I could do better, and now I run a multi-billion dollar organization. I just knew I wanted more for myself.
My bigger concern now is how to raise up my four kids so that they come out motivated, hungry, willing to work, etc. I believe struggled makes great people, my kids won't know that type of struggle - fingers crossed. I ran the crucible, they won't... what does that mean for them?
It also crushes the rest, who might not be gifted or lucky enough to catch a break, despite their continual efforts. Not to disregard your circumstances, but humans irrationally see patterns in randomness. As a counter point: wealth also makes great people (pick any noted 16-19th century scientist, and there's a good chance they were wealthy & could afford to dick around long enough to discover fundamental laws. Alternatively, look at political, startup and corporate leadership)
True, it depends on the person. However, I think that trials, whether given by unfortunate circumstances or wise parents, give you an opportunity to improve in ways that simple wealth never could.
I grew up similar - never thinking I’d have the same life forever. I’m certainly not as well off as I’d like to be yet, but I’m starting to get my life ready to have kids (4 or 5 years out I’d guess), and I’m already worried about spoiling them too much. I mean the entire motivation has been to start a family that didn’t have to have the same issues.
Would love to read something from a similar background and how they navigate raising self-motivated, but well taken care of kids.
Struggle isn't noble. Struggle isn't a shortcut to character development. Struggle isn't something you should wish on anyone. Struggle is just struggle.
Plenty of people struggle. And plenty of people are assholes. There's plenty of overlap.
I recently read Metropole by Ferenc Karinthy where a linguist finds himself in a completely foreign society where he cannot learn the language, can make no connection with anyone, and winds up on the streets when his money runs out. It isn't a perfect novel but it it foresees our society where the line between self-sufficiency and poverty grows thinner and thinner. Once someone falls off perhaps due to illness, job loss, or just bad luck it is increasingly difficult to get back up and people (including and indicting myself) just walk by. I am guessing that Levine's account is thirty or more years old. I hope that such kindness hasn't completely disappeared.
I had become poor like this once in my life. I had to ration my food so that it would last a week. I had to think many times before consuming anything as to how important it was for me. I had to think about transportation costs to interviews. I had to tell people that I couldn't pay them because I didn't have money.
One important thing I noticed that I became more superstitious. Like you mentioned, I kept questioning the paths I had traveled in my life, kept wondering if what I was going to do next was going to help or harm. It was really crazy. I could, of course, see that happening in myself, but the rationalization was, "what's the harm?"
I also think that's tied up with one's faith in oneself. And the eroding of that faith was quite surprising when poor. I guess some people have a strong faith in themselves. I didn't.
I also noticed that we focus on too many petty things in our lives. Social structures, peer acceptance, comparing ourselves for a sense of worth. None of these really matter at the end of the day (or life!).
Most of my four years of college were lived in this state. I never knew at the beginning of the week if I'd still have food by the end of the week. Instead of studying I'd lay awake all (ALL!) night running a loop over in my head trying to figure out if/how the money would last to next semester. It really takes a continuous cognitive toll.
Scarcity: The New Science of Having Less and How It Defines Our Lives (Sendhil Mullainathan & Eldar Shafir)
The authors, through empirical research (awesome experiments) show that scarcity (poverty) makes people perform worse on IQ tests by ~17 points (which they regain as soon as scarcity disappears). Poverty makes day to day living an endless barrage of difficult decision making.
Andrew Yang mentions this in his U.S. Presidential campaign speeches as a benefit of UBI. I wish more people were listening to his message. From battered women to families where the sole earner has lost their job - all would benefit from a minimum income and make this a much better society.
This right here illustrates something I've been thinking about a lot - the various ways you can define freedom, and how differently it tends to be defined in the US compared to how I as a European define it. It seems that in the US it's common to define freedom as simply the absence of obligations and demands. So low taxes and small government = more freedom. Everyone gets to pay less in taxes so they are more free. For me this seems incredibly simplistic - it completely ignores the reality that actual freedom requires power, it requires opportunity, and it requires choice. Most poor people have no freedom, because they have neither power, opportunity nor choice. Poverty is completely crippling - you spend all your energy and focus on surviving, so you have very few resources to invest in bringing about a less desperate situation.
So I don't get why the 'land of the free', the 'greatest nation on earth' can can be so ideologically opposed to wealth redistribution and the concept of a wellfare state as it seems to be. Jeff Bezos would not feel less free if he was worth 50 billion instead of 100. But the freedom that money could create among millions of others is enormous. And I'm not just arguing this as a moral kinda thing, e.g. 'think of the starving children', I'm just as much talking about this as a pragmatic, how-to-make-the-economy-work-better sort of thing. It's not just handouts, it's investing in people that don't have the resources to invest in themselves. It's increasing the size of the middle class that is capable of buying things, creating a bigger market for entrepreneurs to sell stuff to. Get the money circulating instead of stagnating in some tax haven.
Is it because the Cold War has forever branded anything remotely resembling socialism anathema? Is it the propaganda from Fox News? Is it because the country's independence movement was kicked off with an opposition to taxes (the Boston Tea Party) and that has forever instilled the notion that taxes = bad in your very soul? I can see why those things would create resistance, but it just seems like such an ideological and not very pragmatic position at this point.
I know this isn't exactly the point, but 50 billion divided by the population of the US is $166 per person. Even assuming you could magically sell off all of his stock without it losing any of its value and only distribute it to the poorest 10%, you're still only talking about a few thousand dollars per person, once.
All the money of the richest people in the U.S. could provide the poorest with a good income for a year or two, but then it's gone and we still haven't addressed the cost of education or healthcare, or even started to address the fact that the poor in the U.S. are not particularly poor by worldwide standards.
From a pragmatic, how-to-make-the-economy-work-better sort of perspective, there mostly needs to be a lot more wealth, period, in the form of more housing, more energy (hopefully renewable), more food (though we waste a lot in the US), more healthcare, more everything. From a basic math perspective, it seem like redistribution gets us like 1% of the way there, and only in the U.S. Once you start redistributing around the world, you run into the problem that a whole lot of people are really desperately poor in a way that can just devour redistributed dollars unless those dollars are creating growth. This isn't to say that redistribution isn't a very useful tool, and I'm actually a fan of lots of spending on infrastructure and a social safety net, but I believe economic growth is how you erase poverty.
> All the money of the richest people in the U.S. could provide the poorest with a good income for a year or two, but then it's gone
That's actually not true.
Think about where all that money goes when people spend it.
And then the people who receive it spend it again. Etc.
Round in a circle, basically, so they will continue to have a good income for much longer than the back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests.
Perhaps in perpetuity if the redistribution continues; then it would be a system change rather than a one-off event.
That said, I completely agree with you about investment, especially in things like housing, and other forms of investment and wealth generation.
> I believe economic growth is how you erase poverty
If you believe in the idea that "what you measure is what you create", then it depends on how economic growth is measured.
Measures that look at growing the average wealth or economic activity of people in a population largely ignore poverty. Even with a lot of desparately poor people, because of the power law distribution of wealth, the poorest people contribute less to the average than their numbers would suggest.
For that sort of reason, I prefer the idea that a society is judged by how it treats its poorest people first.
(And by people I don't mean citizens, because non-citizen residents are real people too.)
Thank you for you comment! I think that’s a very good point about the money circulating, but at that point it feels like an end that could be achieved by printing money, but the problem isn’t really a lack of money, it’s a lack of things like housing and whatnot. I think perhaps printing money could help, but lots of places have tried to print their way to prosperity and it tends to end badly, so I don’t know...
That said, I do agree with what you said about measuring growth and poverty, but I think the simple math about redistribution is useful because while you can circulate dollars, you can’t circulate factories or farms or infrastructure. Wealth in useful forms throws off income that is a small percentage of what those things are worth, if you “consume” the wealth and not just the income, then the wealth is destroyed and doesn’t produce more wealth, and the numbers on redistributing income look even more bleak than the numbers on redistributing total wealth in dollar terms. And that’s what I feebly attempted to communicate, that there just aren’t enough productive assets in the world to produce all the things we as a species need to feel like we’re living our best lives and certainly not to do so sustainably.
While i agree with the overall sentiment of your comment, the whole thing about “Jeff Bezos worth $50bil instead of $100bil” ticked me off a bit. Mostly because it reeks of lack of knowledge and substance.
How do you propose making it happen? Note that by saying this, i dont mean “how do you convince him to do it”. I mean, what would be the process for doing that, assuming everyone is already on board with it.
99% (or close to it) of those billions of Jeff Bezos’ worth are in Amazon stock. How do you propose making his net worth only $50bil and making use of the rest? Making him give up half of the ownership in the company by giving his shares to the government, thus making the government a major shareholder in the company?
This is a genuine question, because i do not see how else shares can be feasibly taxed until the moment they are sold. And there is no way Jeff would be able to sell half of them, i bet there are rules that don’t even allow major shareholders cash out like that, since it would crash the value of Amazon overnight. And by the time he is done selling, he would have made way less than that, as the value of shares will be continuously dropping as he sells. Not even the mentioning the whole aspect of forcing someone to sell their shares and, thus, giving up their ownership in the company.
Making Jeff Bezos' net worth suddenly belong to other people would be a massive event, and if done clumsily would undermine the foundations of property and ownership, which so many things depend on. Even those aren't fundamental truths, but people really care about them. Not likely to happen without a catastrophe (e.g. WW3).
On the other hand, making it so someone like Jeff Bezos could never accrue $100bil in the first place is a lot more plausible.
> i do not see how else shares can be feasibly taxed until the moment they are sold.
Oh, that's just a matter of assigning a notional value through some accounting estimation process. The value might be wrong but that's ok, overpaid tax would be returned if a lower value was discovered at the next sale.
But why sell the shares anyway. If you're going to transfer $50bil (currently in shares) to lots of poor people, transfer the shares. I expect people would find a way to trade their microshares afterwards to get the things they need. Amazon would probably be happy to run the microshare-trading service for a small commission :-)
> This right here illustrates something I've been thinking about a lot - the various ways you can define freedom, and how differently it tends to be defined in the US compared to how I as a European define it. It seems that in the US it's common to define freedom as simply the absence of obligations and demands. So low taxes and small government = more freedom.
That's an exaggerated and misleading description. Per person government spending in the U.S. ($22,500 per year adjusted for purchasing power) is well above the OECD average, and right between Switzerland and Germany: https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/reg_cit_glance-2018-41-e.... (Factoring out the difference in military spending, about $2,000 per person in the U.S. versus $600 in Germany, doesn't change the ranking. The next country below Germany is Ireland, at under $20,000.) Four of the largest five EU countries (Spain, Italy, Germany, U.K.) spend less per person -- again, adjusted for purchasing power -- than the U.S. France is only a little higher, around $23,500. Excluding Norway (oil money) and Luxembourg (tax haven), the highest is Denmark, at $26,000.
We have a big government in the U.S. It's often not very efficient. We consistently spend more to get less in terms of education or healthcare. But that's a very different issue.
The ultimate state of being in the US is one of higher freedom.
What happens at the bottom end is neither here nor there.
I prefer the European model as well - but let's be clear about this - most socialist countries don't really care about this either from a moral perspective, it's more of a law and order thing and a different way of running a society internally.
The UK is leaving the EU in large part because a lot of people think immigration from other reasonably-developed countries is too high. The actually poor parts of the world are like a massive blind spot that we wave away into the category of 'asylum seekers' as if they're subhuman.
Everywhere and everyone has a blind spot somewhere.
I grew up poor even by local standards during a civil war in a former communist state. Had 5 younger brothers and sisters living in a 30m2 apartment, electricity regularly being cut off, days without food, etc.
I identify with nothing you said - I could clearly identify the causes of the poverty in our family in my dysfunctional parents.
The biggest problem with being poor is when you get stuck at 0 it's incredibly hard to get out of that. Hard to start well at a new job when you got nothing to eat at home, don't know if your power is going to get switched off tomorrow and you might get evicted any moment.
I would say the first time I lost the fears you mentioned was when I hit the lowest point - when you decide your life isn't worth living the way it is - what do you have to lose ?
But those fears weren't the thing holding me back - and overcoming them didn't really pull me out either - sure it put me in a different mindset once I got the opportunity - but it took getting help from my sister (who I supported earlier) now getting in a better situation where she could help me get out of that stuck at 0 while I deal with my debts and get the opportunity to do something.
>Poverty consumes each person that lives inside of it and strips them of their own individual identity.
I have no idea what this means. What I know from personal experience is that poverty makes one care less about the future. And make stupid decisions like voting for the guy who gives out $1 bread, sprays money in the air and ends up stealing $10mil.
>Poverty makes a person begin questioning what it is they did in their life that brought them to this low of a point.
For someone born to a poor home, this doesn't apply
>In their eyes, if they were given the opportunity to be so comfortable in life, they would do anything they could to spread joy to anyone who walked through their door
Depends on where you grew up or what your parents said to you. Where I'm from, wealthy guys who were once poor don't spread joy, but pain & oppress others with their wealth. They make completely new friends, become extremely busy, develop amnesia and suddenly can't remember people from their days of poverty. They rub it in your face, won't give out $1 to help anyone but would buy you as many beers as you'd like.
Some people who escape poverty overspend, buy shiny wheels, drink their eyes out - buy, buy, buy to enjoy the life they never had in childhood and hasten their way to poverty.
Another set become withdrawn. The fear that the good fortune is temporary makes this class live very simple lives. To them, "Winter is just on the horizon."
Well the OP was saying that poverty has a psychological dimension and it seems to me you agree with that.
From your perspective that psychological dimension can be explained without much interiority (i.e. makes you do stupid things) but for the OP it needs explaining from the inside in terms of feelings.
You are both saying very similar things except you are applying very different value judgements to them.
If I had to guess I would say you have a rather more deterministic / mechanistic view of the human experience than the OP.
I'm sad that you're getting downvoted for posting what you obviously experienced personally.
I can't agree or disagree with most of it, since it wasn't my experience, but I do want to change your mind on one point:
" And make stupid decisions like voting for the guy who gives out $1 bread, sprays money in the air and ends up stealing $10mil."
Perhaps it does make some people make stupid decisions, but I'm become very careful in what I label "stupid". When you've got un-met needs, you do what you have to in order to fulfill that need. If you can get free bread and money in return for a promise to vote a certain way, that's basic incentives.
The demographics of HN are well known. The average biases of said demographics are well known. It is telling but not exactly surprising that every single comment that claims to have first hand experience with poverty is disagreeing* with the GP and also grey and at the bottom.
*GP seems to be placing arguing that psychological factors are key to what makes poverty suck and most of the people disagreeing seem to think psychological factors are a non-issue or take a distant second place to more immediate material concerns (though they don't necessarily agree beyond that).
Man, do I associate with "winter is coming." I grew up fairly poor and I got a start up lotto ticket. I wouldn't say I'm rich by any stretch, but I'm comfortable. I've expected the gravy train to end the entire ride.
Yeah, I know this feeling. I finished school with a teaching certificate in '09 when not even public schools were hiring, and took a series of manual labor temp jobs until someone was willing to hire me to clerk in their warehouse.
I'm making about 5 times as much per year now than when I started(I'm incredibly lucky), but I still remember what it was like to have to live frugally on $10.00/hr to $12.00/hr. I had to change oil and do repairs on my old GM truck myself, buy anything I needed from the Goodwill and fix it up, and generally try to make ends meet. Luckily rent was really cheap and the grocery store and a parts shop were in walking distance(~.5 mile one-way). And having the truck meant that I could move bulk items like a couch and a coffee table.
Living like that is why I don't buy new cars and have avoided trying to buy a house. Because at any time my luck could run out and I'll have to use my wits to stretch my means again.
Being scared of the gravy train stopping is exactly why I bought my house. By shoveling as much money I to it as I can, I can remove an expense long term. Paying only taxes and utilities seems better than paying rent and utilities.
If you have the option to go for it, I would question whether avoiding trying to buy a house is smart compared with renting, assuming that's the alternative.
If you can't keep up payments on a house purchase, you can still sell it (or the foreclosing bank will), and if that happens after a few years to cover costs, probably still come out ahead compared with renting.
> What I know from personal experience is that poverty makes one care less about the future.
That's interesting.
What I take from the psychological aspect of poverty is this:
Poverty makes one care a lot about the future. As in worry. Worry about the next meal, the next rent payment, paying that bill, how to socialise without paying for anything, keeping up appearances because you think getting a job (or a better one) depends on appearing successful, being scared to go to the doctor about that lump because you might end up homeless and still can't afford treatment anyway, wanting to not worry your family but not wanting to hide things, etc.
The problem is this occurs continuously - you can't afford a break from thinking about near-future needs, because some of them affect you every day (e.g. skipping meals to save cash, while making sure your coworkers don't notice), and some of them feel like threats every day (e.g. you never know when late rent will turn to an eviction, you don't answer phone calls from unknown numbers because you don't want to acknowledge contact if it's a debt collector).
This is a high, continuous cognitive load and that makes it harder to make good planning decisions. Both because there are more immediate needs, and because simply thinking clearly needs the luxury of a decent stretch of time not worry about other things. It's not even enough to have a short break, as it takes a long time to wind down from a state of perpetual back-of-the-mind worrying and juggling problems.
If anything, people who are reasonably well off and safe economically care less about the future, because they don't have to care, it'll be fine.
>> Poverty makes a person begin questioning what it is they did in their life that brought them to this low of a point.
> For someone born to a poor home, this doesn't apply
I think it does apply but in a less obvious way.
People born to poor homes are still shown what they could aspire to: A higher standard of living than they started in, and greater opportunities to aspire to.
If anything, they see more of that than the middle classes, because they start from a relatively disadvantaged position, but are seeing the same things on TV (say) as everyone else.
And so when they grow up to be responsible for themselves, if they believe it's not fixed and depends on themselves but they are still dirt poor, the question becomes "What haven't I done with my life that I should have?"
> What I know from personal experience is that poverty makes one care less about the future. And make stupid decisions like voting for the guy who gives out $1 bread, sprays money in the air and ends up stealing $10mil.
What do you mean by personal experience? That you were poor and made the named stupid decisions? Or that you know of poor people who made the named decisions?
This seems very disconnected from reality to me. Romanticization of the poor as some sort of noble, underprivileged class, yearning for the opportunity to bring humanity back to the world is a very common narrative sold by people who are usually just trying to make themselves feel better about something. The truth is that poverty tends to just harden people to the world. You see much less empathy in impoverished communities, poverty is more likely to make you care less about other people, not more, and much more likely to end up victimizing other people, usually other poor people. That’s why our poor communities have such wide spread problems with violence and property crimes. Telling lovely made up stories about what it’s like to be poor might make you feel better, but it’s not helping anybody, and it’s certainly not accurate.
I don't think it's disconnected from reality at all. This kind of "underprivileged class" description echoes my experience, but my experience was largely rural poverty rather than urban.
In our case we got to know our neighbours better because we'd borrow things from one another, my parents couldn't afford childcare so I stayed with those same neighbours after school.
Now I live in a city the poorer areas are much closer to what you describe.
Such an experience is very atypical, regardless of rural or urban setting. Poor rural communities are just as likely as urban communities (if not more likely) to have issues with substance abuse, violence and family harm. Poverty tends to take your childhood away from you, but good parents can overcome that and bring some reasonable level of stability to the home. But this is absolutely not the norm in poor communities. It sounds like you grew up with two parents, who weren’t neglectful? Well that essentially puts you amongst an elite group in a poor community. Most poor children don’t have two parents, and don’t have any reasonable level of stability at home. If your parents also managed to avoid abusing you, or exposing you at a harmful level of substance abuse, then you would have most certainly had a better childhood experience than the majority of your socio-economic peers.
My rural experience (UK) may be different from what you're expecting if you're taking an americentric viewpoint. I had one neglectful parent who later married physically abusive step-parent. I experienced physical violence and sexual abuse as a child, but my surroundings outside of the home were largely positive despite poverty.
EDIT: also some of your claims here are questionable. I don't believe that children in an average poor household experience abuse + drug usage. I knew plenty of poor children who had one parent, I knew some who had a drug user in the house and I definitely knew some who were abused but I didn't know a single person who ticked all of those boxes.
It is not good to make implicit assumptions that are not generally shared. Your post is either a cruel joke, or you assume certainty about something like reincarnation (another life). That might be "obvious" to you, but if you have just a bit of interest in what others think, you'd know that for a very large majority, that is not obvious at all. Do you write for yourself or for an audience?
I had a neighbour once that made the boldest claim about "what must be in the universe", never empathizing with others but just making the wildest claims about supernatural phenomena. She ended up being committed at an institution.
The reason you are in the position to earn money and the poor person isn't, is luck.
No matter how you look at it. You had no influence on your genes, the culture you were born in, your upbringing and the socio economic status of your parents, how your genes were influenced by the environment and so on. All the little pieces that made you who you are, were outside of your control.
Now you can say "well I decided at some point to do this, and that is why I am successful." But there are lots of factors that let you into the position to make that decision.
If you had the same genes, the same upbringing and so on as a poor person, you would be poor as well. In fact you would be exactly that person.
We should be thankful for the systems that enabled us to achieve. From roads and a government that has made things relatively stable, and we should acknowledge the dark parts of our life that have helped tailor who we are. A lot of life is chance (your genes, where you were born, and to whome). However, I firmly believe that you are wrong in your last paragraph. You can argue determinism, but that is lazy. I escaped poverty and it was a lot of work. I chose to do that and I got lucky. It required both luck and hard work.
> However, I firmly believe that you are wrong in your last paragraph. You can argue determinism, but that is lazy. I escaped poverty and it was a lot of work. I chose to do that and I got lucky.
It doesn't need to be determinism. You have no control over random events as well. How exactly did you decide to chose the way you did? Why were you able to stick to the hard work part?
Of course you can assume some supernatural you that is able to make decisions for your brain. But there is no evidence for that. As far as we know, how the neurons are connected and how they interact with the rest of the environment determines all our longings and our decisions.
I find that Robert Sapolsky's "Behave: the biology of humans at our best and worst" is a must read for anyone who wants a small glimpse on the topic of why humans are the way they are.
If i understood it correctly, your whole argument can be boiled down to “we have no free will, because all our decisions are influenced by a ton of factors outside of our control, thus making us not in control of anything.”
While this is debatable, it is not a useful lens to look at the world through. Why work out or study or attempt to do anything difficult and work on improving yourself to try and achieve something? If you dont feel motivated, it is all your brain chemistry and other factors outside of your control. Poor you, and lucky all those other people who worked hard and tried achieving something, too bad your brain chemistry and outside factors didn’t convince you to work on yourself and improve things. Nothing you can do about it, so why worry about it, right? /s
I am not trying to evoke the “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” point, that’s not what i am trying to say at all. A lot of things in life are definitely due to luck and factors outside of our control. But a lot of things require both hard work and luck, with luck alone not being enough.
Think about it. Imagine you randomly meeting Elon Musk at a grocery store, and you got lucky, he decides to have a conversation with you while waiting in line (it is a far-fetched scenario, i know, but bear with me here). He asks what do you do and what you are into. If you worked hard in the field of aerospace engineering and made significant contributions, that conversation can easily turn into a job or learning something new and cool. If you didnt work hard (regardless of the field), then the conversation will prolly be about some surface level topic like the weather or tesla stuff, and you are left with nothing at the end.
Just working hard isn’t enough by itself, but it ensures that you are prepared to take the most advantage out of a lucky situation that could present itself.
A Thomas Jefferson’s quote comes to mind as relevant as well: “I'm a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it.”
If you are motivated by the belief that your efforts will make a significant long term beneficial difference to your life, go for it.
But what if it really isn't true? What if for each thing that appears to be obtained through your own effort, there are plenty of other random factors in your life that interact with your apparently-obtained gains and tend to cancel out the benefits by making something else worse?
Then you'd be labouring under a convincing illusion. One that probably can be examined by people interested in studying it.
If it could be studied, would you rather know the truth, or would you rather not even look, so you can stay motivated?
(Btw, I'm a fan of the quote as well. Above is written from a devil's advocate sort of approach.)
I find that reading behave gave me a new perspective on how to look at people that are less fortunate than me and how I think of "evil" people.
> While this is debatable, it is not a useful lens to look at the world through. Why work out or study or attempt to do anything difficult and work on improving yourself to try and achieve something?
Incentives and desires don't go away just because you came to the conclusion that free will as it is often used, does not exist.
I still have a desire to better myself and improve my life. I'm just clear that my ability to do that is the result of a cascade of events that I had no control over.
Everything that you own had been created within the support and context of society. Your food and water, the service that takes your waste away, the vehicle you drive, the vehicles that deliver your food and clothing, the roads, the maintenance of those roads, the products that you're using to post on this site . . . If it's against your will to contribute to these services, you can choose to live free of all of these societal abominations and live in the forest somewhere. But yes, society has a way of preventing freeloading.
The perspective that "illness makes the life not worth living" is not universal. Indeed, it is utilitarian or epicurean perspectives that lead to this way of thinking. Many Christian perspectives (and, I expect those of many faiths) will hold that there is tremendous value in living and enduring discomfort and suffering.
It's worth noting that these faiths spur believers on toward helping the poor and disadvantaged.
I didn't say that illness makes the life not worth living. I said an illness that makes the life not worth living. What that is is a very personal decision and should be an option that a person can have. Note that it is pretty easy to safeguard such a system from impulse decision that are often caused by mental illness.
> Many Christian perspectives (and, I expect those of many faiths) will hold that there is tremendous value in living and enduring discomfort and suffering.
This is such a toxic part of christianity that causes so much suffering worldwide.
Voluntary giving is no substitute for state programs that give a guaranteed safety net.
Do you think it's better if people just die to avoid suffering rather than learn to live the best they can despite that pain?
Why do you say "causes"?
Agreed on the last point, but also having to beg others to get enough food/shelter to survive ... if you want that then you need to take a look at your ego.
A lot of people think this way, until they are forced to deal with the real and visceral physical suffering themselves.
Just look at Mother Theresa. She was refusing administration of painkillers to people dying in agonizing pain at her hospitals (hospices?), because she believed that experiencing suffering in this way was a part of being a true christian and virtuous person (yes, that was her actual stated reasoning). All of this was immediately cast aside as soon as she herself got debilitated with painful suffering due to illnesses, however.
I do believe there is value in suffering, but there are different kinds of suffering, and what’s being talked about here (physical) isn’t the kind that has much value.
One of the greatest values in suffering (imho) is illustrated by that Mother Theresa story.
Basically, in suffering yourself, you finally relate to what other people are going through, instead of dismissing their complaints as mutterings of inferior people.
And then maybe you will care to make a difference, if it's not too late.
Just for the record: I have a disability (blind), and from my point of view, there is one category of people that tends to behave completely inappropriately towards me, and those are "believers". I tend to avoid them whenever possible, because they tend to treat me in a very disrespectful way. They dont notice, because their faith has trained them to treat me with a certain patronising spin.
TL;DR: Not all "disadvantages people" actually want the protection of religious fanatics.
Thats part of it. Unwanted help is definitely an issue.
However, it doesnt end there. The more religious a person is, the more they take their time to explain to me how bad they think my situation is. Patronisation, pittying, and a general attitude of looking down at me.
There might be value in living on and enduring, and you should be free to do that. What you should not be free to do is forcing others to suffer on if they don't find it valuable.
Current legal situation in most places is such a force, based on misguided claims of religions to universality.
> I don’t remember Anita saying anything to my mother or even asking her husband first if she could give us something, but I remember her packing up her table: the pot roast, the carrots, the gravy, the potatoes. She handed it all to my mother.
That hit me like a truck. I'm actually tearing up.
Next time I walk past a homeless person, I'll think twice.
Cash and resources are important, but sometimes just buying someone lunch and listening to what they have to say for half an hour means the world to them.
There's a lot of homeless where I am. I've been here long enough to recognize most of their faces, and I'll often get lunch with about half a dozen of them whom I've found to generally be good people with no support network.
A nicer gesture would be asking what they need and supplying them. Cash is not always the best medium for reasons related to not having enough background information. Some of them may use it for worsening their condition (addiction) and others don't know how to get good supplies from it - mindset change due to homelessness.
That's not right. You don't get to decide what people do with your gifts. That, too, is not how giving works.
For those who are addicted (and let's repeat that not everyone who is homeless is an addict, at least not yet) their addiction won't magickally vanish if you don't give them money to spend on drugs. They'll find their drugs anyway. Maybe not with your money, but they won't get any better because you didn't give them money. And they'll probably do something desperate to get it if they don't have money so you're probably protecting them from the worse if you do give them money.
Personally, I live in a place with a large population of homeless people and I give money. The majority don't look like they're junkies or anything, but even for the ones who are, if enough people give them money they'll get their drugs and they'll have some left to go and get themselves something else they need. You just have to fill the pot up.
I sometimes ask people what they need, if they're sitting outside a store. A guy once asked me for a Cadbury's and a bottle of Gatorade. I thought, yech, on both counts and the chocolate is defo unhealthy, but maybe it was a way to combat the cold or get a quick hit of energy? How would I know? I've never sat on my arse on a cold dirty pavement for days. If the folks who do that don't know best what they need, then I certainly don't so I might as well go with what they say.
Edit: And, to be perfectly honest, giving doesn't make me feel any better and it's not really helping the homeless much. What those people need is to get off the streets. Small donations like I can afford (I'm a PhD student after all) is at best helping them get by, if enough other people chip in. In the article, Anita helped the author's mother get a job. That's the kind of thing that changes a person's life, although of course packing up a warm meal for them is a very good start.
There was a young guy who was sitting in the same place for at least three or four years. I used to give him money when I went by on my way home from work (before I was a PhD student). It didn't matter that I gave him money. He was still there for all those years. You don't get people out of poverty by giving them your change. Not that you shouldn't - but what is needed is, well, scuse the involuntary pun but radical societal change. Is that coming from anywhere?
> For those who are addicted (and let's repeat that not everyone who is homeless is an addict, at least not yet) their addiction won't magickally vanish if you don't give them money to spend on drugs. They'll find their drugs anyway. Maybe not with your money, but they won't get any better because you didn't give them money. And they'll probably do something desperate to get it if they don't have money so you're probably protecting them from the worse if you do give them money.
I agree but you need to account for both parties involved. Giving money opposed to asking them for what they need and supplying it increases the risk area for harm and it's inevitably a moral burden as well if someone thinks they are fueling addiction when they might not be, it's hard to know. Addiction is a complex problem which can't be solved by a passway. The best they can do is focus on supplies for improvement in qualify of life for the homeless within a reasonable timeframe. Not only improvement in what you eat and self caring products lead to distraction from addiction but helps you stand up. It opens up opportunity to ask about them and give emotional fulfillment as well. Throwing money in a bin or putting it on their hand doesn't which is what most people would do if they were to just give out money.
> I sometimes ask people what they need, if they're sitting outside a store. A guy once asked me for a Cadbury's and a bottle of Gatorade. I thought, yech, on both counts and the chocolate is defo unhealthy, but maybe it was a way to combat the cold or get a quick hit of energy? How would I know? I've never sat on my arse on a cold dirty pavement for days. If the folks who do that don't know best what they need, then I certainly don't so I might as well go with what they say.
Sure that's a good point and I didn't imply to act like you know what they need. That is more of a quality issue. Giving money is unknowingly restricting and letting their mindset dictate short term benefit over long term. They may try to get a cheaper unhealthy chocolate due to dollar difference or thought of saving up.
Thinking of what I wrote about the guy who wanted the chocoloate and the gatorade later, I realise that there's another reason he might have asked for chocolate, and that's mental health. Sometimes, what you really need to have is what you want, because it will make you feel better. Like, emotionally "feel".
Anyway I dont' agree with you, still. There's so many things that people can do with money that isn't getting high. If I buy someone a meal from outside I can only buy something ready-made (a sandwich or a kebab etc). That's not very healthy. Maybe if enough people give them money they can find a place to stay for a while (or a good Samarithan can pay for a night's stay at a motel) or they can buy something to cook and go to a friend's place to cook it and have a proper meal.
I really don't think that the majority of homeless in my area are addicts. They mostly seem like people down on their luck. It's so easy to end up on the streets these days, especially in the bloody UK where social nets are threadabare and being torn apart constantly. Then of course once you're on the streets it is so easy to start drinking or shooting to "get by".
Like you say addiction a complex problem but I don't accept that giving money makes it worse or doesn't help those who suffer from it. If I'm wrong, I hope I find out soon.
There is no absolute, I never meant to imply that. What I really advocate against is throwing money in the bin without asking what they need and if that's food, get them high quality food. If that's money for x, help them out with money.
Really though, asking part and having a conservation is more important. I was giving addiction as merely an example because I thought people here would relate to it more. I didn't mean to imply all homeless people are addicted. It depends on your location. If they tell you the money is needed for supplying their addiction, you don't stop and move on. No, you ask about it more and if there is a chance, you can get them help at an addiction centre. I am not a medical expert that can judge whether the drugs will have a therapeutic or negative effect on them. If I was, I might help them out with drugs. This is why you need free [1][2]drug maintenance centres where they can safely get quality drugs and fight against their addiction.
Here, the homeless kids will ask you for money and if you give them that, it won't help them. It will go towards funding a business that relies on exploiting, kidnapping and disabling kids to beg in the streets. They won't get any high quality food from it or nice comfy blanket.
Giving money opposed to asking them for what they need and supplying it increases the risk area for harm and it's inevitably a moral burden as well if someone thinks they are fueling addiction when they might not be, it's hard to know
It's a two way transaction. I wouldn't wanna encourage child exploitation business and if I unknowingly did it, that might stop me from getting involved next time. Both people need a satisfactory result. Sitting with the kid while they finish eating meal and playing with toys I brought is a better outcome than uncertainty.
Giving money is unknowingly restricting
You might handout 20 bucks but the supplies they should get may cost a dollar over it. They would be forced to get cheaper one which may or may not be up to the standards.
People are not good at estimating how much they would need upfront. It's not something limited to homeless people. Sorry, if I implied that.
Taking out bigger action like opening a charity and build awareness regarding the problem is better but not always an immediate option, sadly.
I'm not sure you understand how bad addiction can be. If enough people give an addicted person money, that doesn't mean they'll buy "the drugs they need" and then spend any surplus on things they actually need. They could just as well buy way more drugs than they need and die of an overdose that you helped enable.
People don't overdose because they buy too many drugs. They overdose because they combine drugs they shouldn't (like heroin with barbiturates) or because they buy drugs that have been cut with lethal substances, or because a batch is too strong and although they take the same dose they take usually, they end up taking too much. Or even because they're used to taking cut heroin and they suddendly find some that is unusually pure and take their regular dose and overdose.
One person's "worsening their condition" is another person's self-medication.
Sure, you can ask them what they need, but the nice thing about cash if they can use it to buy whatever they need, that's what cash is for. And have the dignity to decide for themselves what it is, not have to tell you and get it approved like you're their teacher or boss.
I mean, are you spending some of YOUR money on alcohol, drugs, and cigarettes? Then you can afford to give someone cash without needing to worry about whether they might do the same, and whether that's good for them or not.
If you are in position where you can take care of yourself, as well as others, then it doesn’t seem like spending money on those vices yourself is what’s ruining your life that much and keeping you down.
To truly help the person struggling to crawl out of that hole, you shouldn’t be enabling the behaviors that keep them there and (possibly) have put them there in the first place.
Take them out for lunch, buy them some food, have a conversation, help them figure out the resources available to them, etc. But straight up cash is not something i would be advocating for, unless it goes to a reputable charity/fund/etc (do your research on that one first, because there are quite a few “charities” that spend majority of the funds on administrative expenses and such, with only a small percentage going towards the actual cause) that can allocate that cash in a good way. Ffs, volunteer at a homeless shelter or a food bank.
Yes, drugs are a form of self medication but at the same time being homeless should sting, it shouldn't make you feel like all you need is one more cigarette. The real problem is helping these people find a home and a job but that's a tough nut to crack.
You are not able to predict who is going to die of an overdose -- let alone because of your gift (ie suggeseting they wouldn't have otherwise, it is your gift that led to that).
So you can decide to treat everyone with dignity as an adult, or nobody with dignity as an adult. You are advocating for nobody (or at least nobody who is on the streets), out of an abundance of 'caution'.
You are mistaken if you think you are helping people by being an asshole to them. But it is certainly your right to do so.
Maybe, maybe not, but claiming the reason you don't give people money is "What is the point of giving someone money so that they can die of an overdose using the drugs you helped them buy?" -- definitely does.
You can treat someone respectfully while giving them money, or while not giving them money; and you can be an asshole either way too.
"This money could help this person, but it's also quite risky, given that the majority of chronically homeless people (most people panhandling) have drug addictions or other mental health issues or both. My money would be better spent on services that can help address these issues over the long term."
I think we disagree on what constitutes an asshole. Being aware of the statistical realities of a situation and operating on them is not being an asshole. If you were to say "of course I'm not giving you money, you're probably addicted to heroin" to someone's face after they ask you for change, that would make you an asshole. But that's not what I'm advocating.
No, a nicer gesture would be respecting their dignity and humanizing them. It's popular to rationalize those who are worse off as being worse at making decisions, but it's not accurate, fair, or humane.
I disagree with the "give them cash" part - donating to shelters or charities is often better. Not because "they will spend it on drugs", which you really can't tell, but because it's a better way to help the overall population rather than a single individual. And giving cash often leads to some perverse incentives.
You can do that right now. And if you haven’t done it by the next time you walk past a homeless person, just give them cash instead of kidding yourself that you’ll give in a more effective way later.
Homeless people respond to incentives like everyone else. If you keep enabling them to beg at street corners it makes it less likely that they will every do anything else to earn money and become productive members.
Yes, you can choose to simply not give either to charities or directly to homeless people, but be honest about it and don’t talk about charities being a more efficient way to give.
The problem with giving cash is that it incentivizes them to continue to panhandle, even if there are other ways they could be spending their time that are more beneficial for them. Maybe they could be waiting in a government office to sort out a benefits issue, or they could be relaxing indoors in a shelter or church, but they feel like they need to sit outside because if they don't they're losing income.
Give to nonprofits that focus on helping the homeless - they will be able to distribute the benefits in a way that is better in the long-term for the homeless themselves.
"The problem with giving cash is that it incentivizes them to continue to panhandle, even if there are other ways they could be spending their time that are more beneficial for them. Maybe they could be waiting in a government office to sort out a benefits issue, or they could be relaxing indoors in a shelter or church, but they feel like they need to sit outside because if they don't they're losing income."
Is this actually true?
1) Why would relaxing indoors be beneficial compared to not earning income? Isn't the whole point in society that lazing around is a bad thing and the poor should work hard to try and get themselves to a better space, which requires money? In the case of the homeless it's public humiliation in exchange for spare change.
2) What if they did, and then they have to wait several months for a response from the gov't (eg. disability)?
I've had enough experiences with people choosing to be irresponsible when given the benefit of the doubt that I've learned not to give it. I may be alone in this lived experience.
My experience in Habitat for Humanity and with various churches offering programs to get the homeless off the street and into homes and jobs, is that people who want help go to places that offer help. People who want easy cash for selfish/self-harming reasons beg on the corners/parking lots presenting either lies or scams.
My experience is more mixed, but it probably depends on what kinds of places and what kinds of help are available in the area.
E.g. an undocumented migrant might be too afraid to go to places that could help (sometimes that's justified unfortunately), and end up self-harming because what else are you going to do stuck on the street with no future you can see, but it doesn't mean they started out motivated to self-harm.
While I fully agree that the most essential need of every human being -- and every animal or plant -- is drinking, breathing and eating, let's not forget there are other essential needs that everyone has: attention, love, education...
All I want to say is that the most precious thing you can give might as well be: your time and undivided attention, a smile or nice word or any other form of humanity. It can sometimes be harder to give that, than a quick donation to a foodbank.
I grew up in a lower-middle class family (luxuries that we couldn't afford were school books for every year, but that was about it), but my SO grew up in actual poverty.
It does weird things to a person. One thing that stood out was decision making in general, which used to be very difficult for her - and the scope didn't even matter - it could well have been deciding on the flavour of juice to buy.
Fortunately it's much better now. We laugh that she has "expensive taste", because without looking at the prices, her first pick is usually the most expensive.
As someone who fasts intermittently, and has come to understand the cognitive effects on the brain of caloric deprivation, it's saddening to think of a child experiencing a similar effect. Unlike a voluntary faster like me, the circumstance is completely out of the child's control and probably happening while they are facing any number of other family challenges.
On top of that, they are in this condition while in school, where they are being evaluated for their cognitive performance.
It really underlines the dire importance of things like free school breakfast, lunch and snack programs.
I was at a party once, which I didn't really want to be at but didn't really have a choice, and everyone was taking drugs and I was hiding in the corner. I started speaking to the only other guy who was also hiding in the corner and it turned out he was a heroin addict. He was quite open about it. He was talking about his life, and after about half an hour of him talking I thought, "this guy had no chance."
I mean, I grew up in a lower-middle class home. There was always food, 2 parents, a roof over my head, education. I had so much luck that when I made a whole bunch of mistakes (to the point that I was hiding in a corner speaking to a heroin addict), I could call up Mum and Dad and move home. This guy had none of that, and worse, people were actively trying to make money off him the entire time. His friends had got him addicted to heroin and then sold it to him, for example. The reason he was sat in the corner for so long was because he'd been late paying his heroin bill so the drug dealer was making him wait until he started to suffer withdrawal before he got some more.
The next day he died of a drug overdose. I stood there in the crowd as they took his body out of his flat. The same friends who'd sold him the drugs were saying things like, "that fucker owed me £20! If you're going to OD you'd at least cash your dole check and pay your mates back first?!"
> There was always food, 2 parents, a roof over my head, education. I had so much luck that when I made a whole bunch of mistakes (to the point that I was hiding in a corner speaking to a heroin addict), I could call up Mum and Dad and move home.
Interestingly, this is one of the biggest predictors for incoming:
> If the income factors all seem obvious, this next finding may be more surprising: Your parents' marriage and family stability might be the biggest determinant [of income] of all. Growing up in a single-parent household significantly hurts a child's chance of upward income mobility, the study finds.
So sure, I guess generosity is all the rage, but decent families is better in the long run.
> There was always food, 2 parents, a roof over my head, education. I had so much luck [...] This guy had none of that, [...] His friends had got him addicted to heroin and then sold it to him, for example.
I dunno. I mean, one could have everything you cited and still let his friends get him addicted. And there's people having no chance at all while still staying far from drugs. A personal and non-learnt-by-example inclination to self-preservation and survival may be a bigger factor than sheer luck (IMHO).
> We know that a stable two-parent household is one of the best predictors of the child's future success.
Which I'm not denying. OTOH, not having that is not the best predictor of falling into drugs. My point was that a starting point is not the full journey.
> The same friends who'd sold him the drugs were saying things like, "that fucker owed me £20! If you're going to OD you'd at least cash your dole check and pay your mates back first?!"
Grew up in a colonia and I constantly fear with my six figure salary, existing in this ridiculous world of opulence and technology that I will lose those lessons. I am more than how I grew up or where I am from. Feels good to know I do not walk alone in that journey...
The news, where "what bleeds, leads" is likely the reason for an amplified perception of "evil". The world is very likely a kind place, especially in politically stable regions
I once forgot to bring my wallet to office. I rarely borrow money so I very reluctantly asked for 20 bucks from a colleague. It was supposed to take care of breakfast/lunch/dinner (probably should have borrowed more considering the location where I was, it wasn't a given that it'll be sufficient). I remember carefully checking the prices of items to decide what I was going to order so that I had enough for the next meal.
This was not even remotely close to being poor but it was enough to provide me with some direct perspective.
Heh. It's funny, because your post reads like a parody, but I don't doubt at all that it's true; I stopped having to use that 'skill' at around age 22 or so, I can easily see how people born middle class wouldn't understand.
Having said that, the amusing bit is more that $20 is an absolute shedload of money. Less than ten years ago I would spend approximately that on a week's worth of food.
> I stopped having to use that 'skill' at around age 22 or so, I can easily see how people born middle class wouldn't understand.
Same. Carving up $20 between food for the family and gas was a common occurrence growing up. Even 20 years later I feel a satisfaction when I fill the car up with gas without much care to the cost.
I remember being a kid and going grocery shopping with my father. At the end of the shopping father realized that he has left his wallet at home and only had something like spare 50 in his pocket. Having to decide what we will buy, and what we should leave for the next time was a really uncomfortable experience...
Why not read it with a modicum of charity? Or even just quote the whole sentence? The parent was clearly saying the experience was nothing remotely like poverty, but helped give some perspective on what it might be like to have to regularly think about making money stretch to the next meal. Many people who've had a cushion of savings their whole lives would never consider that experience at all.
Having to think (as in spend any mental effort) about money at all, in the context of regular daily purchases?
I mean it's not anywhere near the level of worrying about where the next meal is coming from, but it is a reminder of one of the many stressors that the poor are constantly dealing with.
Budgeting is always stressful. Having to exert that effort every day on every purchase, instead of weekly/monthly (and only on larger purchases) is a lot of mental energy that could be spent in more productive ways.
That becomes easy to forget sometimes.
Edit: I didn't think this would be controversial... I'm honestly asking, why?
I submitted using the original title. Someone changed it to the subtitle in the article. I don't know why, I think the original title was fine. A tad click-baity, perhaps, but the article actually delivers.
Only responding to your point about ineffective charities, it’s definitely a pervasive issue, but there are organizations like GiveWell who measure impact of charities worldwide (as best as possible, since randomized controlled trials are not often possible in the domains where charities operate).
They make available all their research, and recommend top charities to give to, continuously re-evaluating and refreshing their recommendations.
I think the biggest elephant in the room with charities is that somebody has to run them. Let's say a guy runs a charity which provides great help for some people. Eventually running charity becomes his full time job. A guy needs to attend some galas to raise more money, is he able to buy a suit? Guy's kids are really good at school, they want to attend some good university, maybe even abroad. Should charity "pay" for these schools? On the one hand a person doing such a great job should be able to pay for his kids education, live a comfortable life, maybe drive a good car. On the other hand where does it end? How much taking from charity is too much?
This is why I think it should really be taxes/governmental social services all the way.
IME this sort of 'concern' is exclusively something that miserable people waffle about out of some sort of jealousy for anyone who has a semi-decent life.
Obviously it's not a problem for a charity worker to buy a suit or send their children to school. They're not "taking" from the charity any more than I'm "taking" from my employer by being paid some percentage of what I earn for them.
As long as they are effective for their cause and care then there's no reason why they shouldn't earn as much as a private sector employee.
It used to be fairly common for people to moan about parliamentary salaries in the UK. An MP earns on the order of 100K with expenses accounted for, which is like, enough to buy a small-ish flat in London. Good money, nothing stratospheric to someone who isn't stuck in a poverty mindset.
When I see charities that employ people in expensive locations I don't feel like my money is actually having any impact. Remember the 80000 hours advice? Make a boatload of money and spend it on charity? That doesn't work when working an additional 40 hours of overtime a week results in someone else getting a 20 hour per week position at a charity because they earn twice as much as you. Why not just do the 20 hours yourself at that point? Save money for a year. Be a volunteer for 6 months. Except people won't do that. So nothing gets done in the end and since the charity probably wastes the money anyway you don't even have to feel bad.
1) Most governments, especially in third world countries where help is needed the most, are rife with corrupt officials and inept bureaucracy. Democracy doesn’t always give the proper incentives for government to care about (a) the long-term future, which matters more for young children who can’t vote, (b) minority interests, again because their vote might not necessarily sway elections. Hence, there is definitely a case to be made for charities and governments to operate side-by-side.
2) Govt officials should be paid well, they do an important job.
3) I think there is a lot more wasteful overhead at charities than employee payroll, which should be cut down upon. I know of some well-regarded charities which fly their junior employees in business-class. Things like that can probably be improved first before turning the gaze on payroll.
The taxes aren't that big, You get a effective police force, good health care, good education, safe societies and a good economy from the network effects of those things.
If you think those taxes are huge it suggests that you don't understand how you could be paying less overall for the above mentioned things if you had a consolidated population driving costs down. or that your comfortable with inequality as long as you get yours.
It’s better than no guidance at all, but it contributes to a very shallow way of thinking about overhead expenses that ends up saying that nonprofit employees should be poorly paid and have shitty working conditions, because that’s all overhead. It’s also fairly easily manipulated in reporting - https://afpglobal.org/news/fundraising-expense-myth-what-cor...
They don't care about overhead, they will recommend a charity that prevents a death per $5'000 and has a 50% overhead over a charity that prevents a death per $10'000 and has a 20% overhead.
I’m very familiar with them, yes. They definitely care about overhead
> We quantify impact using a variety of different measures, including "cost per life saved" (when applicable) and "financial benefits to recipients per dollar spent by donors" (when applicable).
I don't understand how that is a meaningful definition of overhead. Overhead is money that is not being spent on salaries and goods that directly impact outcomes. Therefore cheaper outcomes always imply lower overhead.
I've never seen a begging homeless person with expensive shoes or a brand new phone. And during the winter time, most shelters are at capacity and have to turn people away.
And please do some research on the foster care system in the United States, giving up your child puts them at very high risk of abuse and is VERY traumatizing for the child.
I dislike chuggers as much as the next guy, but it's not as if they know your situation.
It's not like there's an "I have significant disposable income" walk. I mean, there are markers, but then there are people like Mark Cuban that walk around in tracksuits or whatever.
An iPhone or fancy trainers are weird bars to use. At least where I'm from everyone from those on welfare to billionaires have that stuff.
Thanks for pointing this aspect of things out.
I know what you are talking about.
My father spend aroun 80k of the disability money he received in my name on booze. And nobody of my relatives ever raised this issue. It looked like they didn't even notice.
So, the social system was trying to make my situation better, by providing my parents with a considerable sum of money. And all they did, was spend in the way they saw fit.
These days, my mother claims she didn't have any say in the matter. What a chicken move. Think twice before you only see the publishable side of a story.
the iPhone SE was new for $400. iPhones can be bought refurbished, be a hand-me-down, or on a long term contract (which really is a non-issue given the length of the contracts). Also they last much longer than competitors (still holding on to my SE).
So iPhones are very affordable, certainly comparable to Android (for a non-PoS phone) and are hardly a good metric to judge someone by.
Indeed, some of the poorer people I know with iPhones were given them for free - and the older models (but still usable) are available for very little in second hand shops.
Peter Singer just-released 10th-anniversary edition from The Most Good You Can Do and it is free https://www.thelifeyoucansave.org/the-book/ it is one way to look at what is the best way to help people.
Two billionaires walk down the street. They spot a charity drive.
Billionaire A hands over a $50 note, then asks for change. He is planning to donate $20. A reporter captures this moment, and the next day the news is about how much of a cheapscate A is. A proceeds to spend $10000 in PR crisis management.
Billionaire B keeps his head down and pretends he didn't see the charity. Nobody bothers him.
So we stayed at a battered woman's shelter in Cedar City. Lovely place, lovely people. Everyone helped out cooking. It was a small place, maybe 20 woman and children there and a few staff.
But one night my mom volunteered to make a cake. I remember this vividly. It was a Cherry Chip cake from a box and there was a thing of vanilla frosting. I ended up adding the ingredients and mixing them up. So the cake goes in the oven and bakes and something is wrong. I forgot to add eggs into the batter. So we ended up with gross sludge.
People were nice about but you could tell everyone was really disappointed. And cake was a luxury, it wasn't like we could go out and grab another one.
I'm going on 20+ years of mailing them cash with a note saying to buy cake.