Great article! In this specific case, replacing a state-subsidized work (if the author has one of those) with state-subsidized free time would be an obvious improvement. At least replacing one of these two jobs.
I am a bit confused because my first idea of a poor person is a person who can’t find a job, not a person who has two jobs (and therefore has no time to optimize their lives using the typical middle-class methods). I wonder how much should I update, and how much of this is a cultural difference. Or different kinds of poverty. Perhaps “having two jobs” is just a little bit higher economical level than “not having a job” (which explains why people keep doing it, instead of giving up). But maybe it’s something completely different than I am not aware of.
Reading the article again, I don’t quite understand why a person with two jobs complaining about a lack of time is also attending a school. Okay, it would make sense if the school is necessary for getting a better job in the future. But even then this is probably not a situation of a typical poor person.
EDIT: Everyone who was influenced by this article, please update! It is actually a hoax.
At least in the United States, less than 4% of households report under 5,000 USD in taxable income, while between 14% and 20% of households are defined as under the poverty line (depending on source). The official BLS numbers put it at 10.4 million people who are ‘working poor’, aka working or looking-for-work for half the year and also under the poverty line (pdf warning), and a little over three quarters of households under the poverty line have at least one person who fits into the “working poor” category. This is further complicated by income disparities and cost of living varying heavily from state-to-state: one can live much more comfortably on 20k in the midwest than on 40k in California.
Reading the article again, I don’t quite understand why a person with two jobs complaining about a lack of time is also attending a school. Okay, it would make sense if the school is necessary for getting a better job in the future.
A little over half of off-campus college students live under the poverty line, making up a significant part of total poverty . There’s a perception that a degree (and usually a four-year-degree) is necessary for any desirable “real” (non-retail non-fast food) job. Worse, there’s a perception that any degree is both necessary and sufficient for long-term “real” jobs. So you do get a lot of people trying to take classes and make ends meet at the same time, even if the system eventually shoves them out the door with a lot of student loans and a liberal arts degree that barely improves their options (or not even that: low-income folk who drop out get screwed even worse).
It’s probably not the average case, but it does make up a non-trivial portion of the total.
((On the other hand, many of the issues raised in the linked blog post show problems related to information access. “Sliding scale” payments usually mean nearly free for a low-income mother, in the odd case where she doesn’t qualify for Medicaid. The documentation necessary to set up even a post-9/11 bank account is less than that necessary to get most forms of public assistance including WIC or TANF, while there are other complex reasons people in poverty avoid bank accounts. It’s quite possible to cook basic staples with nothing more than a microwave, a plate, and a couple pieces of silverware, but that’s not really something that’s taught in Home Ec or cookbooks. And the depression self-diagnosis is… not robust.))
another emerging issue is that degrees can have a negative utility these days. if your degree can’t land you a “real” job, and employers who would otherwise take you now see you as ‘overqualified’, your options are more limited than if you never went to college in the first place.
I am a bit confused because my first idea of a poor person is a person who can’t find a job, not a person who has two jobs
I’ve spent a fair amount of time volunteering in fairly poor communities, and i my experience, many of the people living in those areas work multiple part-time jobs, some “official” some under-the-table.
In the US at least, statistics bare this out- even 45% of homeless people have worked a job in the last week (much fewer have regular jobs, because of the nature of homelessness). 13% have regular jobs (are working poor). ~25% or so of people below the poverty line are working poor, and the fraction has been increasing. I imagine if you include under-the-table jobs, its much higher.
My idea of a poor person is not someone without a job, but someone without money. Not having a job is one contributing factor to being poor, not part of the definition.
If you want to help poor people, and the only information you have is that they literally are without money, the only conclusion you can get from this data is that if you give them some money, you will make them less poor… well, at least in the short term.
Having information about how specifically these people are and remain poor shows opportunities for other interventions, some of which might be more effective. Thus I would like to know the most frequent “templates” for poverty.
The linked article describes a person who studies and works at two jobs, and lives in an area far away from many useful or cheap things. This can give some specific ideas about helping them. For example giving them enough money to keep only one job; or providing them a free ride to the nearest city. Some of these ideas may be more effective than others; for example if there are more people in the same area with the same problem, you could drive them to the city together by bus, instead of each of them in a separate car. Or a big refrigerator shared among multiple families. Or an advice about how to solve unusual situations that happen once in a while and they have no time to research.
Then there are people who are poor because they don’t have a job, and don’t even have the education necessary for the job. In that case, completely different specific ideas may be helpful; for example providing them the education or a simple work experience they could mention at a job interview. Or educating their children for free if they fail to understand something at school. Or perhaps teaching them how to do something useful for themselves and their neighbors, if free time is not a constraint. There are possible projects where they provide the work, and you pay for the materials and tools they need. Etc.
I always imagined the latter to be a typical example, and didn’t think much about the former. Now that I think about it, all the information I have on the former are from USA, while I have a lot of information on the latter from my country, so maybe it’s something country-specific. But maybe it’s just my limited information.
EDIT: The original article which inspired these thoughts was a hoax, so whatever conclusions were built on the provided information are extremely unreliable.
Great article! In this specific case, replacing a state-subsidized work (if the author has one of those) with state-subsidized free time would be an obvious improvement. At least replacing one of these two jobs.
I am a bit confused because my first idea of a poor person is a person who can’t find a job, not a person who has two jobs (and therefore has no time to optimize their lives using the typical middle-class methods). I wonder how much should I update, and how much of this is a cultural difference. Or different kinds of poverty. Perhaps “having two jobs” is just a little bit higher economical level than “not having a job” (which explains why people keep doing it, instead of giving up). But maybe it’s something completely different than I am not aware of.
Reading the article again, I don’t quite understand why a person with two jobs complaining about a lack of time is also attending a school. Okay, it would make sense if the school is necessary for getting a better job in the future. But even then this is probably not a situation of a typical poor person.
EDIT: Everyone who was influenced by this article, please update! It is actually a hoax.
At least in the United States, less than 4% of households report under 5,000 USD in taxable income, while between 14% and 20% of households are defined as under the poverty line (depending on source). The official BLS numbers put it at 10.4 million people who are ‘working poor’, aka working or looking-for-work for half the year and also under the poverty line (pdf warning), and a little over three quarters of households under the poverty line have at least one person who fits into the “working poor” category. This is further complicated by income disparities and cost of living varying heavily from state-to-state: one can live much more comfortably on 20k in the midwest than on 40k in California.
A little over half of off-campus college students live under the poverty line, making up a significant part of total poverty . There’s a perception that a degree (and usually a four-year-degree) is necessary for any desirable “real” (non-retail non-fast food) job. Worse, there’s a perception that any degree is both necessary and sufficient for long-term “real” jobs. So you do get a lot of people trying to take classes and make ends meet at the same time, even if the system eventually shoves them out the door with a lot of student loans and a liberal arts degree that barely improves their options (or not even that: low-income folk who drop out get screwed even worse).
It’s probably not the average case, but it does make up a non-trivial portion of the total.
((On the other hand, many of the issues raised in the linked blog post show problems related to information access. “Sliding scale” payments usually mean nearly free for a low-income mother, in the odd case where she doesn’t qualify for Medicaid. The documentation necessary to set up even a post-9/11 bank account is less than that necessary to get most forms of public assistance including WIC or TANF, while there are other complex reasons people in poverty avoid bank accounts. It’s quite possible to cook basic staples with nothing more than a microwave, a plate, and a couple pieces of silverware, but that’s not really something that’s taught in Home Ec or cookbooks. And the depression self-diagnosis is… not robust.))
another emerging issue is that degrees can have a negative utility these days. if your degree can’t land you a “real” job, and employers who would otherwise take you now see you as ‘overqualified’, your options are more limited than if you never went to college in the first place.
I’ve spent a fair amount of time volunteering in fairly poor communities, and i my experience, many of the people living in those areas work multiple part-time jobs, some “official” some under-the-table.
In the US at least, statistics bare this out- even 45% of homeless people have worked a job in the last week (much fewer have regular jobs, because of the nature of homelessness). 13% have regular jobs (are working poor). ~25% or so of people below the poverty line are working poor, and the fraction has been increasing. I imagine if you include under-the-table jobs, its much higher.
My idea of a poor person is not someone without a job, but someone without money. Not having a job is one contributing factor to being poor, not part of the definition.
If you want to help poor people, and the only information you have is that they literally are without money, the only conclusion you can get from this data is that if you give them some money, you will make them less poor… well, at least in the short term.
Having information about how specifically these people are and remain poor shows opportunities for other interventions, some of which might be more effective. Thus I would like to know the most frequent “templates” for poverty.
The linked article describes a person who studies and works at two jobs, and lives in an area far away from many useful or cheap things. This can give some specific ideas about helping them. For example giving them enough money to keep only one job; or providing them a free ride to the nearest city. Some of these ideas may be more effective than others; for example if there are more people in the same area with the same problem, you could drive them to the city together by bus, instead of each of them in a separate car. Or a big refrigerator shared among multiple families. Or an advice about how to solve unusual situations that happen once in a while and they have no time to research.
Then there are people who are poor because they don’t have a job, and don’t even have the education necessary for the job. In that case, completely different specific ideas may be helpful; for example providing them the education or a simple work experience they could mention at a job interview. Or educating their children for free if they fail to understand something at school. Or perhaps teaching them how to do something useful for themselves and their neighbors, if free time is not a constraint. There are possible projects where they provide the work, and you pay for the materials and tools they need. Etc.
I always imagined the latter to be a typical example, and didn’t think much about the former. Now that I think about it, all the information I have on the former are from USA, while I have a lot of information on the latter from my country, so maybe it’s something country-specific. But maybe it’s just my limited information.
EDIT: The original article which inspired these thoughts was a hoax, so whatever conclusions were built on the provided information are extremely unreliable.