trying to set the numbers so that no one chooses this option voluntarily, and yet those who don’t have an option of escaping it are treated well… seems like a contradiction.
I think I’m missing your point.
It seems that one approach to this is for me to treat everyone well whether they work or not, and for me to provide additional incentives to people for doing the kind of work I want people to perform. This admittedly does not have the structure of a Prisoners Dilemma game, but I’m not sure why the PD structure is important.
If I find that some people who are capable of doing that work consistently choose not to under my incentive structure, I can experiment with my incentive structure… different people are best motivated by different things, after all.
If despite that I still find that some people who are capable of doing that work consistently choose not to… well, that means less of the work I want people to perform will get done than if they chose otherwise. Which might be a huge problem, if that work is much more valuable than the stuff they choose to do.
I have a bunch of options at that point. E.g., I can figure out other ways to get that work done (e.g. automation). Or I can figure out ways to force people to do that work.
Or I can rethink my initial conditions and stop treating everyone well whether they work or not… I can instead treat people well if they do the work I want done, and poorly otherwise, and count on that differential treatment to provide the missing incentive.
But that last option is far from the only option, nor is it clear to me that it works better than the alternatives.
It seems that one approach to this is for me to treat everyone well whether they work or not, and for me to provide additional incentives to people for doing the kind of work I want people to perform.
This seems to me almost what we have now. Yes, there is a problem about defining “treating well”. However well you treat one group of people, if you treat everyone else better, the former will complain. These days in first-world countries the unemployed people are treated much better than an average working person was centuries ago. But that’s irrelevant. We see that they are treated worse than other people are today, therefore they are not treated well.
Even if you start treating poor people much better than they are treated now, even better than the average people are now, just wait 10, at most 20 years, and they will start comparing you to Hitler, if they see that someone else is treated even better.
I agree that we should experiment more. Preferably many different experiments in smaller regions, so it is easier to stop things when they go horribly wrong. Seems to me a good first step would be giving more independence to regions; decentralizing the state power.
Expanding on my “yup” above a little… it’s certainly conceivable that we could adopt an approach to defining “treating well” that isn’t entirely relative.
For example, nation A could assert that A’s unemployed people are being treated well if they have better conditions than the unemployed in nation B (by which standard the U.S. unemployed are generally treated well). Or that A’s unemployed people are being treated well if their children don’t demonstrate significantly higher levels of deficiency-based illnesses (due to malnutrition, exposure, etc.) than the children of their employed people. Or various other standards.
The difficulty I’d expect to face when proposing such a standard isn’t that the unemployed under it would be worse off than the employed and therefore I’m Hitler, it’s that most people have already written their bottom line about whether (for example) the U.S. unemployed are generally treated well, and evaluate the standard based on whether it gives the right answer to that question.
it’s certainly conceivable that we could adopt an approach to defining “treating well” that isn’t entirely relative
Yes, we could. And then some people would get political karma for insisting that this isn’t the true definition of treating well, and instead is just a part of conspiracy for oppressing people.
unemployed people are being treated well if their children don’t demonstrate significantly higher levels of deficiency-based illnesses (due to malnutrition, exposure, etc.) than the children of their employed people
I can imagine a situation where there are illnesses typically attributed to poverty (and some people get political karma for insisting on the poverty hypothesis), even if material poverty is not the cause. For example, you could give people tons of money to buy healthy food, and yet they could decide to spend it all on junk food and alcohol. You measure their childrens’ health, and it becomes obvious the children are not fed properly. This article describes it better than I could.
I agree that it would be great to have an absolute definition of “treating people well”, which could be reached, first in one country, and then perhaps globally. But I predict that the closer we would get to it, the more people would insist that it’s a wrong definition.
most people have already written their bottom line about whether (for example) the U.S. unemployed are generally treated well
I think that in a long term it’s even worse: the bottom line depends on information the people get. In a totalitarian state, you just have to insist that everything is great, and imprison everyone who says otherwise, and after a few years people will believe that it really is great. But if you have freedom of speech, someone will always make political karma by insisting that people should have more (who wouldn’t like that?), and that not having more is completely unbearable.
I am not convinced your article shows an example of “poverty” not being caused by real poverty.
The examples in the article tend to include both poverty-related factors and non-poverty-related factors. For instance, certainly failing to press charges against an abusive, criminal, boyfriend is something that can be done by someone of any income level, but on the other hand, poor people are more likely to steal money (like this boyfriend did), more likely to be unable to treat mental illness that might result in violence, and more likely to be frustrated in ways that lead to violence. In this case the guy was a burglar and had no job (poverty leads to no money and people with no money and no job are more likely to burgle). Those aren’t 100% due to poverty (clearly frustration at poverty is only a contributing factor to violence and the person won’t be violent unless something else predisposes him to violence), but poverty affects them at the margins. Not to mention that even though each individual decision to stay with a boyfriend who has no job is technically not poverty-related, poverty cumulatively leads to a high rate of joblessness.
Poor people are also less likely to be educated and therefore more likely to make poor life decisions.
Even buying junk food is related to poverty because junk food has a lower time expenditure than other food and time has a greater relative cost to poor people than to rich people—poor people often work long hours that leave them exhausted, must spend a lot of personal time on child care, etc. Poor people also are less likely to have a supermarket with cheap non-junk food within easy commute distance. Again, none of this is 100% caused by poverty—this just raises the relative cost of non-junk food, it doesn’t make it completely non-affordable—but it certainly has an effect.
Well, it’s complicated. For poor people, some “smart” options are not really possible. On the other hand, I also see many relatively rich people making the stupid options voluntarily. Poverty can cause “stupid” (from our point of view) choices, and also stupid choices can cause poverty.
I would like to see a society where no one is forced to make the “stupid” choice. (Organizations helping poor people to press charges against criminals, providing them food and refrigerators, etc.) But even in such society I expect many people making the stupid choices voluntarily. (And then complain about an unfair society. So if we could get halfway to such society, judging from people’s reactions it would seem there was no improvement.)
Even buying junk food is related to poverty because junk food has a lower time expenditure than other food and time has a greater relative cost to poor people than to rich people—poor people often work long hours that leave them exhausted, must spend a lot of personal time on child care, etc.
A while back, a friend of mine informed me that poorer Americans consume junk food because it’s one of the few pleasures aside from alcohol that’s easily and cheaply available to people of that socioeconomic stratum, and that what she referred to as “food politics” is therefore symptomatic of privilege.
It sounded like rationalization to me at the time, and I still find the availability and time constraint arguments more convincing, but she’d have had more personal experience than I.
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.
This seems to me almost what we have now. Yes, there is a problem about defining “treating well”.
Yup.
I agree that we should experiment more.
I’m all in favor of experimentation.
And if we’re already experimenting to the limits of our existing regional independence, such that increased independence will relax the rate-limiting constraint on experimentation (which I doubt we are, but is I suppose possible), then yes, increased regional independence would make sense as a next step. Though perhaps it’s best to do so in a small region, so it’s easier to stop things if it goes horribly wrong.
Of course, if we believe for other reasons that decentralizing state power is a good idea, then we should endorse doing so for other reasons, but that’s something of a nonsequitor.
I think I’m missing your point.
It seems that one approach to this is for me to treat everyone well whether they work or not, and for me to provide additional incentives to people for doing the kind of work I want people to perform. This admittedly does not have the structure of a Prisoners Dilemma game, but I’m not sure why the PD structure is important.
If I find that some people who are capable of doing that work consistently choose not to under my incentive structure, I can experiment with my incentive structure… different people are best motivated by different things, after all.
If despite that I still find that some people who are capable of doing that work consistently choose not to… well, that means less of the work I want people to perform will get done than if they chose otherwise. Which might be a huge problem, if that work is much more valuable than the stuff they choose to do.
I have a bunch of options at that point. E.g., I can figure out other ways to get that work done (e.g. automation). Or I can figure out ways to force people to do that work.
Or I can rethink my initial conditions and stop treating everyone well whether they work or not… I can instead treat people well if they do the work I want done, and poorly otherwise, and count on that differential treatment to provide the missing incentive.
But that last option is far from the only option, nor is it clear to me that it works better than the alternatives.
This seems to me almost what we have now. Yes, there is a problem about defining “treating well”. However well you treat one group of people, if you treat everyone else better, the former will complain. These days in first-world countries the unemployed people are treated much better than an average working person was centuries ago. But that’s irrelevant. We see that they are treated worse than other people are today, therefore they are not treated well.
Even if you start treating poor people much better than they are treated now, even better than the average people are now, just wait 10, at most 20 years, and they will start comparing you to Hitler, if they see that someone else is treated even better.
I agree that we should experiment more. Preferably many different experiments in smaller regions, so it is easier to stop things when they go horribly wrong. Seems to me a good first step would be giving more independence to regions; decentralizing the state power.
Expanding on my “yup” above a little… it’s certainly conceivable that we could adopt an approach to defining “treating well” that isn’t entirely relative.
For example, nation A could assert that A’s unemployed people are being treated well if they have better conditions than the unemployed in nation B (by which standard the U.S. unemployed are generally treated well). Or that A’s unemployed people are being treated well if their children don’t demonstrate significantly higher levels of deficiency-based illnesses (due to malnutrition, exposure, etc.) than the children of their employed people. Or various other standards.
The difficulty I’d expect to face when proposing such a standard isn’t that the unemployed under it would be worse off than the employed and therefore I’m Hitler, it’s that most people have already written their bottom line about whether (for example) the U.S. unemployed are generally treated well, and evaluate the standard based on whether it gives the right answer to that question.
Yes, we could. And then some people would get political karma for insisting that this isn’t the true definition of treating well, and instead is just a part of conspiracy for oppressing people.
I can imagine a situation where there are illnesses typically attributed to poverty (and some people get political karma for insisting on the poverty hypothesis), even if material poverty is not the cause. For example, you could give people tons of money to buy healthy food, and yet they could decide to spend it all on junk food and alcohol. You measure their childrens’ health, and it becomes obvious the children are not fed properly. This article describes it better than I could.
I agree that it would be great to have an absolute definition of “treating people well”, which could be reached, first in one country, and then perhaps globally. But I predict that the closer we would get to it, the more people would insist that it’s a wrong definition.
I think that in a long term it’s even worse: the bottom line depends on information the people get. In a totalitarian state, you just have to insist that everything is great, and imprison everyone who says otherwise, and after a few years people will believe that it really is great. But if you have freedom of speech, someone will always make political karma by insisting that people should have more (who wouldn’t like that?), and that not having more is completely unbearable.
I am not convinced your article shows an example of “poverty” not being caused by real poverty.
The examples in the article tend to include both poverty-related factors and non-poverty-related factors. For instance, certainly failing to press charges against an abusive, criminal, boyfriend is something that can be done by someone of any income level, but on the other hand, poor people are more likely to steal money (like this boyfriend did), more likely to be unable to treat mental illness that might result in violence, and more likely to be frustrated in ways that lead to violence. In this case the guy was a burglar and had no job (poverty leads to no money and people with no money and no job are more likely to burgle). Those aren’t 100% due to poverty (clearly frustration at poverty is only a contributing factor to violence and the person won’t be violent unless something else predisposes him to violence), but poverty affects them at the margins. Not to mention that even though each individual decision to stay with a boyfriend who has no job is technically not poverty-related, poverty cumulatively leads to a high rate of joblessness.
Poor people are also less likely to be educated and therefore more likely to make poor life decisions.
Even buying junk food is related to poverty because junk food has a lower time expenditure than other food and time has a greater relative cost to poor people than to rich people—poor people often work long hours that leave them exhausted, must spend a lot of personal time on child care, etc. Poor people also are less likely to have a supermarket with cheap non-junk food within easy commute distance. Again, none of this is 100% caused by poverty—this just raises the relative cost of non-junk food, it doesn’t make it completely non-affordable—but it certainly has an effect.
Well, it’s complicated. For poor people, some “smart” options are not really possible. On the other hand, I also see many relatively rich people making the stupid options voluntarily. Poverty can cause “stupid” (from our point of view) choices, and also stupid choices can cause poverty.
I would like to see a society where no one is forced to make the “stupid” choice. (Organizations helping poor people to press charges against criminals, providing them food and refrigerators, etc.) But even in such society I expect many people making the stupid choices voluntarily. (And then complain about an unfair society. So if we could get halfway to such society, judging from people’s reactions it would seem there was no improvement.)
A while back, a friend of mine informed me that poorer Americans consume junk food because it’s one of the few pleasures aside from alcohol that’s easily and cheaply available to people of that socioeconomic stratum, and that what she referred to as “food politics” is therefore symptomatic of privilege.
It sounded like rationalization to me at the time, and I still find the availability and time constraint arguments more convincing, but she’d have had more personal experience than I.
Recommended reading: “Why I Make Terrible Decisions, or, poverty thoughts”
There seems to be some evidence that the article is at least describing a general case, and not the author’s immediate experiences, or worse
Huh.
*updating*
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.
See also
Yup.
I’m all in favor of experimentation.
And if we’re already experimenting to the limits of our existing regional independence, such that increased independence will relax the rate-limiting constraint on experimentation (which I doubt we are, but is I suppose possible), then yes, increased regional independence would make sense as a next step. Though perhaps it’s best to do so in a small region, so it’s easier to stop things if it goes horribly wrong.
Of course, if we believe for other reasons that decentralizing state power is a good idea, then we should endorse doing so for other reasons, but that’s something of a nonsequitor.