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 Post Posted: Tue Oct 16, 2012 3:06 pm 
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This is something that I have been thinking about lately. It's occurred to me that a lot of the American debate about poverty is based on oversimplified caricatures about what poor people are like. Republicans say that poor people are just irresponsible people who are lazy and make poor decisions so they deserve no sympathy. Democrats say that poor people are hardworking honest folks who just fell on hard times and so deserve help. I think that neither of those stories is true.

Poor people do make decisions that seem irrational or foolish, but that doesn't mean they're just lazy shiftless bums. And while some poor people are simply blameless people who suffered from bad luck, not all are, and it does no good to paint them as saints. They're normal people, and normal people often do stupid stuff when put in bad situations. I think more needs to be done to understand the psychology of poverty. How does poverty affect people's decision-making processes?

I think John Cheese from Cracked.com has written a pretty good first hand account of how growing up poor makes you develop stupid habits.

For example, he says that when he was poor, he spent money foolishly. Sure, you could say he was poor because he spent money foolishly, but it also applies the other way around. When you are constantly living hand to mouth, you tend to discount the future. So when you get hold of a bit of extra cash (say, a tax credit), you blow it all in one go. You behave like money has an expiry date and if you don't enjoy it as much as you can right now, it might disappear and Future You will never see a cent of it.

Cheese also says that when you are poor, you tend to eat a lot of crap. Liberals tend to talk a lot about food deserts, while conservatives complain about people buying junk food on food stamps. Both sides ignore the psychology. When you are poor, and your life is stressful and dreary, you don't want to eat beans and cabbage even if they are cheap and healthy. You want to eat something sugary and fatty and tasty because there's few other ways to brighten up your day. And as Cheese points out, if you get used to eating crap because that's all you have the time and money to eat, you start to like it and actively seek it out, even after you can afford better food.

In a book I've been reading called "Poor Economics", researchers were puzzled to find that in India, where malnutrition is rife, people have not been consuming more calories even as incomes have risen and food prices have fallen. People aren't buying more food even though they can afford to. They're buying tastier and more expensive refined carbs like rice and wheat and sugar, rather than more cheap barley, and ending up still malnourished as a result. Poor people in India also blow obscene amounts of money on festivals and weddings. Or, they'll save up to buy a TV even if they can't afford enough food. Why? Because they're bored out of their minds. Celebrations give them something to look forward to. And funnily enough, in areas where people own more televisions, people spend less on festivals.

So people do dumb stuff. But they also do dumb stuff in fairly predictable and understandable ways, and they're neither more sinful nor virtuous than the average person would be in the same situation. And understanding how people do dumb things will help design policies that are more likely to succeeding helping people become less poor.

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 Post Posted: Tue Oct 16, 2012 3:15 pm 
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There are quite a few books out there on the subject. Well, maybe not exactly on the mindset of poverty so much as the mind set of those that are wealthy. They do touch on the differences between the masses and those that become successful. I could over simplify it by saying that many books point out that in either case it comes down to mindset and habits. They also stress that the people you surround yourself with are the people you will be like.

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 Post Posted: Tue Oct 16, 2012 3:16 pm 
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Give me paper and a pencil, and it will take me a long time to get bored.

If you also give me someone with similar interests, now we're talking months.

It's a shame if those who need it the most can't extract amusement from the cheap or free.

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 Post Posted: Tue Oct 16, 2012 3:26 pm 
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drachefly wrote:
Give me paper and a pencil, and it will take me a long time to get bored.

If you also give me someone with similar interests, now we're talking months.

It's a shame if those who need it the most can't extract amusement from the cheap or free.


Most of the time this is true for me too.

But if i am stressed and exhausted, but not yet tired enough to go to sleep, then i want to watch TV, not do anything creative or something.

Being poor often exhausts and brings stress.

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 Post Posted: Tue Oct 16, 2012 4:19 pm 
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Some things I observed while serving a mission in Mexico:

We were encouraged to teach not only gospel principles, but also hygiene where needed. Of particular importance was buying purified water, as drinking tap water was pretty much the number one vector for contracting intestinal parasites. I remember sitting down with the mother of one family and asking why she did not buy purified water. She responded that it was too expensive. In nearly the same breath, she turned to her child and sent him to the corner tienda to buy two 2-liter bottles of Coke. For the same price, she could have purchased 19 liters of purified water.

I lost count of the number of tiny shacks I was invited into that had dirt floors, sticks and cardboard walls, aluminum sheeting roofs, and awesome stereo systems.

A scenario I saw frequently was the father of the family getting his paycheck and blowing most of it on booze the same day. He then came home drunk and passed out on the hammock. Meanwhile, his wife had to work another job just to have barely enough money to pay rent to keep their family housed in their tiny, dirt-floor shack... and take care of the kids on top of it all. It was such a distressingly common scenario that it seemed almost a cultural phenomenon, and the irresponsibility of it infuriated me.

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 Post Posted: Tue Oct 16, 2012 4:39 pm 
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AlternateTorg wrote:
I lost count of the number of tiny shacks I was invited into that had dirt floors, sticks and cardboard walls, aluminum sheeting roofs, and awesome stereo systems.

Not the same degree, but when I'm delivering furniture for a local charity organization, I can't tell you the number of homes I see missing basic necessities but sporting massive TVs. I once delivered a mattress to a house with about a half dozen kids asleep on piles of dirty laundry, but they had 60" screens in every room.

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 Post Posted: Tue Oct 16, 2012 5:04 pm 
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My family owns a trailer park and stuff like that is surprisingly common. One tenant was behind on his rent three months. Came to my parents crying about how he didn't have enough money to pay rent and how awful sorry he was. A week later he brought home a brand new silver sports car with a gas guzzling V8 engine. Another tenant of ours would miss a rent payment every couple of months. When going in to conduct an inspection to see if there was anything that needed fixing, we found a 60 inch flat screen television in the living room and several smaller ones in all three bedrooms along with about three different PS3's.

I've long since stopped trying to understand it. It's actually gotten to the point that the stupidity of it doesn't bother me anymore. Just another fact of life. Water flows downhill. Grass is usually green. The leaves change colors during the Fall. Poor people spend ludicrous amounts of money they don't have. Sunrise, sunset.

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 Post Posted: Tue Oct 16, 2012 5:18 pm 
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There are a number of books on the psychology of poverty --Ruby K Payne's "Framework For Understanding Poverty" is one of the best known, although it's also highly controversial.

However, what I see as missing from this conversation seems to be the observation that much of what people have described here could just as easily be described as the social exploitation of the vulnerable poor.

Companies spend millions on marketing because it's highly effective at changing people's behaviors. That's true even in a well-educated population, but it's even more true in a population that doesn't have any framework for analyzing or resisting the consumerist message it encounters.

None of this can be understood in isolation from the fact that the propagation of self-destructive or self-defeating behavioral patterns among the poor does tend to serve the interests of society as a whole, at least as modern society is currently constituted. For that reason, no great amount of effective effort is ever expended to change things (not counting, of course, the aforementioned millions spent on creating the consumerist mindset in the first place).

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 Post Posted: Tue Oct 16, 2012 5:48 pm 
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I think an obvious lesson no one (but Kea) has directly mentioned is that entertainment is clearly considered to be a necessity, not a luxury. Our society does not view it so, however, and thus we collectively find people that choose entertainment over one of the basic necessities to be nonsensical.

If, instead of placing entertainment on a tier (or two) above the "basic" necessities, we instead viewed it as equally vital to food and shelter, would these decisions not become more sensible?

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 Post Posted: Tue Oct 16, 2012 6:50 pm 
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I tend to be out of date regarding the prices of electronics, some stuff is terribly expensive, and then you don't look for a moment and then it's dirt cheap, so i am not making statements, what sort of consumer electronics is appropriate for what income.

It could be argued, that for buying fewer or less luxurious TV sets, the families could have nearly equally good entertainment for much saving in costs, assuming it is actually luxury TVs at the time the buy it.

On the other hand how much and what furniture do you get for the price of TV sets and stereos? How many month rent? And if you are not certain if you will be able to pay your rent in the coming years, will you invest in hard to transport equipment such as beds and cupboards, or in more portable stuff like plasma TVs? If you are going to be evicted, you propably can run away with your plasma TV, but not so likely with your furniture.

And there also is a psychological need for luxuries and status symbols, for some people. If i am stressed at work or working on something i don't like, if i start thinking that i have to do this to pay for my basic needs, i only get more depressed and start thinking about how long i could live on the money i have in my saving account*, if i quit my job. If i think about luxuries i am going to buy with the money i make, it helps me get motivation. And while it's hard to pin down buy decisions, i guess i bought some luxuries**, just to keep me motivated at work.

Should i compain about something i want and can't buy, and someone well meaning would tell me, that i could, if i saved all the money for thoose various luxuries, then the advice would not be particulary welcome. If i stop buying them, how am i supposed to keep working without developing a burnout?

Sure you can direct such gratification to cheaper luxuries, and it is a good advice to have a limited budget for them and stick to it, if money is tight. But advising, not to have any luxuries, while poor is IMO not very constructive-

* well i am not poor, i just assume it basically works the same with some poor people, only they don't have money in a saving account.
** and propably they are lame compared to other peoples luxuries

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 Post Posted: Tue Oct 16, 2012 9:21 pm 
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I sincerely hope it has changed by now, but throughout my entire public school career I was never in a class that taught basic money management: why credit is both important and dangerous, why saving for a purchase is better than buying on credit, how to track, prioritize and budget your expenses, how to save for retirement, how to efficiently pay off debt and stay out of it, how to cooperate with your spouse on financial matters, that sort of thing. I don't think my parents taught me, either, at least not directly. It was mostly stuff I learned for myself because I didn't want to be in that situation. It seems to me that if we really want to address poverty, one of the first things we should do is make sure people are taught basic financial principles. Granted, a lot of people will be irresponsible with money even when they do understand these things, but it seems like there are a number of people who just never learned them.

As I was reading this thread, I was thinking about some friends of mine who seem to exemplify some of the problems discussed in this thread. Every time they start to make financial headway, they get smacked with a problem that could have been easily avoided. They get hit with finance charges because they don't coordinate with each other on expenses. They get charged no-show fees by the doctor for repeatedly missing appointments. They even got sued because they repeatedly forgot to make payments on something. If they just communicated, cooperated, and got their act together, they'd have enough money and could build up a savings; instead, they live hand-to-mouth constantly.

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 Post Posted: Tue Oct 16, 2012 11:11 pm 
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A couple of points, and one is what Freakyboy said, which is that the poor tend to consider entertainment a necessity. Being poor isn't fun, and if you don't have some fun, you'd go nuts. drachefly could entertain himself with a pencil and paper, but what good is that to an illiterate rickshaw driver? Or a farmer in a village with more cows than people?

Secondly, blowing money on giant TVs fits into the "discounting the future" bit. I think there's a bit of caveman psychology going on there - if your livelihood is highly unstable, you're going to want to feast when times are good. You stuff yourself silly when resources are plentiful so that you can weather starvation times. Of course, money doesn't work that way, but I think people's minds still do.

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 Post Posted: Wed Oct 17, 2012 12:22 am 
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arcosh wrote:
how am i supposed to keep working without developing a burnout?
This is the reason/excuse I use when buying "unnecessary" luxuries such as entertainment. While not poor now, I grew up very poor. I am sure my spending habits were created at that point in my life. I live check to check. I work VERY HARD almost every day and at the end of the week I seldom have anything left for me. If I paid all my bills on time I would have none. On the rare occasions that I get a little extra cash (O/T, tax return, side work) I do spend money on entertainment. I have a big TV. In my home I have a PS3, two Xbox 360s, a Wii and four computers. I have a Harley Davidson motorcycle. I also live in a small Mobile Home instead of a house that I could afford IF I lived frugally and IF I had a credit score that would allow me to get a loan. My reasoning, although it may be flawed, is not that I am entitled to entertainment and that the bill collectors can just wait, it is that if work is all I do it will not be long before I see no reason to keep going on. My entertainment IS a need. It is the necessary distraction that allows me to trudge on through the daily pain of working my butt off trying to survive.

After reading the link Kea supplied I would like to quote a section that really struck me. It was an insight into my own behavior that I had never considered but it is very true.
Cracked said "When a windfall check is dropped in your lap, you don't know how to handle it. Instead of thinking, "This will cover our rent and bills for half a year," you immediately jump to all the things you've been meaning to get, but couldn't afford on your regular income. If you don't buy it right now, you know that the money will slowly bleed away to everyday life over the course of the next few months, leaving you with nothing to show for it. Don't misunderstand me here, it's never a "greed" thing. It's a panic thing. "We have to spend this before it disappears."'

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 Post Posted: Wed Oct 17, 2012 12:42 am 
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My home has three largescreen tvs (that I know of), two I didn't buy, one I picked up off a driveway and carted home. Why is it that I don't spend on entertainment, but I never have money anyway? Every year I get an extra bit of money, and every SINGLE YEAR something eats it. New tires, 30k tune, auto accident. Any time I might be able to sock some away there's a plethora of eager hands waiting to snatch it away.

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 Post Posted: Wed Oct 17, 2012 1:48 am 
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I'd agree that "caveman psychology" is a factor. However, our consumerist culture probably pays a part as well. When having the latest/most expensive X possible is seen as a status symbol, buying things, no matter how impractical, can be seen as achieving success.

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