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Comment by aantix | Hacker News Reader

Don’t most U.S. based poor still have housing, food, cable television, air conditioning, heat, cell phones, and access to public libraries with WiFi?

It’s not luxury but isn’t it major progress vs 100 years ago?

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At the risk of being demeaning, this could only be a reply from someone with money who knows no one without it. Go travel around the poorest areas in the US and spend time talking to people, you'll learn really quickly how little access to cell phones or public libraries with WiFi are improving their life.

Sure almost everyone in this country has a computer in their pocket, they also very often have no access to fresh groceries at the same time. The town I grew up in is 60% below the poverty line and the nearest grocery store with fresh produce is a 30 minute drive away. That's over 800 people in one city who eat frozen gas station food on a daily basis. Do you think their wifi access and cable television is a good measure of their quality of life? They've also had to shutdown the local hospital recently. Meaning their already-terrible access to healthcare just got that much worse. Most people there only visit a doctor once every 5 years.

And I can already imagine the replies to this "well, times are changing, they're living in a dying region". Which... while true... doesn't come close to forgiving the systemic problems that put them in this situation. Systemic problems that by no measure had to come to fruition, if we had only had a stronger system of wealth distribution and thus physical and educational support for the people at the bottom of the pile.

Also, for the record, they're actually closing the library in my hometown.

Something many people may be unaware of, is that one cannot receive food stamps without a physical street address. Meaning that the numbers on food stamps and the numbers of homeless are for the most part 2 separate groups of people. Combined, they easily represent half the population. And I insist that census statisticians constantly downplay homeless stats, for two reasons. Because the real numbers are embarrassing, and because you cannot hit a moving target.

About 9% of US households use food stamps at some point in the year [0]. About 0.17% of US people are homeless on a given night [1]. Nowhere near half.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supplemental_Nutrition_Assista...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_the_United_Sta...

And by my years in the streets do I insist that such figures are full-on lies, lies told to comfort the masses away from throwing trashcans through shop windows and burning down city hall and the like. Most of said masses don't look away from their screens long enough to see the real picture.

And a grinding, dehumanizing bureaucracy to prove that you need access to assistance of various kinds, plus various disincentives to work as assistance drops off faster than your income grows.

USDA estimates that 12% of households qualify as "food insecure": https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food-nutrition-assistance/fo...

Adult Medicaid recipients often have only "emergency services", aka having your teeth pulled, as part of their benefits: https://www.medicaid.gov/medicaid/benefits/dental/index.html

All-in-all it's not pretty being poor in America, even if you have cable TV and heat to distract you from the mountain of paperwork where you have to repeatedly state how much help you need and the gaps in your teeth and the "joy" of paying with food stamps at the store.

All while hearing rhetoric from certain politicians saying how people "leech" from the system and actively try to remove these services.

Let’s not hold back. Mitch McConnell, wants to punish the poor for being poor.

Milton Friedman recognized this and proposed a solution half a century ago.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWcTMGaOHWA

Is that a reasonable metric to use? (edit: ... to declare success?)

We can have major progress and still not have sufficient progress. We can make major improvements and still feel like we have a long way to go.

Just because we're better off than our grandparents doesn't erase that some of us are relatively badly off against today's standard, and we could be doing more to help those who are at the bottom of our socioeconomic ladder.

> Is that a reasonable metric to use?

Yes, it is. There is hyperbole on both sides of this debate. Being able to show we've made historic progress makes future potential progress look more realistic. It shows our institutions are capable of solving this problem.

That's fair! Assuming you are making the argument that we are making progress.

I should amend my statement to say, "Is that a reasonable metric to use to declare success?" I regularly bump into folks who say, "Well, what more should we do? We're already better than we were 100 years ago."

> I should amend my statement to say, "Is that a reasonable metric to use to declare success?"

Got it. I think there may be confusion between a metric and a threshold. The metric being certain objective measures of quality of life. The thresholds being where we were 100 years ago, where we are today, and where we should be today.

More broadly, anyone "declaring success" on such a broad question is--at best--deluded. More common is people throwing their hands up at what looks like an insurmountable problem. I've found pointing out the often-unappreciated magnitude of recent historical performance to be useful in that respect.

> today's standard

If you keep moving the goal posts, you'll never get there.

Isn't moving the goal posts the whole point, though? If we didn't do that then we would declare "mission accomplished" as long as everyone wasn't sleeping on a dirt floor and dying of malaria. Social welfare success should always be a moving target relative to the ability of the society in which it exists to create it.

Not in California, for example, which has taken Dream Hoarding to the extreme.

AC, Heat, cell phones, internet are all easily achievable, sometimes with an RV or a car. But housing has been hoarded to an extreme, locking out all sorts of people.

The poor can afford food, but of what quality? Looking at the pricing of shitty food vs quality food, it's pretty obvious that the poor are disproportionately consuming crap, with all the attendant health problems that brings. Health problems that they are unlikely to be able to afford to effectively treat.

Yes, by many measures, life for the poorest in the first world is far less miserable than it was 100 years ago. But still pretty miserable as anyone who has been poor - really poor - knows. Dickensian quality of life shouldn't be used as a the baseline against which we measure ourselves in the 21st century.

Today's middle class fair better than medieval royalty. So what?

We're not comparing today's poor to yesteryear's.

We're comparing today's poor to today's robber barons.

This is such a great analogy.

I suppose if a business has a desk, printer, phone, and employee, we can count it as successful too.

There are plenty of people who would then politely point out that if the poorest Americans aren't poor enough for you, we can look at the problems of the poorest people on the planet and say that it's pretty fucked conditions they're living in considering how the top 20% of Americans are spending their money.

Or, tl;dr- "Better" still isn't good enough.

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