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Comment by DoreenMichele | Hacker News Reader

There will always be relative poverty. In other words if we "solved poverty" and there were no more hungry people without health insurance sleeping in the streets, you would still have people who had less than others around them.

But we can try to solve absolute poverty. We can try to make sure everyone has medical coverage, adequate nutrition etc.

An important element of that is we need to design systems where having less than others doesn't close doors in your face and become a trap you can't escape. (I don't think UBI accomplishes that.)

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Do you mean inequality? Poverty has a specific meaning. We define poverty thresholds. Middle class is not in "relative poverty" compared to billioners.

The threshold at which people use the term "poverty" is very different in different countries (including the official American definition, which changes), even after adjusting for PPP. So whether or not it's officially supposed to be an absolute measure, in practice it's relative.

No, I mean relative poverty.

Many years ago, I saw a study that indicated that less than 1/2 of 1% of Americans were poor by the standards of India. Even homeless people in the US typically ate better than people classified as poor in India.

But we still have homeless people here in the US. They typically have serious personal problems, such as serious medical conditions. Being homeless in the US is a genuine hardship and it's partly caused by the lack of cheap, small housing.

We've torn down about a million SROs.* There are homeless people in the US who could afford an SRO if they could find market rate SROs.

If you live on Social Security as your only income and can no longer work, we don't have any market based housing for you and many government housing projects have wait lists that are years long.

We've raised the bar so extremely high in this country that it's a genuine problem for a high percentage of the country. It actively creates hardship and privation in a wealthy country that really ought to be able to virtually eliminate homelessness.

But we don't. And after tearing down a lot of very basic housing for literally decades, when someone ends up homeless, we don't blame the lack of housing supply for people with low incomes. We say they have a personal problem and are probably just a junkie.

* https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_room_occupancy

The average social security check is $1461 (https://money.usnews.com/money/retirement/social-security/ar...). There are plenty of places in small town USA that you can rent for $600-$700 a month and have money left over.

Of the 7.5 million existing rental homes that extremely low-income families can afford, 3.5 million are occupied by higher-income households. In other words, families who need affordable housing the most don’t necessarily get it.

From this article:

For every 100 families living in poverty on the West Coast, there are no more than 30 affordable homes

https://www.geekwire.com/2018/every-100-families-living-pove...

Most people will absolutely not be getting the average amount. Some will be getting quite a lot less than the average.

(Someone with a PhD once told me: "The average human would have one breast, one testicle and a three inch weiner." Designing policy around averages is practically guaranteed to go bad places.)

For every 100 families living in poverty on the West Coast, there are no more than 30 affordable homes

There are 45 more states in the contiguous US that are not on the west coast.....

That's merely the title of the article. From the article:

No state in the nation has more than 60 affordable rental units for every 100 families living at or below the poverty line. What’s more, 71 percent of extremely low-income households spend more than half of their incomes on rent and utilities.

What point are you trying to make here?

How is the average retiree's income from Social Security relevant to the broader issue of poverty and homelessness among people of all ages?

From the parent post:

If you live on Social Security as your only income and can no longer work, we don't have any market based housing for you and many government housing projects have wait lists that are years long.

Maybe all the poor people aren't too stupid to figure this out but have various complicating factors that often tag along with poverty like bad credit or losing their home due to poverty or job loss which is often described as a "poor rental history". It also assumes that one can find housing so cheap in areas where other people in your household can also find work.

Lets be charitable and assume that poor people aren't struggling because they are too stupid to find cheaper places to live.

I never said that wasn’t the case, I replied to one specific part of the comment.

My wife is disabled. We don't get checks for 17k instead we get 10k+ in premiums + medical expenses + 3k in taxes out of what might be 34k gross 21K net.

You can be in fact disabled but not disabled enough to receive much in the way of help.

You can easily be poor but not poor enough to have your medical needs paid for and be poorer than if you were barely working and sponging off the system.

Poverty thresholds have always been set relatively, even in the USA.

Poverty is usually defined as a percentage on the income distribution. This may be useful in deciding who qualifies for aid, but is useless as a KPI. There will always be 10% of the population in the bottom 10% of the population.

Inequality is defined as the difference in income between points on the distribution. Inequality can get worse, even as material conditions at the bottom get better, when growth accrues more quickly to the top. Inequality can also get better, even as conditions at the bottom decline, if conditions at the top are declining faster.

Absolute poverty would be the share of people living without some fixed level of material comfort (i.e. shelter). This is probably what we should focus on.

Where is poverty defined like that? I have always seen poverty defined as a function of the standard of living, not of income distribution.

Poverty has a distinct absolute definition (at least in the US). The line is so clear it is, in fact, called the poverty line.

Also, even if you can always rank net worth, you can still greatly reduce the relative inequality from what we see today.

I not American and was curious about that.

For those wondering: their poverty threshold seems to be determined by some form of inflation adjusted basket containing basic goods like food:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_thresholds_(United_S...

Is there absolute poverty in the US ?

>... (I don't think UBI accomplishes that.)

Does anyone have a flashlight? I can't quite see, it's so dark all the way down here where this lede is buried.

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