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There is no windfall in poverty. In general, folks with money are able to have things like comfortable shoes, entertainment, and not worry about their electricity being turned off if they have a flat tire.

Every "windfall" takes care of a need, makes you more secure with things like food and shelter, or gives you some mental relief by providing a few moments of entertainment. There is no saving for those other things if you have been walking to work because you can't afford to fix the flat tire or if you've been in pain due to poor shoes.

There is no advice on how to afford things if you only have $5 extra at the end of the month and definitely no advice on how to afford life if you simply don't earn enough. "Saving a windfall" is pointless if you have a hospital bill that is threatening to sue and deduct the money from your paycheck.

I am not sure you really understand poverty.

False theories of poverty spread by people like yourself are the reason more people don't get the right advice to get out. They're told something crazy like "well yeah you just don't have enough money, too bad"

The guy I'm talking about has windfalls - and when they come he'll feel so bad he goes out with friends and blows $30 on a meal. If he changed his celebrations to $15 meals using a coupon clipped from the paper (I know he can, I've been with him I know his world and options) and saved the other $15, the next time he got an unexpected bill he would have the savings to cover it. (The definition of unexpected here is very loose - because for him it is very loose. Everything is "unexpected" and "unplanned" - but YES - a flat tire) He does this and before long his credit score starts to improve, before long he has balance free transfer offers, before long he is no longer throwing money at credit card interest but instead paying down the balance because he has 18 months 0 interest

My OTHER friend, who is now a millionaire, was earning the same super low income. But he was already investing based on this income by making hard compromises on day-to-day living. He is Asian, so has a completely different cultural background based on his immigrate parents believing one needs to save no matter how low their income. Yeah if he didn't get a better job he probably wouldn't have made it to the millions, but, on a poor salary he was already well on his way to home ownership and all the domino effect line of decisions that lead to lower and lower cost of living (once you're in a home equity is building instead of disappearing on rent) etc. even on the same low salary.

If I didn't know the Asian guy, I'd probably still be using your same line of argumentation - pretending that there is some lower limit where you "just don't have enough" but it is just such hogwash & excuses that got the poor where they are in 9 of 10 cases of poverty in the US at least. Clearly there is a huge difference with the 1 case or with cases in another country where the political system's own evils may cause it

I have no idea of this applies to all low-income people, but I certainly known people who would have trouble paying their rent during the year, but would later spend their tax refund on a trip to hawaii (from california) rather than save it for a rainy day. I went to university with a student who couldn't afford a $30 calculator for class, but would buy a $200 bottle of booze while on a night out for her friend's birthday.

Pretending that none of the poor have maladaptive behaviors is not helpful to them. There are also many other reasons for poverty, many of which are not under that person's control - but that makes it more important to control what you can

"Black rednecks and white liberals" by Thomas Sowell has a lot more details about cultural traits associated with persistent vs transient poverty

Isn't trying to explain poverty by referring to two of your friends a massive overprojection?

There are indeed times when a problem could be solved on the higher level by managing resources better, if you actually have the hinterland. Yet not all problems are about the superstructure you built on physical realities, and sometimes you simply don't have enough money no matter how you budget, or not enough smart people no matter how you place them in an org. chart.

Casting every problem down to a problem of management & choice seems to me a lazy excuse to escape the reality.

I agree in part, but completely ignoring the management and choice aspects to whatever greatest extent that they are present is also forfeiting one of the best local responses.

I think that’s where the Starbucks and avocado toast tropes come from. They’re not 100% right, but they’re surely not 100% wrong either.

I work with engineers who are making 6-figures and struggling with money or on course for a poor retirement. For those people, it’s 97+% choices IMO.

ok, now tell us how that applies to the family with 3 kids where both parents work and rent is 70% of their income?

It applies by the greatest extent possible being zero, which is why I phrased it that way.

did they know rent would be 70% of their income when they decided to have their first child? their third?

This is pretending a world is perfect. If pregnancy were easy to prevent, folks would have done it well before modern times. But that simply isn't the case. It doesn't matter if they knew the rent was that high, and it isn't like folks can avoid this in all areas.

Expecting a couple to never have sex is unreasonable and pregnancy cannot always be prevented. In some areas, access to abortion is abysmal, though in some areas, a woman can get the day after pill for emergencies - but that's hardly prevention.

As far as pregnancy prevention: The best prevention is actually male sterilization. Condoms break. Every single prevention method for women have a failure rate, including sterilization methods. For hormonal birth control, lots of things affect it, including some medicines.

And this is all assuming folks can afford medical care and prescriptions, which you need for most forms of birth control. I'm not sure anywhere in the US will mail condoms to you for free (unsure of how well spermicide alone performs or if they still sell a sponge for women). Heck, a young woman who doesn't want children cannot generally get sterilized, insurance often doesn't pay for it, it isn't cheap, and IIRC you need time off.

okay, I concede there are some parts of the world where family planning is actually pretty difficult. but think about the chain of things that have to go wrong to have an unplanned child in most wealthy countries.

you have to improperly use (or eschew entirely) the several forms of birth control available. you don't need insurance to buy condoms, and they are not particularly expensive. even if you can't afford to buy hormonal birth control, an IUD, or condoms outright, you can often get them for free or very cheap through planned parenthood. if you are even using one of these correctly, your risk of pregnancy in a given year is <= 2%. if you combine them, the risk is well under 1%. if you mess up somewhere along the way or are one of those spectacularly unlucky people who gets pregnant anyway, abortion is still legal (for now, at least) in all 50 US states. once again, you can get this for free or a greatly reduced price through planned parenthood.

if everything I mentioned above has gone wrong and you actually bring a child into the world that you did not plan for, you can still put the child up for adoption. the demand for newborns is quite a bit higher than the number that are actually available for adoption.

I can easily believe there are a lot of parents out there who had good plans for raising their children that went sideways due to truly unforeseeable circumstances. I think there are also a lot of parents who chose to have children without having any idea how they would support them. what I don't believe is that there is a meaningful number of parents in wealthy countries who are stuck supporting children they had no intention of raising.

Maybe they were high earners who had any number of setbacks. There are plenty of ways anyone can stumble financially.

Most people also make financial mistakes. The people who had help, or enough slack to recover shouldn't look down on the ones who don't.

You have to afford birth control, which isn't always an easy feat. I've lived plenty of places where, being poor, I couldn't afford to travel to planned parenthood.

Lots of folks get pregnant on these: Most folks can't take birth control pills perfectly. (I Personally cannot use hormonal birth control at all without major side effects, and wanted to be sterilized - but that's not generally an option for childless women)

Abortion is legal, sure: But it isn't free either and in some states, it takes travel and things to get there.

Expecting folks to put their child up for adoption is simply cruel. Besides, we should look at more than financial viability for folks. I'd rather help folks raise whatever children they have than sell children off (taxpayer funded is the way to go) and I'd much rather foster homes and adoption of older children be encouraged.

What is wrong with a poor retirement? What is wrong with enjoying life today? What if your plan is simply never to retire?

>False theories of poverty spread by people like yourself are the reason more people don't get the right advice to get out.

What exactly is your theory of poverty, if you don't mind me asking? That impoverished folk should be better at saving, and then they wouldn't be impoverished?

Let’s agree that both forms exist. There are definitely people with very little financial literacy living paycheck to paycheck, in constant fear of an unexpected cost, that could have adjusted their lifestyle to save a small amount over time into a meaningful nest egg. There are also people who just make less money than even a spartan life costs.

It’s ignorant to assume that all poverty is the result of poor decisions and an unwillingness to save, but equally ignorant to pretend that doesn’t exist at all.

There's much more windfall in poverty than in non-poverty; when you have stable and sufficient income, you don't have windfalls almost by definition, and middle-income people don't get stock awards or huge bonuses either. When you work odd jobs, or get help from relatives, or whatever, it's all windfalls.

I won't claim it's the majority, but I've certainly seen lots of people blow windfalls of all sizes on ridiculous things (from someone working crappy odd jobs like loading trucks for barely enough money for food and necessities getting a one-time construction gig for a fixed sum and blowing it on a huge party, to barely have enough money for food again in literally a week; to someone using a bonus AND running up credit card debt to go on a fancy vacation, probably far more expensive than my techie vacations, and then complaining to everyone how they have crippling levels of credit card debt interest payments).

I can kinda understand where the psychological need might come from, but it has to be fixed regardless... just like drug addiction while explainable needs to be fixed. That is, if you care to reduce poverty.

Oh an my favorite example from Russia is where someone's rainy day fund of ~$1000 in cash (in the 90ies/early oughts that was a lot of money) was stolen by their sibling and blown on restaurants and expensive clothing. When found out and confronted, the sibling was defensive and said well you were not using it anyway! That's the psychology of many poor as I see it (not the stealing, the "not using" part).

> There are probably 10 guys like him for every person who actually is so broke there is no way out...This is what America's "poor" looks like, it is far more a mental state than concrete reality.

No, this is what poverty looks like in the strawman you've built up in your head. I guarantee you the person you describe exists, and is just as you describe - but they're also not representative of American poverty. But they're certainly the caricature of it that certain groups love to push for political reasons and have been doing so consistently for decades. In the 80s it went by the myth of the 'welfare queens'. A caricature that was demonstrably false - but that didn't stop it from becoming a commonly held perspective at the time (people have since learned the truth). And the process goes back further than that.

I won't speculate about numbers, but until I dealt with people with "spending problems", I had NO IDEA seemingly smart people could be like that!

Simplest way to describe it is that their definition of "I can afford X" is "right now I have more money than X costs". Really!

These people will of course always be poor, regardless of income, subsidies etc.

How many they are is an empirical question, and I haven't seen any data.

One idea to handle them I like is to pay people daily, instead of monthly/biweekly. In the modern computerized world, that should be simple, and could really help some people.

Living month to month from cash reserves is the general way to describe this mindset, and is is the reason the nation sees a significant increase in purchases of durable goods when tax returns roll in each spring.

Your idea of daily payouts is a very clever hack on the system and deserves a practical trial. It would be most interesting to see if it encourages inceased savings on this scale.

Asking in good faith: data to back you up? Just my anecdata, growing up living in apartments with 8 siblings at one point, many friends who grew up in foster homes and trailer parks - maybe 1 or 2 I could recall who were “doing everything right” but still poor, and that seemed primarily because they were on disability and elderly.

The rest? Spent every paycheck, griped about immigrants and how the govt takes too much, bought lottery tickets, tons of toys at Christmas. One couple even lost had his kids taken away by CPS, was told they’d get them back once they could move out of the hotel they were living in and demonstrate they could stick to a budget - they spent their tax refund on a used Mustang.

Perhaps there are plenty of people who save what they can, make smart financial decisions, and STILL struggle in poverty. That’s not the case in my experience, but I’d love to be wrong. The hardest part about escaping may just be having no clue how to, or just plain refusing to implement it.

(Economist) Bryan Caplan is currently working on a book, and his research so far seems to agree with your points: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jAaCpyuwRIw

Caplan is very right wing ("the homeless still smile!"). The talk was still okish, but the points of view come from one side and could use some balance.

Blaming poverty on "impulsive sex" and leaving blameless the policies of limiting birth control and freedom of choice is a pretty myopic point of view.

Caplan is a libertarian.

You'll never see anything like his pro open borders book from the right wing:

https://www.amazon.com/Open-Borders-Science-Ethics-Immigrati...

A fair amount of libertarians are right wing. This is true even if one supports something or another that happens to not be stereotypically right wing.

Broadly, libertarians agree with the right on economics and the left on social issues.

Ditto. My family would spend all of their savings on Christmas presents, which would generally never exceed 500 dollars. They felt it was beneath them to follow the advice I gave them from early retirement blogs. My mothers partner bought an expensive riding lawnmower when my little brother needed many of his baby teeth treated due to baby bottle carries (totally preventable if you follow the advice of almost any baby book). He was too proud to sign his name to get free dental care for my brother so he suffered/had teeth pulled. My mother would super glue a tooth of hers back into her mouth and get reoccurring infections and pay for the antibiotics instead of getting it properly taken care of. My mother will be government assistance of the rest of her life. She has taken no initiative to learn a skill/find a job. I can imagine her working as a receptionist or Walmart greeter but beyond this there are just some people like her who are too broken from abuse/health problems or have a very low IQ. I escaped poverty/child homelessness/covert sexual abuse. Moving to Silicon Valley to work in bioengineering was extremely difficult. I know no one else in real life who came from a similar background who has made it this far.

If that’s the poorest guy you know, then you don’t really know poverty. Come on over to Mississippi.