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Comment by ironman1478 | Hacker News Reader

This. Poverty doesn't just cause immediate issues it can also cause long term issues that can effect not only adults, but the children who grew up in that environment. This is largely because families in poverty tend to also abuse their kids at higher rates (this includes mental abuse) or at least foster an extremely unhealthy environment due to the stress it causes. So even a generation later it can be difficult for a family tree to be lifted out of that situation. It's brutal not having a support system in place for people. What sucks is that it's probably bad for overall productivity to not help people in these situations, but the usa has chosen to say screw it for many years (hopefully that is changing).

Imo forget being "rich", just growing up in a relatively sane environment is an advantage.

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I grew up in a family of 7 (4 younger siblings), during civil war, father was into gamling and drinking, mother was unemployed and constantly on the verge of a mental breakdown (understandable given the conditions she was living in). To paint the picture, I have vivid memories of vomiting a boiled onion I ate after not eating for days (I think I was arround 5 years old). And we were poor well into my early 20s untill I left home.

It took a long time to get out of that, and material problems were an issue for sure, but I would say the biggest obstacle for me was that I had no rolemodel and was forced to discover everything on my own. In retrospect I had plenty of opportunities to get out of my situation way earlier and I could have done a lot of things better, and it was pretty common sense to most normal/functioning people - but I didn't have a lot of those arround me.

And that wouldn't change if you gave my parents money - after my grandparents died my mother inherited some land and a house, in a year she managed to squander it away with terrible spending decisions and no long term planning (coupled with the sense of entitlement and expectation that things will just work out).

I also never viewed school as something relevant, teachers were hardly authoritative figures (from my perspective their job was to babysit me and they were poorly paid - why would I accept them as authority on anything).

So I don't think it's something you can solve with money alone, having functional parents is always going to set you up to do better in life.

I don't think anyone is suggesting problems can be solved with money alone. What's very obvious is that a capable person without resources will struggle while a much less capable person who has the safety net of a wealthy background can still be successful. No one is suggesting it's guaranteed though.

That's the classic "you shouldn't give money to poor people, they are just going to spend it on alcohol, drugs etc." argument. This ignores that there are a lot of people who are unable to make ends meet despite having not one but sometimes several jobs. Maybe people would be less stressed if they knew they wouldn't lose their job if their car (>20 years old, which they can't afford to repair) breaks down...

Where am I saying that ?

Sorry if my comment came across as insensitive, especially since it's your own family history, but you should be aware that people might read your comment that way: "father was into gamling and drinking [...] So I don't think it's something you can solve with money alone". And yeah, the "working poor" I mentioned is a "first world issue" (even though, for the people involved, it's still not a good situation), other countries have worse problems (civil wars, rampant corruption etc.).

> I don't think it's something you can solve with money alone

Emphasis mine. Pretty unambiguous that it says money is necessary but not sufficient. This is on you for misreading it.

Money is like electricity. If you don't know how to use it, what happens next will shock you! :)

> > worse problems

Much worse problems. When I see people in the US advocating semi-socialist policies, I wince.

PS I grew up in Bulgaria. I live in the US since 2007.

People aren't thinking Bulgaria when proposing socialistic improvements. Most would say they like where the Nordics have gotten themselves.

You read my mind! I was going to add a PS about that but deleted it.

The Nordics are not nearly as socialist as you might think. [1]

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Socialism-Sucks-Economists-Through-Un...

But the "semi-socialistic" policies people advocate are the usual Nordic policies of free healthcare, free education, proper maternity leave and safety nets. Or were you talking about some fringe discussions? I don't think anyone is planning to seize the means of production if that's your worry.

Yes, more fringe.

In the general case, I think a lot of the items you listed are good ideas.

The devil is in the details, as always.

Did you even read that comment? Or just skim it?

You are a hero to have realized all of this on your own and not have become bitter in the process. Way to go, man!

This is probably not the place to say the following, but I just have to.

Reading your comment nearly made me cry, because it (strikingly) reminded me of my own story. You are not alone.

Keep your head up (as you seem to always have done), and if you can, make peace with the past and your parents. This took me a LOT of time, but it helped me.

Thank you for sharing your story.

Thank you, it's been a while now since I started improving things so it's easier to look at this more objectively.

I was harsh on my parents in that post, they were dysfunctional but my mother loved all of us in her own way and spent her whole life arround us, and I can't say a lot of good things about my father - dealing with my mother in those days would break anyone.

I'm on good terms with them now and they are in a better place now that we're grown up and independent.

I wonder if things would have turned out the same if your mother hadn't cared about you. My theory is that love from parents and family growing up is hugely important for a happy life.

Hard to optimise through political solutions, unfortunately. Just handing out money probably won't help so much, like you observed. Generous parental leave rules might be useful.

And a well functioning social safety net (which also requires money from the state) to catch the youth who suffer from parental neglect and/or lack or resources. You can have role models aside from your parents.

Sigh this hits me really hard looking back. Oh well can only make the most of tomorrow

Was it in the Balkans?

Yes, I grew up in Croatia.

Odmah sam prepoznao. ;)

Similar reaction, not so teary though :)

I grew up in similar circumstances, and it still affects my mindset. It's changing, but slowly.

It helps a lot to read others' stories.

I had a similar life and I fully concur to your sentiment - it took me the better part of my life to get out of poverty, and I missed out on so many things that normal people regard as a given.

These days I‘m studying physics and mathematics while having a cushy engineering job and I‘m so genuinely happy that I can sit down and study for hours without having to worry about making ends meet at the end of the month. It’s a blessing.

Unfortunately the dysfunction and poverty may go hand in hand a lot of the time. There is strong indication that scarcity affects cognitive function.

"Scarcity: Why having too little means so much" is a great book on this.

In essence it is not that people in poverty have less innate executive control / cognitive capacity, but that the situation of poverty causes anyone to lose some significant points of executive control / cognitive capacity.

There are some illuminating (but terryfing) experiments in the book, where they show you can literally sabotage a low income persons score on an IQ test by mentioning a hypothetical car repair of 2000 dollars before they take it.

I absolutely think this is a thing, speaking from experience. Working freelance and suddenly see your savings / income dry up due to circumstances. You start to go into “survival” mode which means you start making radical different decisions that work in favour of near future results (aka surviving) but cost dearly in long term health, independence and economic strength.

I'm not sure that's specific to scarcity, though.

Imagine two rooms, each with a caged bear. The bear is not happy being in a cage. A rich man, and a poor man, are ushered into their respective rooms, and told that the lock on the cage isn't all that reliable.

I'd wager that they'd both suffer roughly equally on a provided IQ test.

If you can't afford it, that car repair is an existential threat.

You don't get that car fixed, you don't get to work, you lose your job, and then everything else that goes with that. Not to mention figuring out what you're going to do while your car is in the shop. Maybe you skimp on the repair, just do what you need to get it running again, and hope it doesn't turn into a bigger problem down the road.

If you can afford it, it's an inconvenience.

You drop your car off with the mechanic, get a rental or just Uber it to work, and pick up your car when it's ready. You'll pay to fix things properly, of course, because you can.

I think it's not scarcity itself, but constantly living under existential fear that causes so many problems.

> I think it's not scarcity itself, but constantly living under existential fear that causes so many problems.

Correct: it's not money per-se, it's about desperately needing money in a society where money are crucial for survival.

Often economists make the mistake of equating poverty == no money.

Instead, not all economies are money-driven.

Sorry, this may be too inflammable, but there is also evidence that cognitive ability is negatively correlated with conservativity. [1]

So, what to do if you are conservative politician and want more voters? Do you try to make poor people better or worse off given these two data points (whose scientific validity I am not able to judge, but I have to admit, they do seem to make sense)?

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01602...

> There are some illuminating (but terryfing) experiments in the book, where they show you can literally sabotage a low income persons score on an IQ test by mentioning a hypothetical car repair of 2000 dollars before they take it.

Modern humans have existed for something like 100,000 years give or take a few tens of thousands, and yet we only started building anything particularly innovative in the last ~10,000 or so. So we spent 90% of our species' history doing very little in the way of cognitively challenging innovation.

I wonder if this might not be the reason. Some have observed that hunter-gatherers often had better nutrition and were healthier than at least early civilized humans, but maybe they also lived under a perpetual cloud of fear about the next famine, raid, or plague. Maybe that basically shut down their capacity for higher cognition. Maybe they didn't have any time to sit down and think and do so free of concern about the future.

Another factor seems to be becoming sedentary as a species and gaining more sugars favoured the energy needs of the brain. That in turn allowed for people to focus on land ownership and dominance over others to secure this income.

I think you're defining innovation too narrowly. There are lots of social, political, and behavioral innovations in hunter gatherer societies that may not necessarily manifest as technological innovations, but are no less innovative or clever.

In my limited experience with these people, they are absolutely capable of higher cognition, including planning into the distant future.

I think calling it a wealth gap really misses the point - it's a stability gap. Most upper-middle individuals pass on socio-economic stability to the next generation. Most middle and lower class pass on instability. Wealth is a small part of it.

I was agreeing with your comment until the last sentence. Wealth is stable access to money, which is a fungible resource. Used appropriately, it can provide access to stability that would otherwise be inaccessible. Without such a resource, other factors of instability more likely to be chronic or even inescapable.

Can we ever really know if we are using a resource appropriately?

I’m thinking of the story “The Chinese Farmer” as told by Alan Watts.

Education is actually much more important than wealth. So is city and community infrastructure, a positive family environment, etiquette / upbringing, values passed down, positive / helpful relations, mentorship, trauma free environments/mental health, and good social practice. Wealth is a very small part of stability.

It is much easier to be functional parent when your material needs are met and you are not under big stress. That is my experience from my parenting and from family history.

It is much easier for me to be functional and caring parent when I am happy and content. It gets harder when the period is stressful. I would be failing at that way more if I had one of those real big problems.

Obviously money will not change everything but if you get a monthly allowance to feed your children it will probably decrease the incidence of onion vomit for a substantial portion of them. Which seems valuable in its own right. Dealing with a large lump sum payment is inherently much harder.

I agree, I think some sort of universal income payment for each child would be the least controversial version of UBI.

Really? I think you would hear some strong arguments about how that would incentivise people to have tons of kids.

Considering most developing countries have aging populations that's actually a good thing, especially if you provide the resources for those children to turn into productive members of society.

Something like the UK's Child Benefit?

https://www.gov.uk/child-benefit

Yeah that looks good, but I wouldn't have the part about >50k income having to pay it back in taxes.

We have this in Poland. It's a big wealth transfer from productive responsible people to those who have a lot of children regardless of their economic situation. I think there are two problems with it:

-People who wait with having children till their situation stabilizes are now subsidizing those who don't. I think this is simply immoral and will result in more productive/responible/better educated people having even fewer children.

-the money goes to often dysfunctional parents and is spent on pointless consumption and alcohol. It's not a meme that if you want to see a lot expensive brand clothes or shoes you just need to visit a poor part of the town (I live in a very homogeneous country so no race/religion/culture undertones there).

I would much prefer the money to be spent on infrastructure making life better for the kids. Making sure children can get quality food, educational materials, help from social workers, can spend quality time outside of their dysfunctional homes and maybe get exposed to different ways life could be would be in my view way more helpful.

Making sure preschool children have their needs met is a more difficult problem. Still I think giving people free access to quality nutrition, clothes, medical care, toys etc would be a better way.

Sure there is a % of people who w can manage money and prioritize their children but those people would do well anyway if the money came as free stuff you can get for your children instead of buying it yourself.

Since (very modest for western standard) ubi like program was introduced we have seen huge raise in tourism and alcohol consumption. The numbers are there. It's just people who end up in bottom % economically are usually very bad with money and decision making.

I guess we can live with that one we can afford ubi for everyone but for now the priorities should be about giving children of shitty parents a fair shot at life. Good unfortunate parents will be able to use other programs as well.

Thanks for sharing your story. Real life stories like your give far more insights to life than cooked up biographies of billionaires.

> So I don't think it's something you can solve with money alone, having functional parents is always going to set you up to do better in life.

Do you think your parents being in poverty (if they were) or a similar situation made it as difficult for them as it was for you? It seems to be an obviously vicious cycle that is difficult to break without education and opportunity for people in these situations.

I don't know how much you can generalise from my story, but both of my parents came from middle class families, they got the money to buy our first studio apartment from them, father got jobs through family connections. But he was a weak willed man who got evertyhing from his parents and had no ambition or drive, he fumbled several easy jobs, I can remember the arguments he got into with my mother over not working saturdays because "it's not worth it". At some point he got in to gambling too. Mother was unstable personality and she detiriorated as father was screwing up, leading to both sides of the family cutting us off (because of how hostile she was) - very self entitled in the sense that she expected things to be a certain way and others were to make it happen for her (not in the sefish way tho, she invested most of what she had into us, even if it wasn't in best ways). So those two were just a dystfunctional feedback loop, and yet somehow they ended up having 6 kids.

Yep. I grew up very financially comfortable, but my mother died when I was eight, and even now in my forties I still see mother-child interactions in which I notice an implicit lesson or guidance that I missed out on.

Whenever this topic comes up, I like to link to these excellent and eye-opening articles:

• 5 Things Nobody Tells You About Being Poor, May 27, 2011: (https://www.cracked.com/blog/5-things-nobody-tells-you-about...)

• The 5 Stupidest Habits You Develop Growing Up Poor, January 19, 2012: (https://www.cracked.com/blog/4-things-politicians-will-never...)

• 4 Things Politicians Will Never Understand About Poor People, February 21, 2013: (https://www.cracked.com/blog/4-things-politicians-will-never...)

fantastic articles - and from Cracked!

Second link: https://www.cracked.com/blog/the-5-stupidest-habits-you-deve...

Whoops, mis-copy-and-paste. Thanks!

The 2nd link is a duplicate. Here's the correct one

The 5 Stupidest Habits You Develop Growing Up Poor:

* (https://www.cracked.com/blog/the-5-stupidest-habits-you-deve...)

Don't forget malnutrition. High quality calories are expensive.

> Poverty doesn't just cause immediate issues it can also cause long term issues that can effect not only adults, but the children who grew up in that environment.

This is absolutely true!

> This is largely because families in poverty tend to also abuse their kids at higher rates (this includes mental abuse) or at least foster an extremely unhealthy environment due to the stress it causes.

This could be true with some families, but most parents try at least not to go below the financial level they are at. I remember my parent use to get all jittery even at a slight stress on the finances fearing that they will not be able to sustain. They had prioritised education, food, clothing in that order. Unfortunately, after education and food nothing was left! I remember wearing same set of clothes for almost a decade. Even now, even though I can afford to spend, I got into that habbit of wearing same clothes most of the time. I still use clothes that are almost 10 years old! I remember we(I and my friends, they too were from the same financial status) use to wear same worn-out/torn school uniforms by doing something called "rafoo". That made us kids understand value of money and the determination to get out of the situation as soon as possible. The problem we faced was lack of information and support network. We had to build it ourselves from scratch, most of the time stumbling. It also dents the confidence as you don't know how long it is going to take to achieve your goals, if at all it can be acheived!

> This is largely because families in poverty tend to also abuse their kids at higher rates

Source?

Sure. A quick Google search yielded the articles below. I don't have authoritative papers to reference, so you'll have to do your own digging too. But it also makes sense when you are aware of the realities of being in poverty. You also left out what I put in parentheses. Mental abuse is abuse and many children are subject to it. I explicitly called it out because I personally feel that people underestimate the damage it does primarily because it's something that is just completely alien to many people and cannot be related to. I also think people do not tend to realize what mental abuse is and in how many ways it can take shape.

https://stateofopportunity.michiganradio.org/post/poorest-ch... And this https://www.nber.org/digest/jan00/poverty-and-mistreatment-c...

Also, not to make excuses but I think in the mental abuse case people don't always know they are doing it. They do what their parents did or learned from those around them who also didn't know what they were doing.

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