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Comment by drdeadringer | Hacker News Reader

I worked on a (US) Naval shipyard for a spell.

The number of payday loan shops in the immediate surrounding area was astounding. I kept hearing word of "Don't Do Payday" financial help training for the Naval crew, who apparently were a prime target for the industry. Before working there, I had little idea such existed.

Think "worse than 'cash your cheque here'" places.

I don't know how many Naval folks I worked with took in to these places, but every time I passed one I frowned and shook my head.

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Some years back, I was on a jobsite where radios were allowed, and we rotated through the crew, everyone playing deejay for a day, so everyone's taste got represented. Some guys would bring in a stack of CDs, some would just play the radio. It meant I listened to a few stations I don't normally listen to.

And the density of payday loan ads, on some stations but not others, blew my mind. I don't think I ever heard one on the classic-rock station (their stock in trade was testosterone ads, apparently), but they were at saturation density on the R&B station.

Payday loan places have always been scum, but that really opened my eyes to the deliberate exploitation aspect. This is targeted.

It's good to hear that there's financial training for the Navy. I wonder if there's anything similar out in civilian life that we could support?

> that we could support?

One of the most effective anti-poverty programs the government could do is teach basic accounting and finance as core curriculum in the public schools.

That sounds like victim-blaming. People are poor because they can't balance their checkbooks?

Or raise the minimum wage, raising the wage floor for all workers, and putting more money in the hands of poor people (who are generally much, much better at managing it than anyone else, due to the need to.)

Frontline (I think it was) many years ago ran an episode on 401k plans. There was a medium sized company that offered an identical 401k plan to all its employees, from the bottom to the top salary levels.

They found that the higher the income level, the better percentage returns the employee had on the plan. The lower, the worse performance.

The 401k plan offered several investment options.

Clearly, the higher income people were making better investment decisions. The conclusion was the company was going to offer seminars on basic investing, though who knows how that turned out.

There's a lot more to personal finance than balancing a checkbook, though many can't do that, either.

What does this have to do with people who are making poverty wages?

It has to do with your claim that poor people "generally much, much better at managing it than anyone else".

I don't see how a news entertainment program you saw many years ago actually addresses how well poor people are at making the most of their very limited dollars.

I always wondered whether instantaneous payment would help solve this.

For example, our digital infrastructure could pay people per second and it could instantaneously show up in a bank account; if people were never waiting for these Delta function payments, maybe they would be less prone to being exploited by systems that seek to smooth out these Delta functions.

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