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Comment by Mz | Hacker News Reader

I just wish that articles like this focused more on how to solve it. It's nice that it acknowledges the problem. But that is not enough. The end of the piece gives a small snippet of examples of what works.

How do we start promoting things that do work? That really work? I think that does not get done in part because many people really do not want "the poor" to solve their problems. I do not understand why that is but there seems to be a hostile attitude towards poor people, as if being poor is evidence of lack of good morals or something and thus you deserve to suffer.

But this doesn't just hurt people who are currently poor. It means anyone who falls down gets kicked while they are down so it becomes unlikely they can get back up. This is not a good paradigm for society. It hurts everyone.

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I recently finished reading the book mentioned in the article and in the book, they have a chapter focused on ways to improve the situation for people living in poverty. What I got from it was that programs to help poor people need to be tweaked to not tax their bandwidth as much and there is no real one size fits all solution.

One example in the book is the computer skills programs that are often offered by employment services offices. These programs are usually several weeks long and build on knowledge from previous weeks. For someone who is struggling financially, attending these classes weekly could be difficult. You miss one class, and the next class makes no sense and you feel like you're wasting your time. The authors' suggestion is to restructure these classes to be more modular and allow people to attend these classes based on their schedules.

I think it's not so much that people don't want the poor to solve their problems. It's that they don't want to make it easier for them. People feel that they themselves did just fine without all the benefits that the poor get, so why should we make it easier for them?

Thanks for the feedback on the book.

As for your last paragraph: I have been homeless for about 2.5 years. Programs to "help the homeless" mostly really, really suck and a lot of them a) piss away the time of the intended recipients b) require the intended recipients to accept enormous disrespect and c) reinforce a subsistence existence. Many of the programs that look to get poor people off the street require you to first be guilty of something, admit your guilt and then be their property.

I have no doubt that it isn't exactly consciously intentional but those attitudes are in there somewhere or this would be better. (There are some programs that are better than that but the default model is pretty awful, to the point of being actively hostile.)

I don't think it's that people don't want "the poor" to solve their problems, but there isn't an immediate benefit for others to solve that problem for them. Many have their own problems (even if they aren't as series as those faced by others).

I was under the impression that basic income was designed to give the poor the base they need to relieve the pressures of being poor enough that they could actually focus on getting a leg up instead of devoting all of their resources to simply surviving week to week.

a) I don't think this article mentions basic income. So I kind of think that is not relevant to this discussion.

b) I am not for basic income. I don't think completely screwing over the economy helps people at the bottom. I think "basic income" likely would screw over the economy.

Hostile attitude towards poor? I don't think so. Most of us are just busy trying to make a living/career, raise a family etc. There is not enough free time to go around. And whatever free time that is left is sucked up by TV/internet.

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