Comment by crdoconnor | Hacker News Reader

Comment by crdoconnor | Hacker News Reader

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Being poor renders it very difficult to think long term as the survival instinct kicks in. If you have to constantly worry about whether you can put food on the table and pay the electric bill tomorrow, you simply stop thinking about what happens next month.

This instinct kicks in on such a low cognitive level that it's almost impossible to suppress.

This makes it very easy to leech profits from the underclasses through payday loans. The profit is made at the point that the survival instinct programs them to ignore.

This is why outright prohibition of payday loans usually has a positive impact on the financial wellbeing of the underclasses.

Unfortunately, even the middle and upper classes who struggle with giving up smoking still look down on the set of people who take payday loans, thinking that their superior intelligence and good sense is what leads them to not be suckered.

Empirical study on the effect of poverty on short term thinking:

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/11/your-bra...

Study on the effect of banning payday loans on the financial health of the underclasses:

http://www.federalreserve.gov/pubs/feds/2013/201381/201381pa...

You are conflating cause and effect. Being poor does not make it very difficult to think long term but the lack of discipline required to make good short term choices has the effect of keeping you in poverty over the long term. A pattern of good short term choices tends to lead to getting out of poverty whether one is thinking long term or not.

I lived a significant portion of my life in pretty severe poverty; I was raised in it. It requires a decent amount of discipline to not waste money even when you are hungry and can't pay the bills, and many poor people do not have that discipline and therefore stay poor. Many non-poor people have the same lack of discipline but can simply afford to be more wasteful. Given two choices that solve an immediate problem (e.g. hunger) people will often choose the one that is most wasteful of their money even though they know they are poor.

I was never the world's most disciplined person but I did manage to bootstrap myself out of poverty in fairly boring fashion working low-paying jobs. As long as I had an income (never guaranteed) I always managed to spend less money than I earned. It is pretty shocking the percentage of people in poverty that are obviously wasteful with their limited resources but it also explains their long term outcome.

I earn a fine income today but my spending stopped rising with my income a long time ago. Old habits of not spending frivolously on low-value things die hard I guess.

He's not conflating cause and effect: There's plenty of Psychology and Behavioral Economics research on this. People end up thinking that the money they save will disappear with unexpected expenses, so they spend it, because the stress of not having enough money to eat is 'healed' by wasting money, which later makes sure you won't have any money to eat. It's a feedback loop, as bad choices lead to bad outcomes, which increase the chances of even more bad choices. I've seen it happen in people that you'd originally think that they had a whole lot of self discipline: For instance, a very Ph.D student that constantly stressed about how poor she was. Even after her income moved up, it took months for that mindset to go away, because the fear of something wiping her out just made her decisions completely irrational.

You had the discipline to fight it: That's great. But that does not mean that other people's experiences are like yours. Go read the literature.

Go read the literature? What does that mean. It means anything you choose to select from it.

And apparently other's people's experiences are only significant if presented by you "I've seen it happen in people that you'd originally think that they had a whole lot of self discipline:"

>Being poor does not make it very difficult to think long term

>I lived a significant portion of my life in pretty severe poverty

My experience suggests the opposite. Much like the study.

The fact that you suggested that it takes discipline, to me, also suggests that you felt the same uphill struggle to be able to do forward planning.

It takes no discipline for me to do forward planning these days. It's easy to focus on now that my income far outstrips my outgoings.

It's not that it's terribly difficult to think long term.

The problem is that any kind of plan which has a reasonable chance of building up some savings and giving you some financial stability involves sacrifice now, probably to a very painful degree.

In my view it's not the thinking that's the trouble but the execution. It's hard to not spend all your money full stop. Having less money means that any savings involves greater sacrifice.

I don't believe you were ever actually in poverty.

The mindset I'm describing is one where you are forced to prioritize necessities - rent/food/electric bill, not one where you sacrifice all the small luxuries in order to be able to cover your necessities and save.

I wonder how many people here criticizing you for saying you were able to work your way out of being poor loved the "A little bit of slope makes up for a lot of Y-intercept" article and can't see the parallels.

Yes I'm aware that there are feedback loops that make it much easier to say poor than to claw your way out. I have suffered them to a very minor degree. But from a systems perspective being poor is simply spending all the money you get and not saving any of it. It's not that we can't identify the problem; it's that people lack the awareness or education and potentially the will to make the changes necessary to not be poor. Poor is less about your income and more about the decisions that you make every day to spend all of it, at least in my experience. I know people making $40k who save a lot and are very peaceful and people making $150k living paycheck to paycheck and struggling financially and mentally.

I think one of the contributing factors is the low interest rates right now. If you're poor and struggling anything given up today is a BIG deal so you need a LOT more in a year to convince yourself that it's worth it. At 1% interest it's basically never worth it, but at 10% it might be.

>Poor is less about your income and more about the decisions that you make every day to spend all of it, , at least in my experience.

Being poor is ABSOLUTELY about income and NOT about being a single $150,000 / year programmer who is one paycheck away from being on the street.

1) Financial hardship happens to almost everybody at some point.

2) Being poor happens to some.

3) Poverty happens to a subset of the poor. These people are the mainstay of payday lenders.

The very idea that people who USED to be in groups 1 and 2 and think that they can lecture group 3 from experience is a gross insult.

> Being poor does not make it very difficult to think long term

Citation needed. There's a fair bit of evidence otherwise. E.g.: http://www.amazon.com/Scarcity-having-little-means-much-eboo...

In which upper-class HN tells someone who grew up poor how poor people think. And then downvotes the heretic, despite relevant, first-hand experience contribution to discussion. Nice.

I grew up in a poor family, and would say the downvotes are for stereotyping and gross generalizations I vehemently disagree with. That may be his story, but it's not mine.

To be fair, first-hand anecdotes don't rank high as evidence. But, for what they are worth, I'll add my own.

I am where I am today because my family had enough money to own a computer (and never threw out the old ones, so the kids got to mess with the cast-aways—my first program was for a Kaypro 2), because my brother's interest in programming inspired my own, and because I was able to spend years without adult responsibilities learning everything I could.

That, and my parents fully supported every dive I took into every crazy interest. My parents kept books around and bought me toys to feed my interests—I had a chemistry set, an electronics kit, a violin, multiple microscopes, and access to books on subjects from photography to biology. I lived in nerd heaven… except for that bit where my parents expected me to clean my room.

I was working on a hobby OS in high school (1) because I was smart and dedicated, but also (2) because I didn't really have much else to worry about. I had plenty to eat and a safe place to sleep. Eventually, I even had a dial-up Internet connection, so I wasn't stuck with the local library's computer books from the 80s. All this was straight-up handed to me in the hope I'd do something great with it.

That advantage continues today. Because I have a stable job in middle-class territory, I can spend my free time on whatever crazy experiments I want. I do, and they continue to teach me things, even when the end result only 2 people on Earth actually care about. (Case in point: https://github.com/LnxPrgr3/crossfeed)

I know people in rural Tennessee who see an Internet connection as an unnecessary luxury, and the first bill to be cut when money gets tight. I imagine my life would be dramatically different had I grown up there.

Would I even know what I'd be missing?

are we reading the same thread? OP said "i grew up poor, here are my anecdotes about how poor people are dumb while those are smart get out of poverty", while the responder said "actually, struggling to survive has a broad-range negative cognitive effect, and here are some widely cited and accepted studies from science proving this effect"

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