It sounds like you don’t seem to understand how poverty works. Either you have no lived experience of it, or you do, but you’ve internalised the notion that it’s possible to pull oneself out of poverty by the bootstraps — possibly because it’s more comforting to think this than to reckon with how many of us are just a few strokes of bad luck away from poverty.
Often poverty is entrenched precisely because many people don’t have a choice about whether to keep a 1-2 month buffer of resources. Social safety nets exist not just out of compassion, but because a society becomes better when people who are struggling don’t have to worry about how they’re going to feed themselves.
Place the blame where it is due: the maliciously incompetent legislators who see poor people going hungry as a feature, not a bug.
I live in one of the most poorest neighborhoods in the United States, in the projects and on SNAP and other government assistance, and I used to be homeless living on the street and shelters, so I don’t need any lecture about not understanding how “poverty works”. There are different levels of poverty. Just because we live in poverty, is no excuse to still be careless with the little money we have. Be careless and pay the consequences. Be in dire straits, and pay the consequences. They’re called survival tips and being street smart and I’ve gotten them regularly from homeless people, drug addicts, prostitutes and other people who live in poverty that I’ve met in my life. We can’t do nothing about what the cronies in the government do, so sitting around crying about what they’re doing is pointless. We have to watch our own backs and be smart with what we have.
P.S. It is possible to pull oneself up out of poverty by the bootstraps because I know people who have and I also know people who were up, fall down into poverty. One can even dig themselves so deep into bad choices, that it’s impossible to dig oneself out of it. Hell, there’s a celebrity who lives in my building who’s living in the projects just like me. It’s a two-way street affected by life choices, education, financial literacy, health quality, environment, and other factors too broad to cover here. Being in poverty doesn’t relegate one to always staying in poverty.
“Being in poverty doesn’t relegate one to always staying in poverty.”
I agree, but not everyone who makes good choices is able to escape poverty, nor is it the case that everyone who falls into poverty gets there through making poor choices; there’s a tremendous amount of luck involved.
You’re right that there’s basically nothing that an individual can do against the assholes in government and the injustices they perpetuate. However, it’s important to remember the strength of the social safety net varies significantly across history, and that just because things are fucked up now doesn’t mean it can’t get better (or worse). In my country, for example, although we are fortunate to have universal, taxpayer funded healthcare, the NHS is struggling after a couple of decades of chronic underinvestment, which has caused the quality of services to degrade in many respects. So much has changed in a relatively short time, and by looking at relatively recent history, it’s apparent that change is possible.
I imagine you would argue that even under a far more comprehensive welfare state, that government assistance can’t be a replacement for making good choices for oneself, and I would agree with that. My hope would be that under a more compassionate system, it would mean that people who make good choices would be more likely to actually be able to improve their socioeconomic circumstances due to being less beholden to luck.
“I don’t need any lecture about not understanding how “poverty works”.”
I hear you, and I apologise for offending you. Rereading my comment, I realise that my tone was unnecessarily harsh and presumptuous. However, I maintain that overemphasizing individual choices isn’t productive here, because there’s only so much one person can do. It seems like one thing that we are very much on the same page about is how fucked up the world is. Along those lines, I worry that it could be a net harm if we put too much pressure on ourselves by expecting ourselves (or others) to be able to struggle our way out of poverty. In much the same way that I believe that political change is possible, but that it’s important to not expect radical change is possible overnight, I also think that we need to be realistic about how little agency we have in this system. Individual choices do matter, and they can help tip the scales in our favour, even if we are still super reliant on luck. However, it often does come down to luck, and we do ourselves a disservice by believing that this system is meritocratic. It sucks to acknowledge, but sometimes even the best choices available to us are just harm reduction, and all we can hope for is that an opportunity to do more will come along.
I appreciate your point about survival tips though, because it really resonated with my own experience. I have also been homeless, and although it was a tremendously stressful experience, I have a surprising number of fond memories from that period as a result of the solidarity forged with other people who were struggling. This is part of why I apologised above — even if there’s much that we don’t agree on, that shouldn’t mean that we can’t be in solidarity with each other. My original comment was perhaps not conducive to that, so I appreciate your thoughtful reply.
It sounds like you don’t seem to understand how poverty works. Either you have no lived experience of it, or you do, but you’ve internalised the notion that it’s possible to pull oneself out of poverty by the bootstraps — possibly because it’s more comforting to think this than to reckon with how many of us are just a few strokes of bad luck away from poverty.
Often poverty is entrenched precisely because many people don’t have a choice about whether to keep a 1-2 month buffer of resources. Social safety nets exist not just out of compassion, but because a society becomes better when people who are struggling don’t have to worry about how they’re going to feed themselves.
Place the blame where it is due: the maliciously incompetent legislators who see poor people going hungry as a feature, not a bug.
I live in one of the most poorest neighborhoods in the United States, in the projects and on SNAP and other government assistance, and I used to be homeless living on the street and shelters, so I don’t need any lecture about not understanding how “poverty works”. There are different levels of poverty. Just because we live in poverty, is no excuse to still be careless with the little money we have. Be careless and pay the consequences. Be in dire straits, and pay the consequences. They’re called survival tips and being street smart and I’ve gotten them regularly from homeless people, drug addicts, prostitutes and other people who live in poverty that I’ve met in my life. We can’t do nothing about what the cronies in the government do, so sitting around crying about what they’re doing is pointless. We have to watch our own backs and be smart with what we have.
P.S. It is possible to pull oneself up out of poverty by the bootstraps because I know people who have and I also know people who were up, fall down into poverty. One can even dig themselves so deep into bad choices, that it’s impossible to dig oneself out of it. Hell, there’s a celebrity who lives in my building who’s living in the projects just like me. It’s a two-way street affected by life choices, education, financial literacy, health quality, environment, and other factors too broad to cover here. Being in poverty doesn’t relegate one to always staying in poverty.
Obvious which one you are then.
You don’t know me so stop pretending like you do
I know you enough to know you’re full of shit and your perspective is myopic. Get bent.
I agree, but not everyone who makes good choices is able to escape poverty, nor is it the case that everyone who falls into poverty gets there through making poor choices; there’s a tremendous amount of luck involved.
You’re right that there’s basically nothing that an individual can do against the assholes in government and the injustices they perpetuate. However, it’s important to remember the strength of the social safety net varies significantly across history, and that just because things are fucked up now doesn’t mean it can’t get better (or worse). In my country, for example, although we are fortunate to have universal, taxpayer funded healthcare, the NHS is struggling after a couple of decades of chronic underinvestment, which has caused the quality of services to degrade in many respects. So much has changed in a relatively short time, and by looking at relatively recent history, it’s apparent that change is possible.
I imagine you would argue that even under a far more comprehensive welfare state, that government assistance can’t be a replacement for making good choices for oneself, and I would agree with that. My hope would be that under a more compassionate system, it would mean that people who make good choices would be more likely to actually be able to improve their socioeconomic circumstances due to being less beholden to luck.
I hear you, and I apologise for offending you. Rereading my comment, I realise that my tone was unnecessarily harsh and presumptuous. However, I maintain that overemphasizing individual choices isn’t productive here, because there’s only so much one person can do. It seems like one thing that we are very much on the same page about is how fucked up the world is. Along those lines, I worry that it could be a net harm if we put too much pressure on ourselves by expecting ourselves (or others) to be able to struggle our way out of poverty. In much the same way that I believe that political change is possible, but that it’s important to not expect radical change is possible overnight, I also think that we need to be realistic about how little agency we have in this system. Individual choices do matter, and they can help tip the scales in our favour, even if we are still super reliant on luck. However, it often does come down to luck, and we do ourselves a disservice by believing that this system is meritocratic. It sucks to acknowledge, but sometimes even the best choices available to us are just harm reduction, and all we can hope for is that an opportunity to do more will come along.
I appreciate your point about survival tips though, because it really resonated with my own experience. I have also been homeless, and although it was a tremendously stressful experience, I have a surprising number of fond memories from that period as a result of the solidarity forged with other people who were struggling. This is part of why I apologised above — even if there’s much that we don’t agree on, that shouldn’t mean that we can’t be in solidarity with each other. My original comment was perhaps not conducive to that, so I appreciate your thoughtful reply.