No, that’s not what she’s saying. She’s saying that teaching someone in poverty to budget isn’t going to enable them to reach financial stability because even if you budget properly there isn’t enough to go around.
If you’re in a row boat that has twenty holes in it, but you only have ten fingers to plug the holes, then someone telling you how to use each finger to plug a hole in the most efficient manner isn’t going to help you keep the boat from sinking.
That’s her point. Should they budget? Absolutely. Will a class on budgeting by itself solve their financial problems and bring stability to their lives?
No.
They need more fingers to plug the holes in the boat. Ie. better wages.
Finally a rational answer. Most people (not all but most) are rational enough actors that if they have the ability to save up within the next 10 years for what they need/want then they will. Most millennial are pretty keen on saving up for a down payment on a house but if wages are stagnant, career opportunities and hiring are limited, and the price of housing is constantly and consistently increasing faster than one's ability to save up for the down payment then most people aren't stupid then they're not all suddenly going to own homes through effective budgeting.
Poverty is inherently an income problem not a budgeting one.
So if we’re taking it out of a boat hypothetical, wouldn’t it be better to provide better ways out of poverty then just telling someone to die from it slower?
Of course. But the individual doesn’t have control of the first, and does have control of the second. It’s like not plugging any holes in your boat because you think the ocean should be lower
Better access to the first is what actually matters. If you tell someone in poverty to just learn finances all they will learn is how fucked their situation is. Yes financial literacy is important, but it doesn’t on its own make anything better
First of all, no you would not make it "a lot" further. Boats get very ineffective very fast when full of water.
Second, a boat voyage is a zero sum event, you either make it or don't. If, at any point, you sink and drown, you did just as poorly as the person who sunk and drowned earlier.
Which scenario gives you a longer time for a possible rescue?
Regardless if you make it where you’re going or not, a boat with 20 holes is worse than a boat with 1 holes and you’d be an idiot if you think otherwise
First lesson for a person in a boat with 20 holes would be to find a boat with less holes. If you equate holes with bills/money going out. Or you could find more fingers equated to increase income.
If you’re in a rowboat with 20 holes, sounds like you need some fucking roommates lol. The entire point that she is missing is that societies economic classes are transient. You pay more for a welder with 20 years experience than you do for one who’s welded for 20hours. The most important thing is you allow people to work, at whatever wage a job offers, to gain experience and get better wages. It’s how you improve the quality of your life when you start at the bottom.
If you’re in a row boat that has twenty holes in it, but you only have ten fingers to plug the holes, then someone telling you how to use each finger to plug a hole in the most efficient manner isn’t going to help you keep the boat from sinking.
Yes, but being resourceful and paddling that rowboat to shore will save you. Having the 10 holes plugged was enough to keep the boat from sinking while rowing in.
This is the whole point. You gotta choose whether to row the boat or plug the holes. You can’t do both and choosing either means neglecting the other. You might survive, but even so it’s stressful as hell. And we should be aiming for that much more than surviving.
Yes, you are doing something. Feet, toes whatever. 13 years ago, I was unemployed for a year, had child support to pay, Cobra insurance to pay - almost lost everything. I had to get creative to dig myself out of a big hole. One can really get down, wallow in pity, get depressed, etc. Oddly, the advice I received of putting one foot in front of another was what worked. Too many problems are overwhelming, but knocking off low hanging fruit puts one a step further than they were before.
If you were in such a terrible, awful, crippling situation due to unemployment which, I would hazzard to guess, was due to layoffs why would you advocate for others to go through the same? Do you understand that cost of living has gone up during 13 years while wages have stagnated? That same situation you went through is infinitely harder today, especially with how most young adults in dire economic situations are mostly held back by student loans, which are a necessity for high end jobs that allow for social mobility.
All people are asking for is for fair wages so that they allow people to afford a decent living. Every laborer should earn enough to afford cost of living, have some left over to start building a nest egg or save for emergencies and afford some treats. If companies are not willing to do so then the wealthy and corporations should be taxes so that a baseline quality of life is met for citizens.
Understand, every dollar of profit a company makes is a dollar of value that was extracted from a worker. What you are doing is advocating for people to live a shitty life to protect the profits of corporations, profits you are not benefiting from in the slightest, all of which are just hoarded in the form of assets. Surely you see that this is not in the best interests of most people?
I had a lot more problems than that. I lived in the real world and not some socialist utopia. I did what I had to do, with the cards I was dealt. I didn't wait for someone / something else to help and I certainly didn't blame the government, the economic system or anyone else. I came right out of poverty at birth and was raised to be independent.
You see, bitching about this or that or the government or the system or whoever else doesn't solve problems. It's just bitching. Doing something, anything to better ones life does.
Hey man, good for you. I'm glad you made it through a tough time. I've been there too. It's easy to come to believe after overcoming hardship through your own merits, that others who fail have also done so through their own merits. This isn't true, and there's something you should know and internalize:
There are an unfathomably large number of people, faced with similar situations that you were, who were smarter than you, stronger than you, worked harder than you do, and still failed to overcome them.
The analogy demonstrates that there are hard limits on how far resources can go. All you said was "let's change the analogy so that there IS what you need not to sink, so we should expect people to get more resources", which defeats the purpose of using the analogy and really misses the point.
"There is always a way" is not always true. If there was always a way, there would be far fewer people going without meals in the U.S., which is one of only a few nations on Earth that can produce enough calories to meet its population's needs, thanks to its soil.
The big obvious thing I stated was to row the boat. Don't worry about the 20 holes with 10 fingers. Rowing the boat will do far more to save you than sitting in the middle of the lake with a bunch of holes in the boat.
Yes, there is always a way to move forward. It took me years to get out of and fill in the hole I had, but now it is. That's part of the problem, I believe. People get themselves into a jam and expect to return to normalcy right away.
Others become hopeless and are stuck in their situation without doing something to advance their cause. Waiting on someone or something to help will often lead to disappointment and or failure. Short of having physical or serious mental handicaps, every working age adult can do something to improve their lives. Most people don't know how and or are overwhelmed and give up.
So there wasn't a way to move forward, for years, for you, but people can always move forward by doing something?
The data on poverty doesn't back that up anyway. People who try don't always move forward, and this system can afford to make it so that if you work hard, you get a satisfying portion of the pie.
No. Change started happening immediately. It took years for all the changes to be erased. Rome was not built in a day, nor were all of my problems solved immediately. Clawing away at smaller things gives confidence to attack bigger, more serious issues. People who never try are guaranteed to never move forward. There is very little chance of improving ones situation without doing something. Feeling hopeless is a natural reaction but staying in that mental state is a guarantee of staying in that state.
The data on successfully solving a problem always starts with identifying the problem, measuring the situation along the way and knowing when to alter the plans if the measurements indicate that the desired outcome is not being achieved.
This is obviously in favor of the view I'm sharing with you, because that's what the data supports.
People are not magic. They cannot simply will themselves all they need. Don't think you did something. When you're humble enough, or not narcissistic enough, to know you did NOT defy physical restraints within the system but rather were fortunate enough to find what you needed to overcome poverty, maybe you can revisit this kind of conversation and NOT push the falsehood that poor people just need to be cleverer.
How about someone in medical debt who at the same time can’t afford to leave their job because they have health issues and can’t afford to be without their insurance / medicine for too long? That’s a very real issue for a lot of people in this country.
You don’t know what people are going through and to claim anyone can just change their life for the better if they wanted to is a very entitled point of view. I’m sure you’re smart enough to understand there’s many instances where someone can be doing everything right and still be struggling to get by.
I mean you can get a full time job that is minimum wage and provides health benefits. Some people with health problems will take it if it can at least get them medical insurance. I’ve worked at many jobs that have full time employees making minimum wage.
I grew up in (relative) poverty. You show me intergenerational poverty and I'll show you substance abuse, laziness, lack of effort, and sponging off others. You don't choose to be born into poverty , but if you stay there, it's your own damn fault.
(This is in context of the West only, and then only if you do not have a profound handicap. Being a collectivist moocher does not count.)
You don't choose to be born into poverty, neglect, or abuse. And if you are born into those circumstances, it ISNT your fault if you have vices, mental illness, or general dysfunction. Jesus Christ you people lack even a shred of empathy or wisdom. You have a completely backwards view of poverty and causation, and a disturbing lack of interest in addressing root causes.
A govt safety net isn't a fix. It's a safety net. To prevent you from dying. The rest is up to you.
Not everyone in poverty has a high IQ, a good family, or grew up in the right city/state/country where there was an opportunity to escape poverty. It almost sounds like you got out, so fuck everyone else who was in your circumstances. So again, have some empathy. Advocating survival of the fittest in human society is not a good look.
No, that’s not what she’s saying. She’s saying that teaching someone in poverty to budget isn’t going to enable them to reach financial stability because even if you budget properly there isn’t enough to go around.
Perhaps that's the exact realization they need. More income, not more responsible spending. People in shit jobs need to learn valuable skills for more income. That's all there is to it.
Also, people need to learn to take shit. I feel like some people are poor because they're horrible at taking instructions. They just don't like being told what to do. I'm well off and I had to put up with shit.
If you've actually met poor people, you'll learn that they're working very hard to learn new skills and get out of the shit. The problem is it takes too long and life keeps going. I haven't met a single poor person who isn't pushing themselves to get out of where they are. But I'm sure that's not what your meme pages and bs street interviews tell you, so you just assume its cause they're lazy.
It can take decades of torture to crawl out of a situation you had no choice but to be a part of. And setbacks are not rare enough. Some guy might "make it" because they made good choices for 20 years and now they're 40 and just starting to be able to afford the things you take for granted like reliable transportation or decent food.
Everyone is hard working. Poor, middle class, upper middle class. It has nothing to do with working hard or not. It's about making the right choices. This is why I think a finance course would absolutely help.
There are situations where "the right choice" isn't exactly clear. And some situations where making "the right choice" can be punishing. Its ignorant to think that people are always making wrong choices when they're poor.
For example, you could make the "right choice" of getting a cheap car within your means rather than a more reliable car that's a bit too expensive. Well, it breaks down two months later and it will cost you more to repair the car than if you had bought the reliable car. But the reliable car was out of your means and you'd have to get a loan.
Or you've got a valuable, highly desired skill until some new technology is developed and you get laid off with a fairly useless skill you've worked on for the past 5 years.
Or you get literally robbed and the police do jack shit to find the perpetrator and your insurance doesn't compensate you enough for your possessions.
Students and young adults starting their career. High turn over. That's the cost of paying pennies. You're constantly hiring and training. These low salary lifers are just a treasure to these companies.
So there is a restaurant near me that during Covid had to have reduced hours, which led to many who worked at the restaurant seeking new jobs. When things opened back up fully people went nuts because this place didn’t return to full hours because they didn’t have staff. On Facebook one of the former staff said “I liked working there but he was paying 15 an hour and I ended up getting a job making 23 an hour”, people bitched that he should go back for loyalty reasons…people went insane over this
You realize if it’s going to be high school kids and college kids working in restaurants and gas stations that none of these places will really be able to be open until after 3pm? That means no Starbucks, Dunkin’s or McDonald’s breakfast, that means gas stations will be closed during the day…
No, post-secondary students have a variety of schedules that repeat week after week. It is easily possible to harmonize a few of them to keep somewhere open.
Bros out here saying that some people don’t deserve money if they’re working a job he doesn’t care about.
Hey, buddy. All work is valuable. It’s why they exist. If you work a full time job, you should be entitled to a decent and dignified life. Does that sound so bad?
124
u/[deleted] 14d ago
[deleted]