What Really Keeps Poor People Poor

Having been poor (not 3rd world poor, poor by American standards) I found the most difficult thing is leaving the poverty stricken network. You don't feel like you've made it until you reject the entire mindset. Until then, you feel like you've sold out. My mother still makes me feel guilty and shames me every time I see her. Until you've had a parent who shames you for doing better than they did, you'll never understand the trap. I tell my upper middle class neighbors about this and they can't imagine parents who wouldn't want their children to do better than them. While I still talk to my parents I've dumped the rest of the network. I protect myself and my family from my old network. Their whole way of thinking is poison. With many of them you risk violence, drugs, abuse, sexual abuse, racism, etc. Even if you trust one or two of them you can never trust who they will bring you or your family in contact with. No amount of mentoring or example setting has helped, it just breeds resentment. Their world view traps them right where they are and their rejection, resentment, and hostility to a better way of life creates their poverty and isolation. Sending them to Harvard isn't going to make a damn bit of difference. Well, MAYBE if you sent one or two, but if you sent enough, they'd just ruin Harvard.<p>I came to the conclusion many years ago that in America poverty is a contagious mindset, nothing more. But I do understand that it is a difficult mindset to escape due to social issues. In all honesty, in most cases the middle class and rich have good reason not to network with the poor.

There are a few reasons that poor people remain poor.<p>Math: The fact is that it's much more difficult to make $10,000 from nothing than it is to make $1M when you have $1B to use.<p>Experience: When you're poor, the odds are very good that you don't know anyone who is successful(let alone "rich") so there isn't the chance to find out what it takes to be successful. Plus, when you have no experience you need to work your way up from nothing. If you come from a rich family, odds are you know people who are willing to take a chance on you based on the references you have.<p>Mindset: I came from a very poor family. I always assumed that I would start work at some horrible entry level job, and work my way up. That's what everyone in my family had done. It never occurred to me that there was another way until my mid 20's. Now I'm approaching 30 and I feel like I'm finally on my way to working for myself.

I come from an officially poor background, but it wasn't until I started learning about my girlfriend's family back in her native, third-world country that I really got a sense for what third-world poverty is:<p>- Constant verbal, physical, sometimes sexual abuse--the stuff that really traumatizes people into doing these same things across generations. This isn't the stuff you learn about in the news because, sadly, to many people living in those conditions, it's part of life. - Simply not have any positive role models at all to look up to. Their role-models are their parents, or their neighbors who have basically grown accustomed to living in poverty and can offer no guidance.<p>And I can go on and on.<p>My girlfriend and I have simply concluded: "some of these people don't know any better." If they had better role-models, they'd have a better shot.<p>So it is about the network in a way, but the author doesn't go enough to explain why. I'd like to give it a shot based on my observations: the network effect matters. Escaping one network to join a knowledgeable and competitive one exposes you to different ways of thinking, makes you question preconceived notions you have, makes you realize just how badly things really were, etc. I'm sure others here can relate even more, but coming from a modest background, it has been truly eye opening to be in the bay area, for example. There are so many talented, ambitious young people that inspire you every day to push your selves to the limits, that question your abilities, etc. Most people, I must say are unfortunate to not even know what YC is, entrepreneurship is all about, etc.<p>So for anyone who doesn't really understand poverty (I myself, included), I really recommend you visit a third-world country and actually live amidst them. Find a friend who comes from such a background and go stay with his/her family and him/her. You'll realize just how fortunate you are. By all means, don't feel bad about this, just gain some conscious about the fact that there are less fortunate people out there and begin to question what you can do with your companies, at your job to educate these people.<p>To finish, for anyone that questions a university's worth... remember this, an education isn't just the material you learn during lectures or books, it's what you learn about others and from others that really , also. And this latter component, I think is the secret to reducing poverty: simple exposure to new ways of life.

I think I'm going to be the only person commenting here who's going to cop to getting jobs all the time based on nothing but middle class social connections. I've gotten jobs through uncle's girlfriends/father's frat brothers/my drinking buddies. Honestly, most people I come in contact with know somebody with or have the ability to give me work, and I have the ability to get some of them work just by being a piece of the network for now, but probably after I'm further along in my career, directly. I have no doubt that if I become a business owner, or pursue a managerial track, I'll be expected to do the same thing for other people and their kids.<p>How else are you expected to get the million years of experience on everything expected at every job? The only entry-level jobs I see advertised are for entry-level geniuses.<p>I don't think that this can be artificially created by a third party for adults.<p>The advice that I would give to actual poor people: make friends with people with money. Wrack your brains to think of ways to do things for them for free so you can become a part of the favor trading network. Drink with them a lot - unless they're religious people, then pray with them. Only date people who have a family that has money. More money is better than less money. Avoid people with no money.

This whole line of arguments is very strange to me.<p>I think it would be nice to have high expectations for our highest colleges to admit a large amount from the lowest quartile of society, but this is not the natural next step in the process of solving poverty. The next step is how do we get more of those individuals to graduate from high school, go to vocational schools, etc. This is just another example of the intellectual elite trying to overlay their standards on problems, resulting in impractical policies and priorities, that do nothing to solve underlying problems.

You can be broke and you can be poor. Being broke just means you don't have money—been there, left that. But I equate poor with the mindset that repeatedly produces being broke and living paycheck to paycheck.<p>If you want to make money and stop being poor you have to stick with a tight budget. Stop spending more than you make, and evaluate whether or not you need that super-cool iPhone you just adore. At $70 a month a single iPhone could put food on your table, or the money you save by downgrading to a clamshell "stupid phone" could help pay off the credit card.<p>Money doesn't solve <i>money management</i> problems. Solve how you manage your money and you automatically keep more. A spendthrift with great social connections is still poor.

I think these things were identified several decades ago by sociologists. Namely that poverty isn't so much about money or level of education, as popularly supposed, but is primarily about "social exclusion", where there are few or no opportunities for someone of modest upbringing to break into other kinds of social circle.<p>My grandparents generation had a very acute understanding of social class, and it played a central role in their lives in a variety of ways. I think the kinds of issues which they faced are now returning.

Many factors in poor staying poor.<p>The High Cost of Poverty: Why the Poor Pay More: <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/17/AR2009051702053.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05...</a><p>Poor people spend 9% of income on lottery tickets; here's why: <a href="http://www.walletpop.com/blog/2010/05/31/poor-people-spend-9-of-income-on-lottery-tickets-heres-why/" rel="nofollow">http://www.walletpop.com/blog/2010/05/31/poor-people-spend-9...</a><p>Missing poverty's new reality: There's a lot less of it: <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/01/25/AR2011012504735.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/01...</a>

Is it access to the networks, or that the networks are a fixed size?<p>To put it another way: one might say the reason people cannot get into university is they score too low on their grades -- so the solution is to get everyone the training to enable them to score higher. Except then the universities will simply set the entrance threshold higher.

Networking can mean two different things and the author's conflating them.<p>1. You have a connection with a successful professional and so you're closer to promising job opportunities.<p>2. Your social circle contains a lot of rich people who have the habits and lifestyle typical of the rich, and you absorb a lot of their behavior by osmosis, which helps you succeed.<p>It's really hard to extend the benefits of the second kind of "networking" to more than a few poor people, and usually they have to be children. (Prep for Prep, college admissions decisions.)<p>On the other hand, it would be quite possible to develop online institutions to help with the first kind of networking. Create alternative, non-college ways to signal ability, and create ways for employers to connect with those able but isolated people. (I'm working on a project that has applications in that direction.)

This article has me reminiscing about the recent Linked-In IPO; I remember reading that the IPO was offered to favorable clients of the brokerage underwriting the IPO.<p>I don't know how many "favorable" offerings are presented each year or what their performances are, but if the IPO is purposelessly undervalued to make their clients richer, how does one compete with that? I doubt a $100 or 10k account would draw enough interest to gain access to these "Favorable" offerings.

He stretches the point a bit far. When he's talking about "isolation" broadly, I can maybe see the point -- lack of role models, mentors, references, people to help get your foot in the door at your first job. (I have no idea if this is "what really keeps poor people poor.")<p>Then he uses "network" to mean what you get at Harvard or Yale, and suggests that this is a gating factor, that masses of people have everything they need to rise out of the bottom quartile, if only we could give them a letter of admission to Harvard. This seems odd.

<i>So can we change this? I think we can. It starts with recognizing the problem for what it is and doing what we can to teach kids from impoverished backgrounds not just how to read and write but how to become upwardly mobile in their networking</i><p>I'm pretty sure the problem is more complex than <i>just</i> lack of awareness of the importance of a certain approach to networking... and I'm someone who has been down this path - having grown up "dirt poor" in rural southeast NC, and having escaped to a solidly middle-class lifestyle. But I absolutely agree that this is <i>one</i> component of helping people escape poverty, and I'd definitely like to see (and perhaps participate in) some sort of initiative to help raise awareness of this point, especially among younger folks.<p>Some sort of program, directed at high-school kids, that teaches skills specifically related to networking, economics, entrepreneurship, and all the "stuff" needed to advance economically, would be - IMO - tremendously beneficial.<p>That said, I believe the point that solson made about mindsets does stand. I grew up with plenty of people who were as poor as I was, and I was willing to make certain sacrifices, and commit to doing things in order to raise my standard of living... many of my peers weren't, and they still live in the sticks and they're still poor. And I honestly don't believe that I'm necessarily (smarter|more talented|more insightful|whatever) than most of them. But I had a different attitude and different ambitions, and - to my mind - that was the single biggest difference.<p>Edit:<p>As an aside, though, I'll throw this out... some of my friends who are still "poorer" than me in the financial sense, may actually be happier. I, for example, have never married or had kids, because I was too busy working and trying to make a better life for myself. And now that I'm working on a startup, I work more than ever and have basically quit worrying about dating or anything for a while... OTOH, my friends back home have wives and kids to come home to, play with, go out with, etc. But I have more money. So who's really better off? I would say that's a real grey area. &#60;shrug /&#62;

<i>at the top places, two-thirds of the students come from the top quartile and only 5 percent come from the bottom quartile</i><p>Whenever I see a statistic like that, the first question I want answered is: what is the trend over time? Maybe this is actually a big change with only 1% coming from the bottom quartile 10 years ago, indicating the future situation, etc.

Having been poor (U.S. standard) during much of my elementary and middle school years, and then escaped to a relative level of upper middle class comfort...there is one defining characteristic between my peers from back then who made it out of that situation, and those who are still there decades later: a broken decision making process best and the inability to plan exemplified in the famous Marshmallow test.<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshmallow_experiment" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshmallow_experiment</a><p>It brings to mind a very recent discussion I had with a close friend from those days, one who hasn't managed to break out of a cycle of being poor. He was telling me how excited he was about a new idea where he was going to enroll himself and and his 12 year old son into an expensive martial arts school for some father-son bonding time every week.<p>I remarked back, "but you barely make rent every month (and you split rent with 3 other adults in a relatively inexpensive area), your cell phone is routinely shut off for non-payment, your credit is so bad you can't even qualify for the highest interest lowest balance credit cards allowed by law, your cars are perpetually broken down/repossessed etc. you have a pending lawsuit for non-payment to a doctor because you couldn't pay your medical bills, etc. etc. etc. how on earth do you expect to pay for this? If I were you, I'd figure out how to resolve my financial situation first so that you can then do those kinds of father-son things you want at your leisure."<p>"Well how do I do that?"<p>"Instead of spending $250 a month on this, why don't you spend half as much and go to the local community college and finish up your associates (he's already finished a semester, so it was only another year, year and half left), translate that into a higher paying job or promotion or whatever, pay off your crap, buy Dad and Son Kung Fu?"<p>"Look, I only have a short window of opportunity here."<p>"What do you mean?"<p>"Well, the lease on the house me and 3 other adults split the rent on is up in 2 years, and because of my money issues I don't know if I can afford to stay living close to my son after that, I may have to move out of state to a cheaper area, I'm seriously considering the Detroit area since the cost of living is low. So I want to do this now, while I can."<p>This has been a typical conversation over the last 20 years with my friend. A decision point comes up, we'll talk about it, on one hand he'll have an opportunity to improve his lot in life, but he'll have to sacrifice a little now in order to reap rewards later, on the other hand, an emotionally satisfying marshmallow.<p>Invariable he'll <i>always</i> pick the marshmallow. He's interested in the immediate "feeling" of a decision, unable to project an expectation of a better "feeling" later on. The result is, 20 years later, an otherwise intelligent, honest, <i>good</i> guy nearing middle age has:<p>- no career progression of any sort, he's actually never worked a full-time job<p>- he's been fired many times from promising jobs because he was "bored" and pretended to be sick from a mystery illness until they let him go<p>- has a couple kids he can't support properly<p>- can't afford a place on his own with living arrangements so complex it would take 4 or 5 long blog posts to explain<p>- has had a handful of cars repossessed or sold off out of his control<p>- continues to buy known unreliable vehicles that require constant repair, costing him precious money and time away from work<p>- did a solid semester at college (with decentish grades) before dropping out because he didn't have enough time to play WoW - he was very proud of having finally cancelled his account...for the 3rd time.<p>- spends considerable portions of his income on videogames and online subscriptions<p>- buys random unnecessary crap all the time, "yes that RC helicopter is cool, why is your phone shut off again?"<p>- has innumerable small medical bills currently in collections, with one pending lawsuit (btw, the one he's getting sued for? Almost the exact cost of a WoW account for a year)<p>- etc.<p>Each of these issues can be explained by the Marshmallow test, because to properly deal with any of them requires the ability to defer gratification in the immediate as part of a plan, something, even with decades of coaching, he's unable to do, and thus remains poor.

A number of my professional friends participate in mentoring programs for young underprivileged kids. From what this article talks about, such programs should have a good potential at making a difference, at least for those that go through it.

I know a homeless person who says that he would not work for less than x money/day, where x is more than what the average person earns here in Hungary. (He used to earn a lot. He used to be a baker.)

<i>“We claim to be part of the American dream and of a system based on merit and opportunity and talent,” Mr. Marx says. “Yet if at the top places, two-thirds of the students come from the top quartile and only 5 percent come from the bottom quartile, then we are actually part of the problem of the growing economic divide rather than part of the solution.”</i><p>Mr. Marx's job is educating, hopefully as well as possible, people who already have a great educational advantage. Anyone working at Amherst or any other elite college who thinks they can be part of the solution by directly educating underprivileged kids is indulging in fantasy. Access to higher education is not the problem; preparation is. A poor person who is prepared to succeed at an elite college has already risen beyond "underprivileged" and is on a trajectory to the upper middle class.<p>More precisely, if Mr. Marx is wrong to imply that there is some kind of "merit" and "talent" that makes one capable of handling higher education but is not affected by a child's opportunities and environmental influences. Amherst does not admit people based on their genetic potential or even their winning personality. They try to take social disadvantage into account when judging applicants' academic preparation, but in the end they limit admissions to students who can succeed at Amherst. If Mr. Marx wants to directly help people who are disadvantaged then he should quit Amherst and join some organization that works with people who are not and could not be Amherst students.

It's not just having access to networks, it's using them. Can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink.<p>All too often I see, from first hand experience, the poor and the middle class having the same opportunities: broadly speaking, the latter take advantage thereof, the former don't.<p>Sure, some networks are not accessible. Many are, and if one does not take advantage of what opportunities one does have, then more will not become available.

I think the author makes a good point here, but unfortunately networking is only a mere fraction of this equation. More than anything, in order for impoverished students to better understand the situation, someone needs to tell them. Explain how our current social structure is unfair and doesn't yield any advantage. Is it grim? Of course. But without a heads up how the hell are these kids going to protect themselves? When you're that young, everything seems attainable (even if just a little bit). Unfortunately, as these kids transition out of high school into adulthood, they begin to realize that they may not have a better path. By instilling thoughts early on, explaining the necessity to focus on school work and the value that it provides your life (also explaining what's actually available, i.e. the networks discussed here) could prove to be a motivator for lots of kids. In order to be educated you need to be educated.

"'We claim to be part of the American dream and of a system based on merit and opportunity and talent,' Mr. Marx says. 'Yet if at the top places, two-thirds of the students come from the top quartile and only 5 percent come from the bottom quartile, then we are actually part of the problem of the growing economic divide rather than part of the solution.'"<p>Is your college a meritocracy based on talent or a means of attempting to right social wrongs, Mr Marx? If it's the former, then the income of student's parents should be irrelevant and you should only be wringing your hands over lesser talented pupils getting in over more talented ones. If it's the latter, I can see your concern - patterns of behavior beget success and children often emulate their parents, leaving you stuck with those blasted high achievers. Tough break, that.

I think there's a similar mechanism by which geeks end up "too geeky".<p><a href="http://www.scottberkun.com/essays/40-why-smart-people-defend-bad-ideas/" rel="nofollow">http://www.scottberkun.com/essays/40-why-smart-people-defend...</a><p><a href="http://amzn.com/0300090331" rel="nofollow">http://amzn.com/0300090331</a>

I've thought this for a long time.<p>It's not the haves vs. the have-nots. It's the connecteds vs. the connected-nots.

Poverty is not an academic problem. It's a human problem. There will always be poverty. It can't be solved. To solve poverty you must solve human greed.

Honestly, it is just so much more complicated than a two paragraph post on hacker news. This is ridiculous. The title is awesome, like scientists just made some startling new discovery. Ridiculous!

how about a social network algorithm that connects the least connected people with the most connected? imagine VC's having dinner with homeless people.

I think the person who wrote this article should read about the history of imperialism and colonization of the non-white world. The quote: "...doing what we can to teach kids from impoverished backgrounds not just how to read and write but how to become upwardly mobile in their networking" really demonstrates a lot of historical ignorance.<p>Anyway, regarding this topic, there's an entire field of academia which regularly studies intergenerational economic mobility (Sociology). Would anyone familiar enough with the field like to provide us with a paper on this topic? (Preferably about the US)

The latest attempt in the UK to deal with the problem<p><a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/8540055/Schools-win-right-to-turn-away-middle-class-children.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/8540055/Schools-win-rig...</a>

Blah blah white people. Blah blah blah black people. Same old story of white guilt by the NYT<p>I'm neither white nor black, but I was definitely poor. Grew up in the ghetto with gang violence. The problem isn't "access" or outreach programs for poor people—the problem is and always will be the parents. My parents stressed the importance of education and now I do well. My friends' parents didnt, and most of them barely graduated high school. Some even dropped out.