Many years ago, I read of a study that measured poverty not in terms of income but with metrics like "How many meals per day do you get?" and "What kind of shelter do you have?" It concluded that less than 1/2 of one percent of Americans were poor by standards in India.
When I've repeated that online, on at least one occasion someone who lived in India got mad at me for supposedly promoting negative stereotypes and told me my info was out of date. They seemed outraged.
I spent some years homeless in America. I'm still quite poor and frustrated with that fact.
I don't know what the solution is for trying to promote better cross cultural understanding. I try to focus on how to get the word out in the US that lack of appropriate housing supply is a primary root cause of homelessness in this country. It's shocking how many people insist that lack of affordable housing has nothing to do with homelessness and homeless people are all just crazies and junkies who don't want to get better.
Grew up in india, spent my twenties in the US, and now back in India. I can give you some potential explanation:
Even though the poor and lower middle class make abjectly low amounts of money, the upper middle class and the rich actually make money comparable to most developed countries. This is reflected in the real estate prices (Chennai, the fourth largest city, has prices comparable to Brooklyn). I can make 200k UsD a year and call myself upper middle class and no one will bat an eye.
While you can kinda isolate yourself from the real poverty, you’re never fully shielded from it. You will see people struggling if you live in India. Then, the only way you can convince yourself you’re not an evil person is by playing some Mental gymnastics. Thus you have people who refuse to accept how outrageous the wealth disparity in India is. Combine this with this misplaced cultural pride that seems comparatively excessive here, and you get people who become belligerent if you mention most Indians are poorer than dirt.
The upper middle class does not nearly make money comparable to most developed countries. If you make 200k USD a year in India you are strictly rich. I make 10x less than you and I'm still upper middle class. The average rent in a place like Anna Nagar in Chennai (which is probably one of the most expensive places to live) is about 50,000 INR a month or ~700$ for a 3 bhk apartment. In comparison, the average rent in Brooklyn for a 1 bedroom apartment is around 2000$ a month. Just wanted to clarify on the numbers, I do agree with everything else you've said.
The median price for a home in Brooklyn in 900k, which translates to 6 crores. That’s definitely not a median price in central Chennai but it’s also not very far away. There’s also a significantly larger discrepancy between rent and home prices in India so that’s there.
Then, the only way you can convince yourself you’re not an evil person is by playing some Mental gymnastics.
Does benefiting from severe inequality imply amorality? I don't see any inherent contradiction between personal financial success and supporting policies intended to uplift the poor (similarly to how some uber-wealthy in America publicly advocate for more progressive taxation).
I think that if someone is well-off and yet they see a lot of people around them that aren't, it's pretty natural to feel uncomfortable about that. Like "why do I live in a house and not in a tent?" Luck plays a role, but that's not a satisfying answer. One way people deal with it is to construct a narrative to explain their success -- maybe they're smarter, or worked harder, or avoided the personal vices they see among the poor.
Those narratives aren't necessarily entirely wrong, and I don't see those people as particularly evil, they just might have a few blind spots. For instance, they might not realize that even though they worked hard for their success, they also had a lot of second chances when they failed and they might not have had some of the roadblocks to success that others had, such as serious health problems, or a bad family situation, or prejudice, or violence, or lack of education, or lack of leisure time.
I've never been to Delhi, so this is just based on my own observation of people in the United States. I assume this is probably one of those aspects of human nature that are more-or-less the same everywhere.
What do policies have to do with anything? This isn't global warming where the big deal is only in the aggregate.
That there are X million people you cant help even if you do all you can doesn't undermine the fact that if you make hundreds of thousands of dollars you could change the lives of many forever with not much of a lifestyle hit for yourself.
So, just to be clear, your position is that any >=middle-class person who doesn't donate the majority of their wealth to charity is "evil"?
What do policies have to do with anything?
I can't tell if this is a serious question. Policies are how we effect change at scale. Relying on countless people to each independently make the decision to follow your particular moral values isn't a practical solution for addressing inequality throughout the entire country of India.
I don't want to speak for the person you're replying to, but..
> any >=middle-class person who doesn't donate the majority of their wealth to charity is "evil"?
That is pretty much Peter Singer's position (who incidentally is Australian, and it appears the person you're replying to may be also), who is if nothing else at least providing serious and cogent arguments for such a position. You may disagree, but he argues fairly respectably, IMO.
I'm a bit on the fence on that one, but I think there's something to be said for the fact that there is at least some immorality happening if a person worth 100.000$ walks past someone worth 0$ and doesn't help them out at least a little.
> Even though the poor and lower middle class make abjectly low amounts of money, the upper middle class and the rich actually make money comparable to most developed countries. This is reflected in the real estate prices (Chennai, the fourth largest city, has prices comparable to Brooklyn). I can make 200k UsD a year and call myself upper middle class and no one will bat an eye.
So true. People have very wrong expectation when "hiring poor Indians." India been a player in software development field for decades. People there know well how do they pay people in the US, not to say that most higher education in India automatically assumes some passable English.
The upper part of India society lives with one leg in the Western world, others not so much.
Mumbai may pass some times to a glass skyscraper city of the West, but drive 100km out of the city, and the reality will hit you like a truck.
> I don't know what the solution is for trying to promote better cross cultural understanding.
I think that's just it: trying to promote better cross cultural understanding. That's something I tried with the GP here, but I could probably write up an article to be linked to in such discussions.
> metrics like "How many meals per day do you get?" and "What kind of shelter do you have?"
I think this is a good thought, a focus on qualitative differences in lived experience using quantifiable metrics. With that approach you're less likely to offend rather than inform. Might be best to skip the "less than 1/2 of one percent of Americans were poor by standards in India" since it seems to suggest that American poverty isn't "real" poverty.
I would even go so far as to say that communicating the cultural context is far more important than underlining the economics, the former of which TFA is attempting to do.
I'm a former military wife. Just trying to explain how military life is different to other Americans was insanely hard.
I lived in the same country. I used the same currency. I spoke the same language. Yet my life was not like that of civilians I knew and their underlying assumptions and mine that informed our decisions just did not match up to such a degree that I eventually stopped trying to explain my life choices even to people quite close to me who simply did not get the context and that their decision-making matrix and mine were largely unrelated.
I wish you luck in trying to figure out how to do this.
It's not possible to make people understand. You can try it understand others, and some others can try to understand you, but you can't make someone's open their mind if they don't want to.
To help people understand something they've never experienced, stay within their own frame of reference. That's all they've got to work with, because they don't know what they haven't experienced.
To explain poverty to a middle class Californian, frame it in culture terms that are familiar, but which still reach the same class of emotional experience you want them to understand.
e.g.
Have you ever gone shopping at The Gap for jeans with a bunch of pals, and they take forever to decide which 12 pairs of jeans they're going to get, but you only take like 20 minutes because you can only afford 4 pairs? You know how that feels?
That's interesting. Would you mind giving an example of one of these disjuncts? Some decision you made as a military wife that others did not understand?
I think the best example is actually from my divorce. A friend basically called me "stupid" for "trusting" my ex to pay me my support payments while on the phone and I basically politely hung up on her.
She was probably just worried sick about me because the stats for civilian Americans is abysmal. I think it's something like one third of men don't pay at all and one third only make partial payments, which routinely leaves women and their children in a real pickle. It can take months or years to get legal remedy, garnish his wages and get back payments -- if you get them at all.
But it doesn't work that way in the military. If he had stiffed me, I would have written his commanding officer and his wages would have been garnished post haste, much more quickly than what you typically see in the civilian world.
My friend apparently thought I was some naive little ninny who just didn't understand the cold, cruel world because I had such a sheltered existence as a homemaker. And that wasn't it at all. The rules were just different for me and I was in no danger of being left out in the cold like she was likely imagining was about to happen to me given how common that is in the civilian version of America.
That street runs both ways. When asshole landlords were raising rent every three months on soldiers and their families, the general on the base threatened to build more housing and move everyone on base, gutting the local rental market.
I'm obviously not Doreen, but I was a military brat and military myself and can relate some of what I saw. First off, there's a sense of impermanence to everything. Your best friend is often someone you will only know for ~3 years of your life. You have to meet people and become friendly with them quickly or you will have no social contacts outside your family.
If you were a military spouse, you may have had a job, but rarely a career. You move at the whim of your spouse's job (every few years) to places you don't control. You generally don't get to pick your neighbors or even your friends - you just adapt to the situation that constantly changes.
Spouses of military members that go on unaccompanied tours have it even worse. They are at home alone, often for months at a time. My anecdotal observations of Navy spouses, for example, was that cheating was a standard practice - not because the marriage was necessarily bad, but because they were so lonely. This is based on limited exposure (I was Air Force, both as a brat and active duty), so may not be as universally true as I observed.
This can all sound horrible, but it really wasn't. Just different. Different enough that sometimes it is hard to explain.
The incentive structure in the military is completely different from normal American society. Imagine a parallel, "socialist" society that exists inside the U.S.A. That's the military in a nutshell.
It has its own government-run housing authority, its own government-run medical system, you don't always know where you will end up on your next tour, you may not be allowed to quit and leave the military when you would normally expect to under some circumstances, etc.
> a parallel, "socialist" society that exists inside the U.S.A. That's the military in a nutshell.
Perfect description, which I find hilarious. It's the best large-scale example of socialism that actually works. But the Right won't admit it and the Left thinks it's hell.
India has lots of villages, slums and people in between having very poor material standards compared to Western countries. But people are also much more interconnected, rely on each other and find ways to get by. So to get that culture, you have to spend at least 6 months and really get to know what family values are, and how things tend to work out. It's very different than the lonely individualist countries. Many Indians actually move back home to be with family and friends!
So superficial analyses may just not be very recognizable to the population, because of very different value systems and nuances.
Personally, that's the biggest lesson that I got from traveling in India. There's no question that people's living standard needs to be improved there, but I saw something that's lacking in a developed country (especially in the country I live): mutual help, or the "love your neighbor" mindset. I hope that tradition last long.
As someone who immigrated to the US from India, and was a 'stereotypical nerd' (being on HN duh) nosy neighbors seem nice on the outside but it can get old really quick. (Unless you're perfectly average for the community you live in). I much prefer making friends at work or other common interest places rather than neighbors or family who randomly happen to be next to you.
Tbh anyone nosy. Every time I visit my parents back home, I realize how exasperatingly nosy they are. They can't stick to minding their own business, and honestly it's something that they picked up with age - I guess to be a part of the general "community". And the amount of mental gymnastics they perform to analyze trivial mind-numbing stuff....
I guess it's something that's as ingrained in the Indian psyche as turmeric is in Indian cuisine.
That's very true, but I think it's possible to a) have a fact-based approach without being superficial, and b) communicate cultural context without having to plumb the depths of the human condition.
Were it necessary to cover the subtle nuances of Eastern and Western culture, it would be hard to get anywhere with prose. I think it's sufficient to convey enough information to demonstrate that the value systems and lived experiences are fundamentally different.
The goal is not to "level the playing field" in terms of where people are coming from, but to foster more meaningful discussions by explicitly taking context into account.
But it takes the plumbing the depths of the human condition to realize that we're not actually a that different, and that the fundamentals are the SAME. Airy eloquent prose may not have the same effect on the data driven as hard metrics, but comparing $20,000 (US) a year to the equivalent of $1 US a day, without capturing, in prose, that person in the US below the poverty line may be going hungry more days a week, and is more exposed to the elements, and more likely to be harrassed by police/others and more likely to die, is superficial.
Prose is what's needed to communicate effectively. Tables and charts simply can't do that by themselves. Even they need a legend and labels to be useful.
There’s someone on YouTube I sorta watched from time to time when the pandemic hit. He’s located in Venice beach, German in Venice. He was exposing the homeless issue and lack of government response.
Fast forward to now. The city offered everyone a free place to go and many took it. There were still a lot of people who refused. Now the garbage trucks and police evicted them. The garbage people packed a lot of stuff and put it into storage.
What’s your take? They were offered housing while they get back on their feet and chose not to take it.
First, some people took it and some did not. Yet you are trying to suggest we judge all homeless based on those who did not without knowing any further details. Damn them all to hell because some were offered housing and said "no."
A lot of services offered to the homeless are really terrible. I never stayed in a shelter while homeless. They have rules that make it just shy of being a form of prison, they tend to not be safe and they often have serious mold problems, among other things.
They also offered me no option to continue living as a family with my adult sons. Every service I spoke to urged me to take shelter as a single woman and to wait-list my sons for shelter as single adult men. There were zero programs to help us find shelter as a family of three blood relatives who still need each other to make our lives work.
I have done a lot of writing about homelessness and housing issues over the years. I could direct you to several of my blogs if you actually are sincerely interested in my take. I doubt that you are. That's likely a rhetorical device.
I am doing what I can to continue researching the issue, to provide useful information for small communities to use, etc. I don't know how to get traction and I don't know how to adequately monetize my work which makes it difficult to keep writing about it in hopes of other people benefiting because I need to eat and pay rent too. I'm certainly not independently wealthy.
I took it as negative because you closed with this:
They were offered housing while they get back on their feet and chose not to take it.
It's full of implicit accusation that the homeless are difficult, uncooperative, causing their own problems and you can't help them because they are irrational pains in the butt.
I interpreted it that way in part because many homeless services are so bad they help keep the problem alive rather than helping to solve it.
As just one example: Most homeless people have serious health issues. It's an underlying cause of their financial problems and a barrier to employment.
But if you go to a soup kitchen, you are exposed to other sick people, plus cigarette smoke and marijuana smoke. I eventually quit going to soup kitchens and just worked at finding other ways to keep myself fed because my health issues are my number one problem making my life not work, so anything that makes it harder for me to take care of my health is a very serious problem.
I think we should lower the barrier to food stamps in the US. It's a good program that allows you to access food from normal middle class venues which are actually clean etc. I think we should do all we can to cut the bureaucratic costs and as much as humanly possible say "If you want food stamps, here you go" without asking people to prove they need them.
But I don't expect anything like that will ever happen. Talk of UBI appears to be code for "And now rich people can say Shut up. You are getting a check, you ingrate." rather than a genuine attempt to give meaningful relief to poor Americans.
Cutting a check is an easy answer to a hard problem, so likely won't solve anything.
I've listed my blogs elsewhere in another comment if you genuinely want to know more about what I think about homelessness, housing issues and community development.
I am wondering why you think a basic income check wouldn’t help anything, because it seems to exactly solve the issue you describe. You sign up for the check (or a lot of the times, get it automatically from the IRS), get it regularly, and buy food with it. Very little bureaucracy compared with food stamps. I agree that one must not call those who rely on the checks entitled and refuse them any further assistance. I think the best thing is to do what we can to help people get back on their feet or at least in a stable situation, and a basic income check would be only one (albeit major) element of that.
I concede that distributing the checks may be difficult to those without stable mailing addresses. Then it may help to for example allow distribution in cash at the local post office.
The pandemic stimulus checks appear to have had a tremendous impact in reducing poverty, see https://www.marketwatch.com/story/this-government-program-cu..., at least based on the studies there. I don’t know what the path is for this becoming regular policy, but the proposed child tax credit is projected to greatly decrease child poverty (although it has its own problems, it’s tough to get people to understand it exists and how to use it).
The amount they are proposing for UBI wouldn't even cover rent in some parts of the US. Or it would barely cover rent in some places with little or nothing leftover. Online conversations about UBI frequently include comments to the effect that "If you had UBI, you could move someplace with lower rent."
It amounts to the latest version of putting homeless people on a bus and shipping them elsewhere so they stop being a local problem.
If rent is lower, it is probably because services are less available. If you need those services, such as specialized health care, telling you "Here's a check. Move someplace where it covers rent." is essentially a big fat fuck you.
We have torn down more than a million SROs and largely zoned out of existence the ability to build new Missing Middle Housing in mixed use, walkable neighborhoods. So you not only need to cover a high rent, you also need to have a car which is another huge expense and another big fat fuck you if you simply can't drive for some reason (as is true for me -- I am handicapped and no longer drive).
If we pass UBI, I believe it will only get harder to convince people to build SROs and Missing Middle Housing and walkable neighborhoods. That would be an important part of actually solving things.
We also need universal healthcare coverage in the US. Medical expenses are another huge hardship in the US.
If it were possible to find cheap housing, live without a car and get medical care without it being a hardship, that would make it possible to live on very little and then most people could make their lives work even if they only worked part-time. Currently, if you can't work full-time at a well paid job with benefits, you can't make your life work and we aren't creating enough jobs of that sort. We are increasingly moving to gig work which would be fine if you didn't need a job with good benefits to get medical care and if you could find a cheap place where living without a car really worked and you mostly can't arrange that in the US.
Throwing money at the problem doesn't fix those systemic issues and likely just makes people in power feel like they did something and don't have to feel guilty while they shirk on dealing with resolving the hard problems because actually fixing anything is hard work and painful and no one wants to actually do that if they can find an easy out like "I cut you check. Stop bothering me."
I truly appreciate the insight you gave on zoning, housing, and healthcare. But I feel we are talking past each other, and you are attacking a strawman. I never implied UBI would be a catch all solution to the problem of homelessness. You are attacking the people who treat it as such when I said explicitly it is only one of several remedies.
I simply meant 1) it seems like a good solution for replacing food stamps, and it seems like you dropped this point entirely. I also think 2) it can be helpful in a wider sense. It is certainly easier to give people basic income checks than to rearchitect the entirety of American society away from cars, employer-based healthcare, and suburbia. While I agree with you that we perhaps should be on this more effective path, such a radical reorganization would take decades and massive political will that just isn’t there yet. Not even the New Deal, Great Society, or Eisenhower highway programs reached anything near this scope. UBI is something that has already had a test shot, and the data shows it has had a huge effect in reducing poverty during the pandemic. Unless I’m missing something big, it seems like a good way to start.
Okay, I’m really trying to have a good-faith conversation about this, maybe my questions weren’t super clear. I am very interested in your opinion, as you seem to have experience and also have thought about this a lot (and I think many of us on HN appreciate the unique perspective you have to offer). I am just having a hard time seeing the difference between “reducing barriers to food stamps in the US”, as you said and “giving regular checks to people”. Could you elaborate what this would look like? And how is it possible for checks to “not solve anything” when they have demonstrated effectiveness in decreasing poverty in the real world? Is the pandemic really that different a situation in this case? Maybe your definition of a solution here is different than mine?
EDIT: And of course I also don’t want to burden you with endless questioning. If you have written about this I would be happy to read links. You just have a lot of websites and a lot of content so it is difficult for me to find your writing on this particular topic.
The stimulus checks aren't a test of UBI in part because we were told they were one time relief for an emergency, not an entitlement you can count on forever. People spend money differently if they are told "it's a one-time gift" versus "you can expect this for the rest of your life."
Historically, when you inject money into a system without increasing availability of goods and services, the result is inflation. If you start giving people UBI as a regular thing, the value of those checks will promptly go down due to inflation.
All welfare programs have a long history of failing to keep up with inflation. Even food stamps tend to last only about three weeks out of the month. I see no reason to believe UBI would somehow magically escape this pattern.
Making college loans readily available didn't fix things. It didn't mean that everyone had equal access to a college degree and now ordinary people could readily pursue the career of their dreams. Instead, it resulted in tuition skyrocketing and students having trouble getting a professional job with which to pay off their student loans, so people are waiting tables, putting off marriage, putting off homeownership, putting of having kids, putting off their lives to try to pay their loans.
I see no reason to think UBI would somehow go differently. I read that they tried something somewhere and the result was the landlords just raised rent and it didn't provide real relief for poor people. It just enriched the landlords.
Two-thirds of lottery winners are bankrupt within five years and they are at dramatically increased risk of being murdered, among myriad other terrible fates. The money doesn't solve their problems. They trade poor people problems for rich people problems and they don't have rich people coping skills. It often has very ugly results.
If, instead, you give people access to food and medical care and you make smaller homes in walkable neighborhoods where it's possible to live cheaply, then people can manage their problems and make their choices and find a path forward. People aren't likely to eat ten times what they need just because you are willing to pay for it. People aren't likely to get ten times as many x-rays and surgeries as they need just because you won't bill them for it.
Covering basic needs and guaranteeing you can eat and see a doctor is fundamentally different from cutting a check and telling people to spend it any way they want. It's an important form of social safety net that helps when things go wrong and isn't as readily abusable as cash is whether through innocent mistake, ignorance or even willful irresponsibility.
If you go nuts and spend like crazy and can still eat, well you might survive long enough to learn better. If you piss away all your UBI and then people say "Nope. No food stamps. We ended that program to fund UBI. Go starve." you've got a serious problem and so does society.
I only asked the question because I wanted your input from your experience. Most of the people who didn’t want to leave were in various stages of addiction and alcoholism. Addiction is something I know about from my life. Not a fan of UBI. I worked endless hours in the Restaurant industry until I was 27 and got into IT and software development. Not trying to compare to your situation.
Food stamps and health care assistance should absolutely be raised. I have family who struggle with both costs.
Sorry, I'm not trying to be difficult. Sometimes people just have incompatible communication styles and it doesn't go well. (Or it just doesn't go well. Because life.)
I'm interested in reading more of your writing. I worked with TANF recipients, many of whom were homeless (although few of them were unsheltered) and would like to hear more of your perspective because I have some exposure personally, and also because there is a serious problem with providing services to a large number of homeless people in my local area.
Things don't get updated as frequently as I would like in part because I don't have traction, so I don't get the kind of feedback I need to help me figure out what to talk about and because I don't get enough from tips and Patreon to focus on these projects instead of on trying to come up with enough money to survive, but I have done a lot of writing over the years.
That list is not comprehensive. It's just stuff that has more than a few posts and most of that stuff is still being actively developed, just slowly.
> What’s your take? They were offered housing while they get back on their feet and chose not to take it.
If you are, say, addicted to drugs, and your options are 'Live in sober housing' and 'Live in a tent', is it that surprising that #2 is more appealing?
And before someone suggest 'They should just stop using drugs'. I'd also like to point out that we don't have a miracle cure for addiction, and that there are millions of upper and upper-middle class people with every service and support network, both professional and personal, who are unable to deal with their drug problems. What chance does someone sleeping rough, with nobody in their lives who gives two shits about them, have?
> It concluded that less than 1/2 of one percent of Americans were poor by standards in India.
I have no trouble believing that.
Same thing with the software industry really.
Source control has been mainstream since the 90's, build pipeline, automation and so on. But there are still shops around where they'll look at you funny for suggesting using git, that swear copy-pasting executables in a GUI is an ok way to upgrade and where the versions of languages used are at least old enough to have a legal drink. Not a lot, but they still exist. You won't find any overlap with what's going on in SV over there.
When I've repeated that online, on at least one occasion someone who lived in India got mad at me for supposedly promoting negative stereotypes and told me my info was out of date. They seemed outraged.
I spent some years homeless in America. I'm still quite poor and frustrated with that fact.
I don't know what the solution is for trying to promote better cross cultural understanding. I try to focus on how to get the word out in the US that lack of appropriate housing supply is a primary root cause of homelessness in this country. It's shocking how many people insist that lack of affordable housing has nothing to do with homelessness and homeless people are all just crazies and junkies who don't want to get better.