I'm going to go on a limb and say half of the US is not living in abject poverty? Nor can I get behind the idea that quality of life for folks is on the down trend.
If you have negative net worth and the bank's money, not yours, is buying your food and housing, you are in abject poverty, just that the system is propping up your survival for a while.
A lot of the US looks like they're doing great but fits into the category above.
Non-poverty would look like:
* You make enough money to pay for your own food, housing, and transportation in full, with enough buffer for emergencies, without needing to borrow a cent
* You make enough money to be on trajectory to save up to pay for your own food, housing, transportation, and medical expenses in retirement when you are physically unable to serve the workforce
> You make enough money to pay for your own food, housing, and transportation in full, with enough buffer for emergencies, without needing to borrow a cent
So you're saying I'm in poverty because I couldn't buy my house and my car outright?
> and medical expenses in retirement
You're saying I'm in poverty because I understand and intend to use Medicare?
Medicare is a different thing, the government should be providing medical care for everyone to begin with, regardless of what they make.
My definition is if you need to borrow money to put a roof over your head, at the minimum renting, you're in poverty. There are huge chunks of the US population borrowing money to pay for rent.
If your locality doesn't provide adequate public transit, then a car is a necessity, and the onus is now on the locality's economy to make sure everyone can access that; if your locality doesn't pay high enough to afford that car without borrowing money, then yes, you're in poverty. Alternatively, the locality can choose to provide adequate, safe public transit, and the bar of poverty would change.
Most of the US doesn't think this way because they're delusional and have been conditioned to feed the financial system and pay for things with money they don't have.
I own a Medicaid home care agency in 13 states. We serve low income families and our caregivers, who earn $12-18hr which is higher than minimum wage, absolutely struggle. We have created food banks and housing assistance because even working people are a few sick days or one car repair away from homelessness.
I would encourage you to go work with average Americans in average towns. The facts on the ground are stark and eroding.
>I own a Medicaid home care agency in 13 states. We serve low income families and our caregivers
There's an extreme selection bias there. If you run an agency that works with low income families you're not going to see a representative sample of the overall population.
Maybe. Unfortunately, what digitaltrees wrote here is ambiguous. It could also be read as this:
Our caregivers serve low income families. Those caregivers, who are our employees, earn $12-18/hr which is above minimum wage. Our employees absolutely struggle. Our employees are the ones using food banks and housing assistance because many are one car repair away from homelessness.
I think the latter interpretation is correct. As in digitaltrees runs a business that does not pay its employees a living wage, who then have to rely on food banks and housing assistance.
We don’t set the Medicaid reimbursement rate so we have no control over wages either. We work to be very disciplined about unit economics and fixed costs so as much money goes to caregivers as possible but if Medicaid pays $22hr you can’t pay $20 because you won’t cover the payroll taxes, workers compensation insurance, or required clinical and other admin expenses.
It’s both. The clients are more impoverished but the caregivers also struggle.
I got into this to build software to lower admin expenses and improve operations for an otherwise under served industry. We are making progress and have supported thousands of people in having stable careers. The horror stories I could tell of other agencies exploiting people due to incompetence or malice are shocking.
Someone could interpret that as a lack of capitalism rather than the opposite.
That is, Henry Ford changed the world because he deployed capital to make workers so productive that they could afford to buy the cars they make.
A person paid to do child care in an organization with overhead, who has to pay taxes, etc. is not productive enough to put their own children in child care. So child care fails to revolutionize the world the way the car did.
Some goes to the capital class, some goes to workers. The Marxist eschatology is that there are pressures that cause the fraction that goes to capital increases over time and breaks the system.
Look at the good deal that the UAW has gotten for auto workers in the system, both US car makers and the union are pretty happy right to keep this system in place and shrink in the face of technological change like electrification not to mention abandoning small cars for large cars that are profitable for now.
(Funny how I often I see "good old boys" driving Asian compacts because they can afford Asian compacts, and I see office workers driving big-ass trucks)
But if that capital accumulation is unchecked it destroys the very market forces such as competition and price setting functions through supply and demand necessary for capitalism to work. So capitalists should want to prevent monopolies and concentration of wealth.
> So capitalists should want to prevent monopolies and concentration of wealth.
Why do you assume that Capital class has an ideological loyalty to the capitalist system? If they can get rich without having to compete or do any kind of effort, don't you think they'd prefer that to actually 'working' for the money? Once they've got theirs, do you think they care about what happens after?
> A person paid to do child care in an organization with overhead, who has to pay taxes, etc. is not productive enough
They are highly productive but the market doesn't value them. It values the backup forward on a basketball team - an almost completely non-productive job - more than a doctor. It values the owner of a company at $1 trillion, which is obviously absurd.
It's not "absurd"... you're confusing moral value with economic scale.
A $1T founder is rewarded for building a massive system that employs hundreds of thousands of people, moved technological progress forward dramatically, and has positively affected the lives millions.
A doctor provides life-saving care, but they are physically limited to helping one person at a time. A backup NBA forward might not save lives, but their work is broadcast and monetized across millions of screens at once.
Arguing that entertainment is "non-productive" ignores human nature. People gladly pay to be entertained. If sports have no value, do you feel the same way about books, art, and movies?
To get to the Baumol effect, the movie actor can perform once and be seen by millions whereas the theater actor has to perform at least once a night in front of one roomful of people. So the former can get paid more, a lot more.
Probably the highest paid athletes in the world are european soccer players and the thing there is that these salaries can be justified in terms of the value top players bring in a game where being relegated can bring the money train for a team to a halt. You don't see working-class soccer fans complaining about this (they feel the value!) but the owners and many representatives of capital get fuming mad about it.
(Funny, growing up in youth soccer in the US taught me to think of the game as an exercise in Brownian motion where there are too many people on the field who aren't held accountable. It wasn't until I had an argument with a recommender system that couldn't accept that I hated soccer that changed my mind and turned me into one of those sports fans who rolls out of bed Saturday mornings to watch the Premier League that I realized how high the stakes are in the European game.)
In European football, relegation is a zero sum outcome for society: One team is relegated and another promoted. On average, equal numbers of fans are happy or sad.
Acting is about art, which brings up different issues and value. But looking at broadcast sports, the marginal value of doing that work is still zero: If that person didn't play football, someone else would and the entertainment benefit would be the same (excluding the few extraordinary athletes like Messi).
Well in American football we have the problem of teams that lumber on playing terribly for years and years. Like we have three teams in New York state and the Buffalo Bills (upstate) are good and the two in the city (the Giants and the Jets) are awful year after year.
If there was some accountability those teams would be better or would be playing at a different level or not at all. So I'd argue pro/rel is a net plus because it leads to better play. Personally I watching the New York Red Bulls (Major League Soccer) play in person but overall soccer is the US is not up to international standards.
What blows my mind about soccer in the UK is that interest is so great that they can support two leagues below the Premier League and I know there are leagues below those. When I went to the Cornell/Syracuse game which is a legendary matchup that attracts a lot of youth players in the audience I was just thinking of the depth and width of the pyramid of soccer play from Kindergarten all the way to the world cup which is what makes the soccer universe so compelling. (Kinda wish more of us enjoyed college soccer!)
> So I'd argue pro/rel is a net plus because it leads to better play.
From a sports perspective, sure, I agree. I've often thought that the only non-competitive position on a sports team is owner. If anyone else, coach or player, performed for one year like the some team owners do for decades, they'd be out of a job. Owners won't agree to losing their jobs (fire the bottom 5%?), but relegation ... but would the other owners want the biggest market, for example, relegated?
But this discussion is about societal value. Whoever wins and loses, every game is net zero in entertainment value (whatever that is worth): 1 win and 1 loss. Every relegation is net zero: one team promoted, one relegated. Every championship: 1 team wins, another finishes 2nd, etc., no matter who it is.
I understand how the marketplace works, but the value - the contribution, the marginal value - to society doesn't match it.
The $1T business owner doesn't provide nearly that much marginal value to society.
The backup (or starting) NBA forward provides zero marginal value - if they didn't do it, someone else would and the outcome for society, entertainment, would be the same. It doesn't matter how well they play basketball; that doesn't make it more entertaining (with a few extraordinary exceptions). People in the US enjoy college sports, where performance is much worse, as much as professional sports. People root for their 'bad' local team as much as a good one: they do prefer winning, but that is a zero sum tradeoff with the other team's fans.
The income for the two examples are the results of economic distortions.
My kids' teachers provide contribute far more than the latter, and far more than they are paid.
Innovative companies at the beginning of growth cycles are always generous to employees. Look at all the perks showered on staff for a long time. They are starting to pull that back as they get monopoly market power.
I would agree with you that more capitalism would be better but only if you acknowledge that monopolies are not capitalism; they are the logical end and death spiral in unregulated and unmanaged capitalism.
They are the black hole that a dead star collapse into.
That story about Ford is just PR. Ford had to increase wages because he was churning through so many employees from injury and burnout that he had to convince people even living 1000 miles away to consider moving to Detroit and working on an assembly line. Otherwise he literally could not fill all the positions needed to run an assembly line.
Median income in the US is much higher than $12-18/hr, it is about $30/hr. 25th percentile make $20/hr. 10th percentile make $15.58. https://www.bls.gov/news.release/wkyeng.htm
So, the people you are mentioning making 12-18/hr, are literally below 1 in 4, to less than 1 in 10. These are not “average middle class Americans” except maybe in that higher end. These are low wage earners and are far below “average”.
I mean absolutely nothing normative by this statement, nothing about whether this is good or bad or what we should do policy, socially, whatever. But saying someone making below the 10th percentile is average is like saying someone making $75/hr is average.
I would fully get behind us paying service providers far more than we do. To wit, it baffles me when people are upset about how much we allocate to pay for services that go to older people, but then we don't do any effort to make sure the services are provided by younger people. Indeed, we seem to go out of our way to make sure the people providing these services are, themselves, low income. It is baffling.
But even this feels like it is overstating things. You say folks are one car repair away from being homeless. And there is a lot of polling that shows people would struggle to pay for repairs. But full on homelessness? I can only assume that you are describing towns/cities that offer no transport assistance at all, that lands people into being so dependent on a car. I believe it, but I struggle to think this is literally half the nation.
I had an employee that was homeless last week. We were trying to figure out what to do. We’ve been looking into buying apartments to convert them to condos for a first time home buyer program, but the economics are hard to make work. We have considered buying a camper that can move around
The reality is that when 40% of your income goes to rent, how many days of work can you miss before you can’t pay rent? If your car breaks down, how many days will your employer tolerate while you try to get it fixed, assuming you have the money to fix it.
You don’t have to believe me, just look up the state on the percentage of Americans living pay check to paycheck.
The stats on "living paycheck to paycheck" are notoriously rough. With some people that make 300k a year claiming they fit that category.
Don't get me wrong, I sympathize with your given scenario. I actually lost my car when I was younger. Was a rough few months while I got used to commuting without one. And I was lucky to have a roommate that kept my cost of living down.
And I remain a proponent of increasing pay to service providers. As well as finding ways to provide cheaper living conditions. First time home buyer programs are great, but seem unlikely to be relevant for the workers we are talking about? I see the median age of home care nurses in rural areas drifts up to 51-53. Which, granted, I see the median age of first time home buyer is drifting up. I don't think it is as high as those workers, though.
I do think there is a problem here. I just don't think it rises to "half the nation lives in abject poverty."
I think “abject poverty” is probably overstating the case a bit. I do think quality of life is trending downward given the fact that housing, food, gas, medical care costs are all increasing while wages are stagnant or worse.
>I do think quality of life is trending downward given the fact that housing, food, gas, medical care costs are all increasing while wages are stagnant or worse.
That chart doesn't make the case you think it does. Real median household income rising can be explained by things like more dual earner households (more women working since the 70s), more hours worked, etc. The household income can rise while the wages can theoretically remain flat or even fall.
The more relevant statistic is that median real wages have only grown by about 29% across 40+ years (~0.6% per year)
Since 2000, medical care costs have risen by 121.3%, hospital services by 275%, college tuition and fees by 196%, compared to consumer goods by 86.1%. Things like TVs and electronics went way down in costs while the essentials have absolutely skyrocketed. The cheap stuff drags the average down.
You need a lot more than a single graph to argue against the quality of life going down for Americans.
You're right, I was mixing up the related charts. Still, this makes my case even stronger since personal controls for adding more earners to a household. If real median personal income only rose from ~$28k in 1974 to ~45$k today, that's a 60% increase. Median personal income rising by 0.9% every year over 50 years compared to healthcare rising by 3-4% every year since 2000 is not a gap you can ignore. Necessities grew at nearly 3 to 4x the income rate.
So the case that quality of life is trending downward is still completely valid and shows why you can't just point at a single graph and say "see? line go up therefore quality of life fine"
>Still, this makes my case even stronger since personal controls for adding more earners to a household. If real median personal income only rose from ~$28k in 1974 to ~45$k today, that's a 60% increase.
Labor force participation rate for both males and females has basically been flat for the past decade, so the recent discontent about "costs are all increasing while wages are stagnant or worse" is still unsupported. Moreover the 1970s was never an era of stay at home moms. Female labor force participation rate was already 45%, against around 78% for male. It also topped out at around 60% (so basically 15% increase, max) with the rate for males dropping.
Right, except I acknowledged my initial statement was wrong because I was basing it off of household income when you were actually referring to personal income. So why did you spend the effort refuting that?
Median personal income is per individual, which is obvious. After I corrected myself the question then became "did the typical individual's real income keep pace with the cost of the things they can't avoid buying?". The answer is no. And I already showed why.
This doesn't actually seem to be true based on a quick googling, i.e. Germany has somewhat higher median income.
But in addition to the raw numbers, you have to keep in mind that they don't account for cost of living and that different countries account for various services differently, especially health care.
Totally understand that; but it counters the assertion of “abject poverty”. Perhaps relative poverty is a better descriptor but abject poverty is someone living in cardboard tents by the riverbank. Regular poor is living in section eight housing or subsidized housing. I don’t think we have 50% of Mississippians living in abject poverty.
As a gulf state resident, a whole lot of us live in shitty old shotgun houses that have been patched up hundreds of times just waiting for the next hurricane to wipe us out finally.
I would assume this doesn't account for Germans having different healthcare costs which will aboslutely wreck the average American household with how fucked our system has become.
Do you believe about 50% of Mississippians live in abject poverty as put forth by GGP poster? The kind of poverty you saw in Dust Bowl era workers or Weimar era Germany or 3rd would today? Sure people may not be middle class but they are not in abject poverty where they steal chickens, shit on the street, sell their relatives into servitude and barely have two changes of clothing. At least I don’t think so. What those people live would be middle class for counties where there is lots of abject poverty.
People watch too many influencers and lose track of reality -it’s not all Beverly Hills and Kardashians and Real Wives of X-town everywhere. That’s fantasyland.
I find it hard to believe 50%, but we are not doing well down here. Homeless populations have increased massively and the average cost of a single bedroom apartment has gone from $500-1150 in my area since I moved here in 2008. Meanwhile the minimum wage is still $7.25/hour up from $5.50/hour in the 2000's.
Gentrification has also bought up a lot of the older areas and created what feels like faux poverty aesthetic gated apartments and over priced eateries with random shit sprinkled in like Axe throwing places. (Please someone where did all of these axe throwing places come from)
Things are also different down here because you see a massive loss in land/homes lasting families for generations due to petro-chemical and now data center companies buying up whole towns to bulldoze and built into pollution centers.
I'm seeing a lot more cars with doors, bumpers and windows missing because people just need their scrap heap of a car to continue to get them to work across town. We don't have walkable cities and even homeless people sometimes have cheap bicycles with scrap weedwacker motors bolted on because they can't afford a car or the time to get a license.
Someone else brought up the real truth, a lot of us are living paycheck to paycheck and entirely beholden to how much room we still have on various credit cards to buy food after paying bills. Eternal debt slavery is becoming extremely common.
It's not abject poverty, its just dire circumstances for a huge number of everyday folk.
Okay and what exactly do you get for that income? What are the material outcomes for having a "higher" income than Germany? Because I know very few people that would openly choose to live in Mississippi versus Germany.
The GP claimed that 50% of the US lives in abject poverty. Mississippi our poorest state compares with Germany in terms of median income and Mississippi itself does not suffer from 50% rate of abject poverty. So by extension the US as a whole doesn’t suffer from a 50% rate of abject poverty (begging, trinket selling, selling off relatives, shitting in public, etc.) rates of abject poverty. That’s stuff you’d see in the Great Depression or Weimar Germany level stuff.
Okay so thank you for avoiding the question, once again what does a higher income in the southern US get you that people in Germany don't have?
People want healthcare, they want cheaper housing, they want high quality jobs, they want lower crime. Material outcomes absolutely matter and there is zero evidence to suggest that "high incomes" in the US translate to anything except more blood for corporations to extract.
Yes, but German society is structured to require much less energy, just as Dutch society is structured to use much less land.
If you put Germans whose lives function in a US-style, even just getting to work will be a huge drag.
Misery depends on the structure of society. Here in Sweden I can walk to work. This means that I'm spending zero money on travel to work, and that my travel to work contributes $0 to Swedish GDP. But this is actually better than if Swedish GDP were higher and I was traveling by car.
This is one way in which GDP can be extremely misleading.
I see walking to work as an relative to each individual and their job lcoatiopna dn circumstance of where they live, not a country related thing.
For example, ,ost of my jobs in EU that me and my gF had required a car to get to work because companies put their offices out in the boonies to save money so walking was not an option, and neither was public transport.
> But this is actually better than if Swedish GDP were higher and I was traveling by car.
GDP growth "experts" would disagree. It's the reason we don't have mandatory WFH for white collar jobs after Covid proved it's possible and salves the environment
A smaller fraction than in the US. I think most people I know drive.
>I see walking to work as an relative to each individual and their job lcoatiopna dn circumstance of where they live, not a country related thing.
Well, it isn't. It's about how walkable environments are.
>GDP growth "experts" would disagree. It's the reason we don't have mandatory WFH for white collar jobs after Covid proved it's possible and salves the environment
Well, they may disagree, but the whole point is the goal of society isn't GDP, since GDP is easy to game with things like creating situation where people are effectively forced to waste energy, drive to work-- that sort of thing.
The homeless number under estimates people with unstable housing that aren’t on the streets.
I assure you that when your basic housing and nutrition are uncertain and missing even a few days of income will result in cascading effects of hunger and homelessness, the underlying stress is overwhelming.
It doesn’t have to be this way, we don’t let bullies steal all the toys on the playground and destroy the very ecosystem that they want to have fun in, why are we letting capital accumulate in the hands of the most effective capitalists at the risk of destroying the very markets that let them succeed.
I say that as a capitalist, if we lose the system because we allow unchecked Monopoly and wealth concentration, we won’t get it back.
I agree with all those things, but if we start making up numbers and definitions we're at risk of undoing actual progress.
Maybe it feels good to say "actually everyone is a victim of capitalism", but it muddies real necessary work when it comes to determining whether to prioritize how resources need to be allocated between a disabled person living on the streets vs a graduate student who is currently just a little underwater on their credit card payments.
That’s a reasonable perspective. I would ask though, whether the fear of muddying the discussion is weaponized to create the impression of complexity, a broad range of intractable causes that lead to the conclusion that any solution is futile. The forces that benefit from the status quo deploy this quite effectively
The BLS and Federal Reserve both have data showing that the median American household has >$1,000 left over every month after all ordinary expenses, including housing, healthcare, and iPhones.
Any definition of "abject poverty" that includes a comfortable lifestyle and $12-15k excess income every year is not a serious definition.
"should" is a pretty woolly concept. "should" we have to work at all? UBI proponents don't think so, and that apparently that has 45% support. What's hopefully obvious is that not being able to afford a 2 bedroom apartment at median wage is a far cry from "abject poverty".
I'm asking you the question because a statement like 50% of [population] is making a claim to some notion of what they expect society to look like
you introduced the benchmark "not being able to afford a 2 bedroom apartment at median wage", though I would expect a modern day society that makes any claim to be wealthy to be able to have above 50% of it's population to be able to support something like that as that would indicate they can support a small family
You're saying that's not a good benchmark, so I'm trying to understand:
1) Do you have a different benchmark?
2) Is your key complaint that being unable to own a 2 bedroom house doesn't mean that individual or family is in "abject poverty"? In which case fair, though I would ask what does mean abject poverty for you?
It seems like you're saying 2, but I want to be sure
>In which case fair, though I would ask what does mean abject poverty for you?
The exact number is heavily contested[1], so I know better than to provide my own. That said, the official poverty lines are a pretty good place to start, and it's pretty safe to say is that whatever the line for "abject poverty" actually is, "2 bedroom apartment on 1 person income" is pretty far away from that. That claim doesn't require me to provide a specific poverty line.
In addition to that being obviously different from the line to “abject poverty”, it’s not at all obvious that a single median income should be able to support a 4-person family in a 2BR apartment or else the system is completely broken…
> it’s not at all obvious that a single median income should be able to support a 4-person family in a 2BR apartment or else the system is completely broken
Either the Western world allows people the financial and real estate resources to have children in the next 5 years or we're all fucked. The tail end of the boomers enters retirement in 10 years and while millennials can take care of the boomers, eventually we will need to be taken care of, and for that millennials need to have children now as long as we still can.
Because margins on building smaller housing is lower so nobody with capital is investing in it. The same reason the US doesn't build cheap commuter cars, nobody with money to invest is investing their money on such a slim margined product with no windfall conditions.
Someone should inform all of the poor children being born and raised everywhere in USA and earth that they need a 2 bedroom apartment to exist, actually
The United States doles out >$30K/year in welfare spending for each person (not household, each person) under the poverty line. And that's just HUD/SNAP/Medicaid. The idea that any significant portion of the US is living in "abject poverty" (let alone half!) is hysterical in every sense of the word.
It's actually far better than that! When people hear "poverty rate", they think "the percentage of people living in poverty". That's not what the census data on poverty is reporting, though. The census data is based on income only. It excludes in-kind welfare (Food Stamps, HUD, and Medicaid) and even excludes some welfare that is paid out in cash (like refundable tax credits). In other words, the census data is reporting that 10% of Americans earn under the poverty line. The number living under the poverty line is far, far lower.
It absolutely is relevant to the discussion. Many Americans are ungrateful and envious of the Americans wealthier than them, in spite of the fact that their own living standards are still far far better than the majority of humans on the planet. And some of those hypocritically think that the wealth of richer Americans belong to them, but would never consider giving their own wealth to people across the globe who are poorer than them.
That is a false claim. Voting for taxation to support the less wealthy is almost a defining feature of what it means to be 'left'. Voting for taxation to support international aid and outreach and healthcare is very common. The 'left' supporting colonial- and war reparation payments is common. Donating money to charity, tithing, nationally and internationally is common across the board.
> "from people richer than them"
You may want to spend some time reflecting on where that money came from. How much lobbying and market manipulation, employee abuse, bullying, exploitation, wage theft, government (taxpayer-funded) grants and infusions of cash, bribery, corruption, dark patterns, law-breaking were involved, and how much tax avoidance and evasion was involved.
"Listen folks, it's no big deal if you can't afford rent or to purchase a house. Ignore my vacation homes in Aspen, Jackson Hole and Nantucket. Just think about how much better you have it than the people in Haiti and get back to work!"
Because we as a society have drastically changed how we use housing: https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2023/06/more-than-a-q... -- Multi generational housing was a thing. Having roommates was a thing... the premise of "golden girls" would be lost to a modern audience, because cohabitation is dead. The premise of "bosom buddies" would get canceled for its insensitivity, but no one would understand because boarding houses are all but gone.
Building every one in the world an American style house, would cripple the globe. Concrete, Sand, Copper, Wood are going to become massive problems long before we get close to getting the job done.
> Ignore my vacation homes in Aspen, Jackson Hole and Nantucket.
You think that vacation homes are causing the housing crisis? Are eroding wages elsewhere? The industry of these locations is TOURISM, and a fair bit of it is international. (Not Nantucket).
It's not like whaling is going to make a comeback to make Nantucket a viable place to live again.
> Just think about how much better you have it than the people in Haiti and get back to work!"
Plenty of Americans look at musk and say "lets eat the rich" ... the problem is that the rest of the world has those same hungry eyes for us.
Does being poor cause mental health issues, or are mental heath issues a cause of poverty... The answer here clearly better access (read free) to mental heath care, and it wont have the impact one would think (see the UK data).
> Look at other stats like rising infant mortality
The thing is we changed how we collect this data, to something that would be considered bad: https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2024/03/13/maternal-mo... - There are tons of criticism on how we collect this data, they are valid, if you dont like this source, find another its a mess of our own creation.
> dropping IQ etc.
The largest root cause is that people spend too much time on their cell phone dumbing themselves down. Think about that one... no one feels the need to elevate themselves, they are happy to spend time on what amounts to leisure. Would you have sympathy for the person who gets fired cause they chose to play 18 holes of golf 5 days a week rather than do their job?
You seem to be arguing that people are poor because they have mental health issues or are otherwise to blame.
The first article you site contradicts that position.
I would also argue that regardless of the cause, society should provide mechanisms to take care of people. Just like we don’t blame people for crop failures, hurricanes, fires or other catastrophic health issues, and instead have insurance, fire departments, etc. poverty is a consequence of social policies. We should strive to create social policies that have less inequality because they are more stable, safe and consistent with what everyone would want if they didn’t know what role they would occupy.
This is quickly going to devolve into 'nobody suffers unless their suffering as at least as bad as the worst suffering that exists', so let's just go ahead and get that out of the way and move on to something less pointless.
Have you looked up the definition of abject poverty? It is "the most severe and hopeless form of human deprivation". It's the subject of the conversation, how is that pointless?
While you are able to look up someone's definition of abject poverty, the only definition that is relevant in this context is the one held by the author of the earlier comment. It is unlikely you can look up his definition (before he replies to those who have asked for the definition in force).
> the only definition that is relevant in this context is the one held by the author of the earlier comment.
This is absolute nonsense. We use common language to refer to common things in understandable ways in order to communicate with each other. You don't get to just handwave baldly incorrect statements as "well maybe he just has a different personal definition" without basically rendering literally all conversation moot and pointless.
"Yeah, I know he said 2+2 is 5, but you don't know he defines 5" is just as patently silly.
> We use common language to refer to common things in understandable ways in order to communicate with each other.
Common doesn't mean ever-present. In practice, it is impossible for everyone to converge on a shared understanding for all terms. There are provably many people in the world who have never even heard the term "abject poverty" before. They cannot possibly understand what the term means to you. Fundamentally, "abject poverty" can only mean in that comment what the author believes it means. That may overlap with your understanding, but it also may not. We can also prove that he is not a mind reader and thus cannot tune it to your understanding. He is limited to his understanding and his understanding alone.
A good faith actor who believes there may be a discrepancy in understanding will seek clarification. That is what a discussion forum is all about. If one does not want to participate in discussion, why be here?
If only their definition matters then their only purpose in this thread is to derail the conversation, or in other words railroad everyone else out because only they can be right.
People responding reject that, because if you're not being specific, you're not making an argument, you're just here to be an asshole.
Since you've made this point, I've gone ahead and reported that comment.
Suppose their definition for abject poverty is: having an income equal to or below the median income. Yes, they would be right. Is it a problem that they are right?
However, you would also be right in agreeing that having an income equal to or below the median income equates to half the population, so you are wrong to think that only they can be right. Of course, that assumes you have used my definitions for these terms and not your own. It is likely that, once we are updated with your definitions, that you were right all along. What are your definitions for the terms you have used?
That's the beauty of discussion. You don't need to guess. You can ask!
But you could. There is no law of the universe that is going to stop you. Words are something randomly made up by humans.
> it's just plain wrong.
Again, words are completely made up, so it can't really be wrong in the traditional mathematical sense. It could be misinterpreted, perhaps. Of course that is dependent on how you've chosen to randomly make up "wrong".
Yep. A lot of such people use words in order to elicit the reaction a legitimate use of said words would get, because they don't want the usually more muted reaction/attention using the correct word would get.
If you’re only complaint is the word “abject”, I encourage you to try to live on anywhere from $7 to $15 an hour, in a part-time job that doesn’t guarantee week to week how many hours you’ll get.
My room mates all lived on slightly above minimum wage with part time hours. They were not in abject poverty. They were just plain poor. They still had cars, phones, video games, food, water, shelter. They each had an ACA plan heavily subsidized and probably were eligible for other welfare but didn’t use it as far as I am aware.
dozerly. "We have one of the worlds most prosperous economies, and half of the US is living in abject poverty while quality of life for everyone is decreasing." Hacker News, 30 Jun. 2026, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48734916
That doesn’t logically follow. If the claim is 1% control 80%.
And the counter argument is wealth is different than income the implication is that wealth inequality is 1) lower than income inequality and 2) more important for some unspecified reason.
But if wealth inequality is more extreme then that means 1% control GREATER than 80% of wealth. So point 1 is false. And point 2 is most likely irrelevant because greater concentration likely means whatever harm from one category would track the other category
>The linked view of the chart is distributed by income percentile, the title is "Wealth by income percentile"
That's still measuring wealth, not income. The correct statement to draw from the chart is that top 1% by income have nearly as much wealth as the bottom 80%.
It's amazing how few people are willing to admit there is a problem. Spend 45 minutes driving around the state I live in talking to random people and it's painfuly obvious this is reality that some. I suppose it's mostly epstein sympathizers who are pushing the narrative that everything is perfect and nothing needs to be done.
I'm going to go on a limb and say half of the US is not living in abject poverty? Nor can I get behind the idea that quality of life for folks is on the down trend.
If you have negative net worth and the bank's money, not yours, is buying your food and housing, you are in abject poverty, just that the system is propping up your survival for a while.
A lot of the US looks like they're doing great but fits into the category above.
Non-poverty would look like:
* You make enough money to pay for your own food, housing, and transportation in full, with enough buffer for emergencies, without needing to borrow a cent
* You make enough money to be on trajectory to save up to pay for your own food, housing, transportation, and medical expenses in retirement when you are physically unable to serve the workforce
> You make enough money to pay for your own food, housing, and transportation in full, with enough buffer for emergencies, without needing to borrow a cent
So you're saying I'm in poverty because I couldn't buy my house and my car outright?
> and medical expenses in retirement
You're saying I'm in poverty because I understand and intend to use Medicare?
These are trivially poor definitions.
Medicare is a different thing, the government should be providing medical care for everyone to begin with, regardless of what they make.
My definition is if you need to borrow money to put a roof over your head, at the minimum renting, you're in poverty. There are huge chunks of the US population borrowing money to pay for rent.
If your locality doesn't provide adequate public transit, then a car is a necessity, and the onus is now on the locality's economy to make sure everyone can access that; if your locality doesn't pay high enough to afford that car without borrowing money, then yes, you're in poverty. Alternatively, the locality can choose to provide adequate, safe public transit, and the bar of poverty would change.
Most of the US doesn't think this way because they're delusional and have been conditioned to feed the financial system and pay for things with money they don't have.
> So you're saying I'm in poverty because I couldn't buy my house and my car outright?
I think this isn't as unreasonable as it seems to everyone living it. It's like water to the fish.
We are conditioned that everything should be fueled by more and more debt, and your dollars should constantly be devalued so you can't stop grinding.
The little people can never be allowed to just work enough to accumulate what they need and then take it easy.
> Nor can I get behind the idea that quality of life for folks is on the down trend.
There is a pretty clear down-trend post-COVID here.
https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/2025-economic-we...
I own a Medicaid home care agency in 13 states. We serve low income families and our caregivers, who earn $12-18hr which is higher than minimum wage, absolutely struggle. We have created food banks and housing assistance because even working people are a few sick days or one car repair away from homelessness.
I would encourage you to go work with average Americans in average towns. The facts on the ground are stark and eroding.
>I own a Medicaid home care agency in 13 states. We serve low income families and our caregivers
There's an extreme selection bias there. If you run an agency that works with low income families you're not going to see a representative sample of the overall population.
> There's an extreme selection bias there.
Maybe. Unfortunately, what digitaltrees wrote here is ambiguous. It could also be read as this:
Our caregivers serve low income families. Those caregivers, who are our employees, earn $12-18/hr which is above minimum wage. Our employees absolutely struggle. Our employees are the ones using food banks and housing assistance because many are one car repair away from homelessness.
digitaltrees: which interpretation is correct?
I think the latter interpretation is correct. As in digitaltrees runs a business that does not pay its employees a living wage, who then have to rely on food banks and housing assistance.
We don’t set the Medicaid reimbursement rate so we have no control over wages either. We work to be very disciplined about unit economics and fixed costs so as much money goes to caregivers as possible but if Medicaid pays $22hr you can’t pay $20 because you won’t cover the payroll taxes, workers compensation insurance, or required clinical and other admin expenses.
If you read the rest of the comment you’ll find it’s about their employees rather than their clientele.
It’s both. The clients are more impoverished but the caregivers also struggle.
I got into this to build software to lower admin expenses and improve operations for an otherwise under served industry. We are making progress and have supported thousands of people in having stable careers. The horror stories I could tell of other agencies exploiting people due to incompetence or malice are shocking.
We have a private pay arm as well, so the other extreme. I also have a roofing company. And I look at the data.
Someone could interpret that as a lack of capitalism rather than the opposite.
That is, Henry Ford changed the world because he deployed capital to make workers so productive that they could afford to buy the cars they make.
A person paid to do child care in an organization with overhead, who has to pay taxes, etc. is not productive enough to put their own children in child care. So child care fails to revolutionize the world the way the car did.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect
> Someone could interpret that as a lack of capitalism rather than the opposite.
In Capitalism surplus economic value goes to the Capital class, so it seems like it is working as designed.
Some goes to the capital class, some goes to workers. The Marxist eschatology is that there are pressures that cause the fraction that goes to capital increases over time and breaks the system.
Look at the good deal that the UAW has gotten for auto workers in the system, both US car makers and the union are pretty happy right to keep this system in place and shrink in the face of technological change like electrification not to mention abandoning small cars for large cars that are profitable for now.
(Funny how I often I see "good old boys" driving Asian compacts because they can afford Asian compacts, and I see office workers driving big-ass trucks)
But if that capital accumulation is unchecked it destroys the very market forces such as competition and price setting functions through supply and demand necessary for capitalism to work. So capitalists should want to prevent monopolies and concentration of wealth.
> So capitalists should want to prevent monopolies and concentration of wealth.
Why do you assume that Capital class has an ideological loyalty to the capitalist system? If they can get rich without having to compete or do any kind of effort, don't you think they'd prefer that to actually 'working' for the money? Once they've got theirs, do you think they care about what happens after?
> A person paid to do child care in an organization with overhead, who has to pay taxes, etc. is not productive enough
They are highly productive but the market doesn't value them. It values the backup forward on a basketball team - an almost completely non-productive job - more than a doctor. It values the owner of a company at $1 trillion, which is obviously absurd.
It's not "absurd"... you're confusing moral value with economic scale.
A $1T founder is rewarded for building a massive system that employs hundreds of thousands of people, moved technological progress forward dramatically, and has positively affected the lives millions.
A doctor provides life-saving care, but they are physically limited to helping one person at a time. A backup NBA forward might not save lives, but their work is broadcast and monetized across millions of screens at once.
Arguing that entertainment is "non-productive" ignores human nature. People gladly pay to be entertained. If sports have no value, do you feel the same way about books, art, and movies?
To get to the Baumol effect, the movie actor can perform once and be seen by millions whereas the theater actor has to perform at least once a night in front of one roomful of people. So the former can get paid more, a lot more.
Probably the highest paid athletes in the world are european soccer players and the thing there is that these salaries can be justified in terms of the value top players bring in a game where being relegated can bring the money train for a team to a halt. You don't see working-class soccer fans complaining about this (they feel the value!) but the owners and many representatives of capital get fuming mad about it.
(Funny, growing up in youth soccer in the US taught me to think of the game as an exercise in Brownian motion where there are too many people on the field who aren't held accountable. It wasn't until I had an argument with a recommender system that couldn't accept that I hated soccer that changed my mind and turned me into one of those sports fans who rolls out of bed Saturday mornings to watch the Premier League that I realized how high the stakes are in the European game.)
In European football, relegation is a zero sum outcome for society: One team is relegated and another promoted. On average, equal numbers of fans are happy or sad.
Acting is about art, which brings up different issues and value. But looking at broadcast sports, the marginal value of doing that work is still zero: If that person didn't play football, someone else would and the entertainment benefit would be the same (excluding the few extraordinary athletes like Messi).
Well in American football we have the problem of teams that lumber on playing terribly for years and years. Like we have three teams in New York state and the Buffalo Bills (upstate) are good and the two in the city (the Giants and the Jets) are awful year after year.
If there was some accountability those teams would be better or would be playing at a different level or not at all. So I'd argue pro/rel is a net plus because it leads to better play. Personally I watching the New York Red Bulls (Major League Soccer) play in person but overall soccer is the US is not up to international standards.
What blows my mind about soccer in the UK is that interest is so great that they can support two leagues below the Premier League and I know there are leagues below those. When I went to the Cornell/Syracuse game which is a legendary matchup that attracts a lot of youth players in the audience I was just thinking of the depth and width of the pyramid of soccer play from Kindergarten all the way to the world cup which is what makes the soccer universe so compelling. (Kinda wish more of us enjoyed college soccer!)
> So I'd argue pro/rel is a net plus because it leads to better play.
From a sports perspective, sure, I agree. I've often thought that the only non-competitive position on a sports team is owner. If anyone else, coach or player, performed for one year like the some team owners do for decades, they'd be out of a job. Owners won't agree to losing their jobs (fire the bottom 5%?), but relegation ... but would the other owners want the biggest market, for example, relegated?
But this discussion is about societal value. Whoever wins and loses, every game is net zero in entertainment value (whatever that is worth): 1 win and 1 loss. Every relegation is net zero: one team promoted, one relegated. Every championship: 1 team wins, another finishes 2nd, etc., no matter who it is.
I understand how the marketplace works, but the value - the contribution, the marginal value - to society doesn't match it.
The $1T business owner doesn't provide nearly that much marginal value to society.
The backup (or starting) NBA forward provides zero marginal value - if they didn't do it, someone else would and the outcome for society, entertainment, would be the same. It doesn't matter how well they play basketball; that doesn't make it more entertaining (with a few extraordinary exceptions). People in the US enjoy college sports, where performance is much worse, as much as professional sports. People root for their 'bad' local team as much as a good one: they do prefer winning, but that is a zero sum tradeoff with the other team's fans.
The income for the two examples are the results of economic distortions.
My kids' teachers provide contribute far more than the latter, and far more than they are paid.
Innovative companies at the beginning of growth cycles are always generous to employees. Look at all the perks showered on staff for a long time. They are starting to pull that back as they get monopoly market power.
I would agree with you that more capitalism would be better but only if you acknowledge that monopolies are not capitalism; they are the logical end and death spiral in unregulated and unmanaged capitalism.
They are the black hole that a dead star collapse into.
> Someone could interpret that as a lack of capitalism rather than the opposite.
Only someone blinded by ideology.
That story about Ford is just PR. Ford had to increase wages because he was churning through so many employees from injury and burnout that he had to convince people even living 1000 miles away to consider moving to Detroit and working on an assembly line. Otherwise he literally could not fill all the positions needed to run an assembly line.
Median income in the US is much higher than $12-18/hr, it is about $30/hr. 25th percentile make $20/hr. 10th percentile make $15.58. https://www.bls.gov/news.release/wkyeng.htm
So, the people you are mentioning making 12-18/hr, are literally below 1 in 4, to less than 1 in 10. These are not “average middle class Americans” except maybe in that higher end. These are low wage earners and are far below “average”.
I mean absolutely nothing normative by this statement, nothing about whether this is good or bad or what we should do policy, socially, whatever. But saying someone making below the 10th percentile is average is like saying someone making $75/hr is average.
They are within 25% of the of the median. So they are the lowest range of 50% of the bell curve.
Literally not a single one of those numbers is above the 25th percentile. 18 < 20.
I would fully get behind us paying service providers far more than we do. To wit, it baffles me when people are upset about how much we allocate to pay for services that go to older people, but then we don't do any effort to make sure the services are provided by younger people. Indeed, we seem to go out of our way to make sure the people providing these services are, themselves, low income. It is baffling.
But even this feels like it is overstating things. You say folks are one car repair away from being homeless. And there is a lot of polling that shows people would struggle to pay for repairs. But full on homelessness? I can only assume that you are describing towns/cities that offer no transport assistance at all, that lands people into being so dependent on a car. I believe it, but I struggle to think this is literally half the nation.
I had an employee that was homeless last week. We were trying to figure out what to do. We’ve been looking into buying apartments to convert them to condos for a first time home buyer program, but the economics are hard to make work. We have considered buying a camper that can move around
The reality is that when 40% of your income goes to rent, how many days of work can you miss before you can’t pay rent? If your car breaks down, how many days will your employer tolerate while you try to get it fixed, assuming you have the money to fix it.
You don’t have to believe me, just look up the state on the percentage of Americans living pay check to paycheck.
The stats on "living paycheck to paycheck" are notoriously rough. With some people that make 300k a year claiming they fit that category.
Don't get me wrong, I sympathize with your given scenario. I actually lost my car when I was younger. Was a rough few months while I got used to commuting without one. And I was lucky to have a roommate that kept my cost of living down.
And I remain a proponent of increasing pay to service providers. As well as finding ways to provide cheaper living conditions. First time home buyer programs are great, but seem unlikely to be relevant for the workers we are talking about? I see the median age of home care nurses in rural areas drifts up to 51-53. Which, granted, I see the median age of first time home buyer is drifting up. I don't think it is as high as those workers, though.
I do think there is a problem here. I just don't think it rises to "half the nation lives in abject poverty."
I think “abject poverty” is probably overstating the case a bit. I do think quality of life is trending downward given the fact that housing, food, gas, medical care costs are all increasing while wages are stagnant or worse.
>I do think quality of life is trending downward given the fact that housing, food, gas, medical care costs are all increasing while wages are stagnant or worse.
???
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N
Note this is already inflation adjusted, so "housing, food, gas, medical care costs are all increasing" is already accounted for.
That chart doesn't make the case you think it does. Real median household income rising can be explained by things like more dual earner households (more women working since the 70s), more hours worked, etc. The household income can rise while the wages can theoretically remain flat or even fall.
The more relevant statistic is that median real wages have only grown by about 29% across 40+ years (~0.6% per year)
Since 2000, medical care costs have risen by 121.3%, hospital services by 275%, college tuition and fees by 196%, compared to consumer goods by 86.1%. Things like TVs and electronics went way down in costs while the essentials have absolutely skyrocketed. The cheap stuff drags the average down.
You need a lot more than a single graph to argue against the quality of life going down for Americans.
>That chart doesn't make the case you think it does. Real median household income rising [...]
Where are you getting household income from? It clearly says "Personal Income"
You're right, I was mixing up the related charts. Still, this makes my case even stronger since personal controls for adding more earners to a household. If real median personal income only rose from ~$28k in 1974 to ~45$k today, that's a 60% increase. Median personal income rising by 0.9% every year over 50 years compared to healthcare rising by 3-4% every year since 2000 is not a gap you can ignore. Necessities grew at nearly 3 to 4x the income rate.
So the case that quality of life is trending downward is still completely valid and shows why you can't just point at a single graph and say "see? line go up therefore quality of life fine"
>Still, this makes my case even stronger since personal controls for adding more earners to a household. If real median personal income only rose from ~$28k in 1974 to ~45$k today, that's a 60% increase.
Labor force participation rate for both males and females has basically been flat for the past decade, so the recent discontent about "costs are all increasing while wages are stagnant or worse" is still unsupported. Moreover the 1970s was never an era of stay at home moms. Female labor force participation rate was already 45%, against around 78% for male. It also topped out at around 60% (so basically 15% increase, max) with the rate for males dropping.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300002
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300001
Right, except I acknowledged my initial statement was wrong because I was basing it off of household income when you were actually referring to personal income. So why did you spend the effort refuting that?
Median personal income is per individual, which is obvious. After I corrected myself the question then became "did the typical individual's real income keep pace with the cost of the things they can't avoid buying?". The answer is no. And I already showed why.
Mississippi, the poorest state, has similar median income to Germany. I’m pretty sure 50% of the people there are not in abject poverty.
This doesn't actually seem to be true based on a quick googling, i.e. Germany has somewhat higher median income.
But in addition to the raw numbers, you have to keep in mind that they don't account for cost of living and that different countries account for various services differently, especially health care.
Totally understand that; but it counters the assertion of “abject poverty”. Perhaps relative poverty is a better descriptor but abject poverty is someone living in cardboard tents by the riverbank. Regular poor is living in section eight housing or subsidized housing. I don’t think we have 50% of Mississippians living in abject poverty.
As a gulf state resident, a whole lot of us live in shitty old shotgun houses that have been patched up hundreds of times just waiting for the next hurricane to wipe us out finally.
I would assume this doesn't account for Germans having different healthcare costs which will aboslutely wreck the average American household with how fucked our system has become.
Do you believe about 50% of Mississippians live in abject poverty as put forth by GGP poster? The kind of poverty you saw in Dust Bowl era workers or Weimar era Germany or 3rd would today? Sure people may not be middle class but they are not in abject poverty where they steal chickens, shit on the street, sell their relatives into servitude and barely have two changes of clothing. At least I don’t think so. What those people live would be middle class for counties where there is lots of abject poverty.
People watch too many influencers and lose track of reality -it’s not all Beverly Hills and Kardashians and Real Wives of X-town everywhere. That’s fantasyland.
I find it hard to believe 50%, but we are not doing well down here. Homeless populations have increased massively and the average cost of a single bedroom apartment has gone from $500-1150 in my area since I moved here in 2008. Meanwhile the minimum wage is still $7.25/hour up from $5.50/hour in the 2000's.
Gentrification has also bought up a lot of the older areas and created what feels like faux poverty aesthetic gated apartments and over priced eateries with random shit sprinkled in like Axe throwing places. (Please someone where did all of these axe throwing places come from)
Things are also different down here because you see a massive loss in land/homes lasting families for generations due to petro-chemical and now data center companies buying up whole towns to bulldoze and built into pollution centers.
I'm seeing a lot more cars with doors, bumpers and windows missing because people just need their scrap heap of a car to continue to get them to work across town. We don't have walkable cities and even homeless people sometimes have cheap bicycles with scrap weedwacker motors bolted on because they can't afford a car or the time to get a license.
Someone else brought up the real truth, a lot of us are living paycheck to paycheck and entirely beholden to how much room we still have on various credit cards to buy food after paying bills. Eternal debt slavery is becoming extremely common.
It's not abject poverty, its just dire circumstances for a huge number of everyday folk.
Okay and what exactly do you get for that income? What are the material outcomes for having a "higher" income than Germany? Because I know very few people that would openly choose to live in Mississippi versus Germany.
The GP claimed that 50% of the US lives in abject poverty. Mississippi our poorest state compares with Germany in terms of median income and Mississippi itself does not suffer from 50% rate of abject poverty. So by extension the US as a whole doesn’t suffer from a 50% rate of abject poverty (begging, trinket selling, selling off relatives, shitting in public, etc.) rates of abject poverty. That’s stuff you’d see in the Great Depression or Weimar Germany level stuff.
Okay so thank you for avoiding the question, once again what does a higher income in the southern US get you that people in Germany don't have?
People want healthcare, they want cheaper housing, they want high quality jobs, they want lower crime. Material outcomes absolutely matter and there is zero evidence to suggest that "high incomes" in the US translate to anything except more blood for corporations to extract.
Per Wikipedia, in 2018:
* Median household income in Mississippi: $44,717
* Median wage in Germany: €5,370 per month, equals $73,565.
So even the individual median wage in Germany is more than 50% higher than the median household income in Mississippi.
Sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_European_countries_by_... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...
Yes, but German society is structured to require much less energy, just as Dutch society is structured to use much less land.
If you put Germans whose lives function in a US-style, even just getting to work will be a huge drag.
Misery depends on the structure of society. Here in Sweden I can walk to work. This means that I'm spending zero money on travel to work, and that my travel to work contributes $0 to Swedish GDP. But this is actually better than if Swedish GDP were higher and I was traveling by car.
This is one way in which GDP can be extremely misleading.
>Here in Sweden I can walk to work.
That's you. but nobody In Sweden drives to work?
I see walking to work as an relative to each individual and their job lcoatiopna dn circumstance of where they live, not a country related thing.
For example, ,ost of my jobs in EU that me and my gF had required a car to get to work because companies put their offices out in the boonies to save money so walking was not an option, and neither was public transport.
> But this is actually better than if Swedish GDP were higher and I was traveling by car.
GDP growth "experts" would disagree. It's the reason we don't have mandatory WFH for white collar jobs after Covid proved it's possible and salves the environment
>That's you. but nobody In Sweden drives to work?
A smaller fraction than in the US. I think most people I know drive.
>I see walking to work as an relative to each individual and their job lcoatiopna dn circumstance of where they live, not a country related thing.
Well, it isn't. It's about how walkable environments are.
>GDP growth "experts" would disagree. It's the reason we don't have mandatory WFH for white collar jobs after Covid proved it's possible and salves the environment
Well, they may disagree, but the whole point is the goal of society isn't GDP, since GDP is easy to game with things like creating situation where people are effectively forced to waste energy, drive to work-- that sort of thing.
>but the whole point is the goal of society isn't GDP
Then why are people(westerners mostly) bullying Japan for stagnant GPD growth and refusing mass migration to boost their GDP?
This just demonstrates that there is something wrong with the statistics.
Sorry but you’re smoking crack if you don’t think quality of life is deteriorating in the US. The anxiety and misery is literally palpable.
"Abject poverty" is currently defined as living on less that $3 a day and dealing with things like chronic hunger and exposure.
The best approximation would be the homeless population in the US (about 500k people), but even then most homeless would not even qualify.
"Half" is a gross exaggeration.
The homeless number under estimates people with unstable housing that aren’t on the streets.
I assure you that when your basic housing and nutrition are uncertain and missing even a few days of income will result in cascading effects of hunger and homelessness, the underlying stress is overwhelming.
It doesn’t have to be this way, we don’t let bullies steal all the toys on the playground and destroy the very ecosystem that they want to have fun in, why are we letting capital accumulate in the hands of the most effective capitalists at the risk of destroying the very markets that let them succeed.
I say that as a capitalist, if we lose the system because we allow unchecked Monopoly and wealth concentration, we won’t get it back.
I agree with all those things, but if we start making up numbers and definitions we're at risk of undoing actual progress.
Maybe it feels good to say "actually everyone is a victim of capitalism", but it muddies real necessary work when it comes to determining whether to prioritize how resources need to be allocated between a disabled person living on the streets vs a graduate student who is currently just a little underwater on their credit card payments.
That’s a reasonable perspective. I would ask though, whether the fear of muddying the discussion is weaponized to create the impression of complexity, a broad range of intractable causes that lead to the conclusion that any solution is futile. The forces that benefit from the status quo deploy this quite effectively
What's your definition of "abject poverty"?
I find it hard to believe that half the US would meet the criteria for any reasonable definition.
The BLS and Federal Reserve both have data showing that the median American household has >$1,000 left over every month after all ordinary expenses, including housing, healthcare, and iPhones.
Any definition of "abject poverty" that includes a comfortable lifestyle and $12-15k excess income every year is not a serious definition.
>and half of the US is living in abject poverty
Source? All the ones I know of use questionable methodology like: "being able to afford a 2 bedroom apartment at median wage".
Out of curiosity, what is your expected baseline of what the average person and family in the US should be able to afford?
"should" is a pretty woolly concept. "should" we have to work at all? UBI proponents don't think so, and that apparently that has 45% support. What's hopefully obvious is that not being able to afford a 2 bedroom apartment at median wage is a far cry from "abject poverty".
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2020/08/19/more-amer...
I mean fair, but not relevant?
I'm asking you the question because a statement like 50% of [population] is making a claim to some notion of what they expect society to look like
you introduced the benchmark "not being able to afford a 2 bedroom apartment at median wage", though I would expect a modern day society that makes any claim to be wealthy to be able to have above 50% of it's population to be able to support something like that as that would indicate they can support a small family
You're saying that's not a good benchmark, so I'm trying to understand:
1) Do you have a different benchmark?
2) Is your key complaint that being unable to own a 2 bedroom house doesn't mean that individual or family is in "abject poverty"? In which case fair, though I would ask what does mean abject poverty for you?
It seems like you're saying 2, but I want to be sure
>In which case fair, though I would ask what does mean abject poverty for you?
The exact number is heavily contested[1], so I know better than to provide my own. That said, the official poverty lines are a pretty good place to start, and it's pretty safe to say is that whatever the line for "abject poverty" actually is, "2 bedroom apartment on 1 person income" is pretty far away from that. That claim doesn't require me to provide a specific poverty line.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States#M...
> All the ones I know of use questionable methodology like: "being able to afford a 2 bedroom apartment at median wage".
Well, that's (at minimum) what you need to raise a family and replace yourself in the labor pool.
That's a laudable goal, but hardly "abject poverty"
In addition to that being obviously different from the line to “abject poverty”, it’s not at all obvious that a single median income should be able to support a 4-person family in a 2BR apartment or else the system is completely broken…
> it’s not at all obvious that a single median income should be able to support a 4-person family in a 2BR apartment or else the system is completely broken
Either the Western world allows people the financial and real estate resources to have children in the next 5 years or we're all fucked. The tail end of the boomers enters retirement in 10 years and while millennials can take care of the boomers, eventually we will need to be taken care of, and for that millennials need to have children now as long as we still can.
Biology requires two people for the system to work.
Economics could as well and the system would still work.
In the 1950s Americans were doing a good job at replacing themselves in the labor pool, and household size was larger and houses were smaller.
Why is it impossible for Americans to live with 300 sq ft per person like baby boomers did as kids, but now we must live with 600+ sq ft per person?
> Why is it impossible for Americans to live with 300 sq ft per person like baby boomers did as kids, but now we must live with 600+ sq ft per person?
Because the American suburbia developers want some nice chunky profits. It isn't enough any more to sell glorified matchsticks and cardboard.
Because margins on building smaller housing is lower so nobody with capital is investing in it. The same reason the US doesn't build cheap commuter cars, nobody with money to invest is investing their money on such a slim margined product with no windfall conditions.
Someone should inform all of the poor children being born and raised everywhere in USA and earth that they need a 2 bedroom apartment to exist, actually
Can you define “abject poverty”?
The United States doles out >$30K/year in welfare spending for each person (not household, each person) under the poverty line. And that's just HUD/SNAP/Medicaid. The idea that any significant portion of the US is living in "abject poverty" (let alone half!) is hysterical in every sense of the word.
The poverty rate in the US is 10%.
https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2025/demo/p60-28...
It's actually far better than that! When people hear "poverty rate", they think "the percentage of people living in poverty". That's not what the census data on poverty is reporting, though. The census data is based on income only. It excludes in-kind welfare (Food Stamps, HUD, and Medicaid) and even excludes some welfare that is paid out in cash (like refundable tax credits). In other words, the census data is reporting that 10% of Americans earn under the poverty line. The number living under the poverty line is far, far lower.
> half of the US is living in abject poverty while quality of life for everyone is decreasing.
The 350 million Americans looking at the top of the US economy and crying need to turn around and take a look at what's behind them.
There are something like 7 billion people behind them, worse off.
This isn't relevant to this discussion. You're welcome to go complain on a message board in Mumbai about wages in the US.
It absolutely is relevant to the discussion. Many Americans are ungrateful and envious of the Americans wealthier than them, in spite of the fact that their own living standards are still far far better than the majority of humans on the planet. And some of those hypocritically think that the wealth of richer Americans belong to them, but would never consider giving their own wealth to people across the globe who are poorer than them.
The people who want money from people richer than them never want to give up their own to the people who look to them with the same eyes.
That is a false claim. Voting for taxation to support the less wealthy is almost a defining feature of what it means to be 'left'. Voting for taxation to support international aid and outreach and healthcare is very common. The 'left' supporting colonial- and war reparation payments is common. Donating money to charity, tithing, nationally and internationally is common across the board.
> "from people richer than them"
You may want to spend some time reflecting on where that money came from. How much lobbying and market manipulation, employee abuse, bullying, exploitation, wage theft, government (taxpayer-funded) grants and infusions of cash, bribery, corruption, dark patterns, law-breaking were involved, and how much tax avoidance and evasion was involved.
"Listen folks, it's no big deal if you can't afford rent or to purchase a house. Ignore my vacation homes in Aspen, Jackson Hole and Nantucket. Just think about how much better you have it than the people in Haiti and get back to work!"
> purchase a house.
This is a functionaly unmovable number. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RHORUSQ156N
> you can't afford rent
Because we as a society have drastically changed how we use housing: https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2023/06/more-than-a-q... -- Multi generational housing was a thing. Having roommates was a thing... the premise of "golden girls" would be lost to a modern audience, because cohabitation is dead. The premise of "bosom buddies" would get canceled for its insensitivity, but no one would understand because boarding houses are all but gone.
Building every one in the world an American style house, would cripple the globe. Concrete, Sand, Copper, Wood are going to become massive problems long before we get close to getting the job done.
> Ignore my vacation homes in Aspen, Jackson Hole and Nantucket.
You think that vacation homes are causing the housing crisis? Are eroding wages elsewhere? The industry of these locations is TOURISM, and a fair bit of it is international. (Not Nantucket).
It's not like whaling is going to make a comeback to make Nantucket a viable place to live again.
> Just think about how much better you have it than the people in Haiti and get back to work!"
Plenty of Americans look at musk and say "lets eat the rich" ... the problem is that the rest of the world has those same hungry eyes for us.
It can be both. Look at the stress hormones people live with. Look at other stats like rising infant mortality, dropping IQ etc.
> Look at the stress hormones people live with.
https://research.senedd.wales/research-articles/poverty-and-...
Does being poor cause mental health issues, or are mental heath issues a cause of poverty... The answer here clearly better access (read free) to mental heath care, and it wont have the impact one would think (see the UK data).
> Look at other stats like rising infant mortality
You mean the attributions tied directly to maternal complications: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/vsrr/vsrr033.pdf
The thing is we changed how we collect this data, to something that would be considered bad: https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2024/03/13/maternal-mo... - There are tons of criticism on how we collect this data, they are valid, if you dont like this source, find another its a mess of our own creation.
> dropping IQ etc.
The largest root cause is that people spend too much time on their cell phone dumbing themselves down. Think about that one... no one feels the need to elevate themselves, they are happy to spend time on what amounts to leisure. Would you have sympathy for the person who gets fired cause they chose to play 18 holes of golf 5 days a week rather than do their job?
You seem to be arguing that people are poor because they have mental health issues or are otherwise to blame.
The first article you site contradicts that position.
I would also argue that regardless of the cause, society should provide mechanisms to take care of people. Just like we don’t blame people for crop failures, hurricanes, fires or other catastrophic health issues, and instead have insurance, fire departments, etc. poverty is a consequence of social policies. We should strive to create social policies that have less inequality because they are more stable, safe and consistent with what everyone would want if they didn’t know what role they would occupy.
This is like an abusive parent saying "Stop crying or I'll give you something to really cry about."
> half of the US is living in abject poverty
Anyone who believes this has absolutely no concept of what abject poverty looks like.
This is quickly going to devolve into 'nobody suffers unless their suffering as at least as bad as the worst suffering that exists', so let's just go ahead and get that out of the way and move on to something less pointless.
Have you looked up the definition of abject poverty? It is "the most severe and hopeless form of human deprivation". It's the subject of the conversation, how is that pointless?
While you are able to look up someone's definition of abject poverty, the only definition that is relevant in this context is the one held by the author of the earlier comment. It is unlikely you can look up his definition (before he replies to those who have asked for the definition in force).
> the only definition that is relevant in this context is the one held by the author of the earlier comment.
This is absolute nonsense. We use common language to refer to common things in understandable ways in order to communicate with each other. You don't get to just handwave baldly incorrect statements as "well maybe he just has a different personal definition" without basically rendering literally all conversation moot and pointless.
"Yeah, I know he said 2+2 is 5, but you don't know he defines 5" is just as patently silly.
> We use common language to refer to common things in understandable ways in order to communicate with each other.
Common doesn't mean ever-present. In practice, it is impossible for everyone to converge on a shared understanding for all terms. There are provably many people in the world who have never even heard the term "abject poverty" before. They cannot possibly understand what the term means to you. Fundamentally, "abject poverty" can only mean in that comment what the author believes it means. That may overlap with your understanding, but it also may not. We can also prove that he is not a mind reader and thus cannot tune it to your understanding. He is limited to his understanding and his understanding alone.
A good faith actor who believes there may be a discrepancy in understanding will seek clarification. That is what a discussion forum is all about. If one does not want to participate in discussion, why be here?
If only their definition matters then their only purpose in this thread is to derail the conversation, or in other words railroad everyone else out because only they can be right.
People responding reject that, because if you're not being specific, you're not making an argument, you're just here to be an asshole.
Since you've made this point, I've gone ahead and reported that comment.
> because only they can be right.
Suppose their definition for abject poverty is: having an income equal to or below the median income. Yes, they would be right. Is it a problem that they are right?
However, you would also be right in agreeing that having an income equal to or below the median income equates to half the population, so you are wrong to think that only they can be right. Of course, that assumes you have used my definitions for these terms and not your own. It is likely that, once we are updated with your definitions, that you were right all along. What are your definitions for the terms you have used?
That's the beauty of discussion. You don't need to guess. You can ask!
It's not about being pointless, it's just plain wrong.
The median (not average) household income in the US is 80K USD. p25 is 40K. p10 is 20K. They're struggling, sure.
But I wouldn't call that abject poverty.
> But I wouldn't call that abject poverty.
But you could. There is no law of the universe that is going to stop you. Words are something randomly made up by humans.
> it's just plain wrong.
Again, words are completely made up, so it can't really be wrong in the traditional mathematical sense. It could be misinterpreted, perhaps. Of course that is dependent on how you've chosen to randomly make up "wrong".
I know it's against the rules, but oh my this reminds of me a certain other popular forum site in its heyday.
Yes, it is nice that there are still glimmers of the good old days of the internet.
GP could have just said "poverty" and the vast majority of unconstructive discussion that has followed could have been avoided.
Instead they said "abject poverty" as an emotional emphasizer, and people rightly called them out.
Yep. A lot of such people use words in order to elicit the reaction a legitimate use of said words would get, because they don't want the usually more muted reaction/attention using the correct word would get.
If you’re only complaint is the word “abject”, I encourage you to try to live on anywhere from $7 to $15 an hour, in a part-time job that doesn’t guarantee week to week how many hours you’ll get.
That is a very common reality.
My room mates all lived on slightly above minimum wage with part time hours. They were not in abject poverty. They were just plain poor. They still had cars, phones, video games, food, water, shelter. They each had an ACA plan heavily subsidized and probably were eligible for other welfare but didn’t use it as far as I am aware.
Do that for your entire life with no advancement. Do that with kids. Do that with elderly parents. Do that until you can’t physically work.
The range of human experience is longer and broader than being a 20 something single young person
If you remove the word abject, the argument is:
> half of the US is living in poverty
This statement is also false.
> I encourage you to try to live on anywhere from $7 to $15 an hour
That's the bottom quintile, not the bottom half. The Median household income is $83,730, which would be more like $41.50.
[Citation needed]
dozerly. "We have one of the worlds most prosperous economies, and half of the US is living in abject poverty while quality of life for everyone is decreasing." Hacker News, 30 Jun. 2026, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48734916
the top 1% have nearly as much income as the bottom 80%
https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/distr...
>the top 1% have nearly as much income as the bottom 80%
>link for "Distribution of Household Wealth in the U.S. since 1989"
income =/= wealth
I don’t think that makes the argument you think it does. Wealth concentration is even more extreme.
The point is that his original claim is either incorrect, or is not supported by the source he cited.
That doesn’t logically follow. If the claim is 1% control 80%.
And the counter argument is wealth is different than income the implication is that wealth inequality is 1) lower than income inequality and 2) more important for some unspecified reason.
But if wealth inequality is more extreme then that means 1% control GREATER than 80% of wealth. So point 1 is false. And point 2 is most likely irrelevant because greater concentration likely means whatever harm from one category would track the other category
Bigger picture truths don't justify smaller picture lies.
The linked view of the chart is distributed by income percentile, the title is "Wealth by income percentile"
>The linked view of the chart is distributed by income percentile, the title is "Wealth by income percentile"
That's still measuring wealth, not income. The correct statement to draw from the chart is that top 1% by income have nearly as much wealth as the bottom 80%.
the only difference is whether or not its realized, no? they're using wealth to avoid that
It's amazing how few people are willing to admit there is a problem. Spend 45 minutes driving around the state I live in talking to random people and it's painfuly obvious this is reality that some. I suppose it's mostly epstein sympathizers who are pushing the narrative that everything is perfect and nothing needs to be done.