Poverty, hard work, and the odds

[nancylebov]

There've been some recent discussions of working one's way out of poverty, with a lot of specific life stories and anger all around. What I haven't seen is any discussion of the odds. If a person who starts out poor is frugal, works hard, and gets an education, what are the odds of them making themselves stably not poor?

It seems reasonable that the frugality/hard work/education strategy is the best one, and it clearly works some of the time, but it isn't obvious how much luck (whether good luck or lack of devastating bad luck) is needed for a successful outcome.

Comments

[madfilkentist]

There are a lot of variables to pin down before you can answer the question. Are you asking just about the US, or more generally? (Upward mobility will vary significantly between countries, and probably even between parts of the US.) You can probably define "poverty" using the poverty-line criterion, and "education" as getting a high school diploma, but quantifying frugality and hard work will be a real pain.

[tashadandelion.livejournal.com]

Sounds like the makings for a Ph.D. dissertation in economics or sociology or anthropology and the like... and about five follow-up books too. :^)

[heron61.livejournal.com]

Given the relatively low degree of social mobility in the US, and the strong incentives to get out of poverty, I'm fairly certain luck plays a very large role in getting out of poverty. Hard data on the actual odds would be useful. I'm betting that most people who try fail due to lack of sufficiently good luck, but w/o data that's difficult to back up.

[sterlingspider.livejournal.com]

A large part of the problem is getting access to the means to that education. You can be as frugal and hardworking as you want but if you're 8 years old and stuck in an area which doesn't provide you even the most basic of educations with parents that don't care or are too disadvantaged themselves to make an effective difference you're pretty well stuck. The way you comport yourself counts for so very very much in this country and if you're not given the tools to express yourself well upward mobility can be nigh on impossible.

There's a really good recent discussion of the illusion of the elbow grease version of the American dream here

[bradhicks.livejournal.com]

I've never seen a good study on the question. And when I stopped to try to design a study that would answer that question, I realized why.

First of all, you'd need it to be a large longitudinal study. That gets expensive already, before you add any other complications. Everybody agrees that really big lifetime longitudinal studies are the gold standard in social and medical science, but they cost so much they're very hard to fund.

Then comes the real complicating factor: defining your variables. How are you going to define "frugal"? Who decides? When your subject says they worked hard in school and got the best grade they could and stayed in as long as they could, are you going to take their word for it, or second-guess them? Same question, when they say they got the best job they could and worked as hard as they could?

Fundamental to the mindset that blames the poor for their poverty is that if you're ungenerous, you can always say that the people who didn't make it could have done more and didn't, so it's their own fault for not having done so. And how are they going to prove you wrong?

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

Yeah, posts about Shepard were a major reason I raised the question.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

And while you're doing your longitudinal study, conditions may well be changing.

Even if a formal study isn't possible, getting some sense of whether the odds are more like 2/3 chance of success or 1/10 would be useful.

Here's a way to look at the effort question: study people who've worked their way out of poverty, then see how many people who are working about that hard and have comparable backgrounds but are still poor.

[sterlingspider.livejournal.com]

People like Shepard seem to think that the ghettos are full of Eliza Dolittles just waiting for the right elocution lessons and buck up attitude to get a leg up and be a Proper Lady(tm).

But I have to wonder if he read the same story I did, or just stuck with the Hollywood version of the story.
People like Shepard would lead us to believe that his experience shows that the Henry abilities were really there inside all of us all along (cue eighties movie revelation music), but what he's missing is that the whole plot of the story was that as much as Henry tried to make Eliza into this perfect creature of his creation, Henry NEVER understood her and furthermore never respected her as a real person. In the book she points out quite eloquently that rather then the "step up" he thought he was giving her, in reality he viewed her as little better then a trained animal to take or leave as he wished.

But at least in the end of that all condescending bastard or no she had the benefit of her lessons. Who exactly is going to be Henry Higgins to every one of those starving undereducated kids who supposedly have so much going for them?

One has to wonder how "uplifting" Shepard's experience would have been if he started from here instead of from good health, a backup credit card, a bachelors, and the knowledge that he can hit the big red button and end the experiment any time he wants.

[sterlingspider.livejournal.com]

There's also the part where you will never be funded to run a longitudinal study of that nature and not offer support to the people that need it (in the form of therapy and resources for things like womens shelters, drug and alcohol abuse, and education resources) thereby destroying the whole point of studying the group in situ int he first place.

[dcseain.livejournal.com]

In my HS class of 430 people, to my knowledge, 3 were from families on welfare, and maybe 12% came from poorer parts of the region. Today, 23 years after we started there, i doubt the percentage from welfare homes has changed too much, even though they account for income in the admissions process. If we allow that i knew of 3, so there might have been 10, that's 10 students out of, at the time, about 65,000 who were able to get into the free, public, magnet school and get a HS education worthy of being listed on a resume.

I am in contact with several of those people today, and they are as successful as the any of the rest of us. They probably give more of their income to their families than i do, though, as they started with a lot less than we had.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

Thanks, though it might be worth noting that the vast majority of people can't be a lot smarter than average.

[velvet-wood.livejournal.com]

Bad luck can set it back, but if the determination is there, it can't kill it permanently -- just add time to it. Attitude, IMO, is everything. If you're waiting on 'something' to happen, or someone to bail you out, it won't happen, period. But if you always acknowledge your mistakes as _yours_ and you always look for your own faults (not to mope about them or self-flagellate, but to see what you can do to either fix them or cope around them), then you'll eventually make it. You don't have to have some huge spurt of good luck, though it would help, of course. You just have to be able to ride out the waves of bad-luck and wait around for things to climb back up to 'normal'.

However, one caveat -- there is one way in which I think luck plays a huge part in the process, and that would be in deciding location. If you're born someplace like, say New Orleans.... or you, like Shalon and I did, find yourself living there when your skills are in no way related to the tourist or entertainment industry, then you're screwed. Because coming up with the money to move is impossible when you don't even actually have the money for day-to-day living*. Or at least it seems so at the time, because all you do is work and you're so beat down you can't honestly imagine that it would be that much better someplace else. Turns out it _was_ that much better elsewhere, but it took me nearly dying and needing to be transferred to a different hospital (one that wasn't, you know, killing me?) for us to realize that.

Shay'd reached the top of the computer geek field where we were... pretty much as far as he could go, and he was making a 'huge' $22K a year (and that really _was_ huge for New Orleans... majority of people there made less unless they were the 'old money' crowd or a lawyer) with, of course, no benefits. No benefits, no overtime, no holiday pay, no prospect for advancement -- and this was such a good job he dropped out of his college classes to take it, because he couldn't get better even with a degree in that area. However, when I got transferred to an East Texas hospital, he started desperately looking for jobs nearby... and found one, doing tech support (ie, _low_ end of the geeky totem pole)... for $44K, benefits, paid vacation, free training and certification (IBM and Cisco), time and a half, and all that good shit, plus relocation costs and they found him an apartment that was a block from where he worked and handled the paperwork for him.

We've never been "counting pennies for gas" broke again.... though the tech crash after 9-11 left him unemployed on an off and on basis for about 18 months (around 10 months of downtime), but luckily I was still able to work, barely, at that time, and he got max unemployment benefits, so we managed to keep house, utilities (though there were a couple of times when they got turned off because the checks just didn't come in fast enough), food, and even both cars.** Eventually, my physical limitations had become bad enough that they were a serious impairment, and sheer pain resulted in me missing just too damned many days, and I got fired, but by that time he'd started working again and we were still okay.

It's been a lovely uphill glide since then, and his current workplace is wonderful. They really seem to value their skilled employees (and he is very, very _good_ at what he does), and their benefits are simply amazing. He could happily stay with this company for the rest of his life, and it would honestly take at least a 25% pay-boost plus equivalent benefits for us to even consider any other offer made to him.

Granted... Michael's (the craft-store chain) was one place he was looking before he got this job, and their benefits were even more fucking amazing, and they had a challenging, interesting job-environment for their geeks... so if need ever arises, we'll be looking there first. I hope it doesn't though. He's happy here, and his job is such that he can spend all week doing what he's paid to do, and then... he comes home on the weekend and is perfectly capable of doing the exact same sort of thing sheerly for his own amusement. IMO, that's the very _definition_ of a good job, you know? :)

--Vel

forgot to actually put _in_ the footnotes, duh.

[velvet-wood.livejournal.com]

*I don't mean "man, we spent too much on beer and now we can't go out friday, this sucks." I mean "Okay, we've got a 2 lb bag of rice and 1 lb of ground turkey to last us two weeks. $0.30 for an onion will make it a bit more palatable, but it means that even if it's flooding straight down you have to walk instead of take the bus to work, sorry honey."

And who can ever forget playing Musical Utilities -- "Well, it's 98F and 100% humidity, and since I'm a bazillion months pregnant, the heat is making me want to die. We can eat our Ramen dry, and I have the venison jerky my daddy sent us that gets me the protein for the baby, so we don't need the stove this month... we'll pay the electric and let the gas go. Now, lessee... water... baby, do you think you could do with sponge-baths from a bucket for a while? The neighbors said I could use their hose..."

**via my rather amazing skill at juggling a budget -- I can make $2000 worth of income cover $3500 worth of bills for a good six months, when I have to... it all has to be paid _eventually_, but I can buy time like you wouldn't _believe!_ :)

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

A lot has to do with family. Poor people who are encouraged and supported by their families to seek good education and jobs can do quite well, while even middle-class people who are raised and supported poorly (and by "support" I'm talking both about economic and social factors) often do poorly.

This goes a long way toward explaining the relatively high success rate of Jewish-Americans in the mid-20th century, and of East Asian Americans in the late 20th to early 21st.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

Bad luck can set it back, but if the determination is there, it can't kill it permanently -- just add time to it. Attitude, IMO, is everything.

That's the kind of claim I'm interested in. You made it through determination and some mixed luck (getting forced out of New Orleans).

It's a hard claim to test. Have all the people you know who were doing hard work and determination reasonably well gotten out of poverty? Did you stay in touch with enough of them to have a good sample?