You Don't Batch Cook When You're Suicidal (2020)

That's one big paradox.

Coming from poverty, I work with plenty of talented people, but nowhere as talented as the people I've studied in shitty schools.

Now most of those people from my poverty times continue to be poor, because of many problems poverty brought to them. I can clearly see that, and that I was the lucky one to find a way up many times.

Yet, my new social circle believe that I'm talented because of my DNA and efforts, and blame others for their poverty.

But I know that those people making "poor" decisions in the view of riches are actually just trying to survive. With themselves, with the baggage they carry, and to the fact that they weren't as lucky as me.

Talent, intelligence is literally everywhere. People that are awesome and ambitious is abundant.

Nobody is really much better than others, but America post-ww2 managed to sell this idea to everyone, including many really smart and talented folks, that think they are gifted.

To sum up, nobody chooses to be poor and humanity could progress faster if we focused instead in eliminating poverty, creating more possibilities for everyone...

Than believing almost trillionaries will guide us to where we need it.

Some people are indeed much better. Anyone who played sports as a kid understands this. Huge differences are immediately apparent in small children. But generally, I agree that, for most life tasks, the differences between people are not enormous. Humanity could do a much better job eliminating poverty. In the future, we may view enormous disparities in wealth as evil as we do racism today.

Better at sports .. but I bet there's a fairly even distribution between people who have money and don't.

In the future, we may view enormous disparities in wealth as evil as we do racism today.

A lot of people already do.

And a lot of people would be very wrong. There’s a floor to survivability, below which you can’t keep yourself alive, but there is no ceiling. If everyone is above the floor, there’s no reason for concern about those looking for the ceiling.

In the future we’ll pull people up to the floor, but that doesn’t require attaching a ceiling. The will never be a successful society that substantially punishes achievement above a certain point.

Depends how much the people at the top (money-wise) are playing zero-sum games. If they are, to a large extent, engaging in asset acquisitions and passive growth of eg real estate, or monopolistic protectionism, then there’s plenty of room for others to engage in activities with positive externalities instead.

There’s no question a lot of people don’t get the opportunity to pursue their niche passions and drives, based on a bad birth lottery ticket. There’s a lot of wasted potential in countries that reduce aperture of the early success funnels.

The issue is, a lot of the people at the top engage in business practices that actively disenfranchise people at the bottom.

Their wealth actually comes from those people who have so little.

Stop peddling this absolute fabrication that there's unlimited wealth and the super rich should be left get richer still.

You're going to need to do a lot of work to demonstrate that wealth is zero-sum, as it doesn't comport with any well-respected economic model I'm aware of.

But even granting that, a government that creates a "survival floor" would protect against wealth-seeking in a world where it was zero-sum. The floor only needs to be high enough to allow people not to be held to the floor should they desire to participate in the accumulation of wealth and its ensuing benefits.

The whole point is to incentivize value creation.

Edit: You really won't like what this paper [0] has to say:

Globally, zero-sum thinking is associated with skepticism about the importance of hard work for success, lower income, less educational attainment, less financial security, and lower life satisfaction.

[0] https://scholar.harvard.edu/sites/scholar.harvard.edu/files/...

If the people who ran that study were really as smart as they pretend to be, as they are from Harvard, they would understand how even their own thoughts, the language they speak and so on, all happened because they were lucky.

Let me repeat to you, as you seem unable to read and comprehend what I have previously written, it can be reading comprehension issue, so I won't judge you negatively like Harvard, an elitist school would, here it is:

Talent is everywhere. It's abundant. There is an immense amount of hard-working people that even if they don't believe in "zero-sum", get nowhere. They still wake up every day early, work much harder than you ever will in your life, but are still in a shithole and this situation will stay as it is until they perish.

That study was done by one of the most well-known universities, full of privilege in a country that managed to have its reigns on the world for so long, an empire.

Let's think together. It would be strange if either the study or the University would conclude that people work really hard. And are as talented as the people able to attend Harvard, but because they were unlucky and that the world is unfair, they couldn't.

That would be a big counterargument to Harvard's selection process, it wouldn't feel it's a really deserving university, nor that the creator of the study is as good as he believes to be. Why would anybody want to pay for its overpriced curriculum that are literally books you could buy it at Amazon? I'm not saying it is all fake, but you can understand how much reputation is bought, not acquired.

You aren't special, nor the thought of zero-sum thinking is what creates poverty. People are drawn into those ideas, not because of stupidity, but lack of luck.

Stop pretending you have so much control of yourself and your thoughts, read more science and you'll see how all those conclusions you believe to be true are really naive.

They still wake up every day early, work much harder than you ever will in your life, but are still in a shithole

A sad fact about the world is that one can work hard and end up accomplishing very little for their effort. "Working hard" may be a necessary condition for pulling oneself out of poverty (or very near to one, at any rate), but it's not even close to being sufficient.

I would even argue that "working hard" is dying, if not already dead, as a means of escaping poverty in developed nations.

What matters substantially more is working "intelligently," which is even harder for those in poverty, given their lack of education.

I grant you all of this (for argument's sake). However, none of it actually addresses the merits of the "zero-sum" claim about capitalism or the claim that economic disparity will in the future be regarded in the same way as racism.

Also maybe I'm blind, but I don't think we've interacted before.

I'm sorry. I consider you either very sheltered from poverty, delusional or both.

I just gave you a long answer, now you have no excuse to complain, but I agree with lwhi. You can only be either of those, or both.

Why would anyone give heed to such a vague, unsupported claim? Would you care if an Internet stranger simply declared you, "sheltered from poverty or delusional" without offering any explanation at all?

Both activities happen in the same economy. Zero-sum or negative-sum activities are plenty. Asset speculation is one such area where the first, second and third order effects are all completely useless to society as a whole, and lack meaningful externalities. Yet people invent the most far-fetched fairy tales to explain why golden handcuffing the brightest math and physics phds to work for hedgies/hfts is a critical piece of human progress.

The truth is markets work great for some things and terrible for other things. When you make a means a goal you always end up with absurdity, in any system.

That's not true; speculation is the absorption of risk, an immensely useful financial tool. For example, farmers require speculators to secure guaranteed revenue from crops. Landlords create (yes, they create) housing for people who can't afford to purchase homes by ensuring capital flow into housing construction, among other things.

Investors take on risk in exchange for additional reward. The upside is the people who can't afford the risk have safe ways to protect themselves.

The issue is, a lot of the people at the top engage in business practices that actively disenfranchise people at the bottom.

In an ideal world, we could first ban those practices, and only resort to punitive wealth/income taxes [1] if/when those measures fail to resolve the problem. The problem is regulatory/legislative capture by the wealthy. But I have doubts wealth caps would solve that - organizations such as WIPO or the BSA don't need multi-billionaire members to lobby effectively. A wealth cap would just multiply the number of shareholders.

[1] In the sense that they are intended to prevent ultra-richness, instead of merely filling government budget shortfalls from the pockets of those who can most afford it.

You're wrong.

Fundamentally it requires redistribution and a complete change of mindset.

A shallow dismissal is less valuable than an excellent critical comment. Please share with me (and others) what's wrong with my thinking. I'm trying to be transparent about my reasoning in child comments, so hopefully, you will have enough to work with.

a shallow dismissal is less valuable than an excellent critical comment

An excellent critical comment is wasted on a shallow argument… your thinking assumes that reaching beyond the metaphorical ceiling doesn’t require standing atop those still struggling to reach the metaphorical floor… it absolutely and necessarily does. Worse, you seem to think that reaching for means that vastly outstrip your need is somehow noble. It isn’t… it’s pathetic.

If Jimmy turns a piece of wood and some graphite into a pencil, he has created value. That didn't require exploiting the lumberjack or the miner. Jimmy did not steal value from either. He created value by inventing a new way for their raw materials to be useful to other people. Jimmy didn't need to "stand atop" anyone to do this.

What's "pathetic" are the ad hominems and insults the people in this thread have to resort to when they can't argue like adults. You're not right because you're angry, and you weaken your advocacy by trying to use your frustration as leverage over people giving reasoned arguments.

If Jimmy only ever prototyped the pencil by collecting and working the wood and graphite himself then, sure, he didn’t exploit anyone… as soon as he went into business employing others to manufacture those pencils he started to. The moment he concentrated the means of pencil production in his own hands he started to exploit both his raw suppliers — that graphite miner’s health woes are the fruit of Jimmy’s demand — and his employees. In the end it was the people actually turning the raw materials into pencils that made the value; the invention added nothing until someone’s labour was exploited.

Jimmy didn't do any of those things. The claim was that Jimmy can't produce value, but he did.

And even so, the work the people making the pencils for Jimmy would not exist without Jimmy. Jimmy, in yet another way, provides value. Jimmy figured out to put the wood with the graphite, not them. Who actually does it is irrelevant; or are you suggesting that if Jimmy kept his operation entirely mechanical, that'd be better?

the work the people making the pencils for Jimmy would not exist without Jimmy

Apart from this example being overly reductive and not rooted in reality, the hypothetical Jimmy would eventually be replaced by someone else who would invent this pencil.

There is no truth that needs a single person to be uncovered. There are infinitely many people able to invent the pencil given enough tries and time. This also makes the argument of original thought not being original.

We are made and influenced by our surroundings and thus the ideas we form must necessarily be a product of those surroundings.

So, even if Jimmy had the idea to "invent" the pencil, he will not be the first one who did. He might be the first one with enough capital to execute (as in buy machines and factories, hire workers and exploit them for their labor and scale the business to planet-scale) and this is where it gets ugly.

You don't need to resort to extremely basic non-real world examples to show how capitalism works out when we live in a world full of capitalism.

Just because something seems like it _should_ be possible, doesn't mean that other worse consequences won't manifest.

That didn't require exploiting the lumberjack or the miner. Jimmy did not steal value from either. He created value by inventing a new way for their raw materials to be useful to other people. Jimmy didn't need to "stand atop" anyone to do this.

This is absolutely not where most of billionaires' wealth comes from. You are being naive if you think this is how they make money.

In the future we’ll pull people up to the floor, but that doesn’t require attaching a ceiling.

It absolutely does, right up until the exact future moment when EVERYONE is pulled up above (well above) the (bottom) floor. In other words no one should be at liberty to seek the ceiling until EVERYONE is out of the basement.

The will never be a successful society that substantially punishes achievement above a certain point.

There has never been a successful society that hasn’t.

Again, you rely on the utterly false notion of a "zero-sum" economy, when in fact it may only be possible to pull everyone out of poverty if we allow people to be proportionately rewarded for their contributions.

That _may_ be true (though the fact that we _have long_ allowed them such rewards and they certainly have not pulled everyone out of poverty seems to auger against that hypothesis) until you prove that conclusively, however, we should continue to proportionally tax them on their earnings.

"Prove conclusively" is not how any of this works.

In other words no one should be at liberty to seek the ceiling until EVERYONE is out of the basement.

Can you explain your reasoning?

The[re] will never be a successful society....

As I do hold degrees in the field studying this very question, may I kindly ask for your sources? Or, not being greedy here, reasons...?

I would bet entire dollars you'll hate this source, but here's one: "The Magnificent Progress Achieved By Capitalism: Is the Evidence Incontrovertible?" [0]

Here's a less insane one: "Comparative Economic Systems: Capitalism and Socialism in the 21st Century" [1]

Another one: "Economic Systems and Economic Growth" [2]

It's not really controversial in your field to claim that rewarding effort is a superior model to spreading out value evenly. The question is more of "to what extent" or even "what is achievement."

[0] https://www.jstor.org/stable/41560252

[1] https://www.bu.edu/eci/files/2021/08/Comparative-Economic-Sy...

[2] https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/87244/1/MPRA_paper_87244.pdf

What's un-controversial is claims like "There will never be..." are bullshit.

Quality contribution; thanks for commenting.

Same vibe here.

The ceiling is there because without it, a minority of people eventually acquire enough wealth and political power than comes from it, that it dominates entire society, to its detriment. Just look at Mexico or Ukraine as examples of what happens when there's no reasonable ceiling.

What ceiling are you talking about? AFAICT there is no earnings or wealth ceiling in the Western world, and there certainly isn't one in the United States.

I'm not really sure that "it's okay if the billionares have space palaces so long as the poor aren't literally dying" is the optimal economic philosophy.

Yeah seriously, it's pretty much standard at this point.

Some people are indeed much better. Anyone who played sports as a kid understands this.

Anyone with a little bit of nutritional knowledge knows that having a nutritious diet is a major part of athletic competitiveness. Poverty limits or eliminates the ability of a parent to provide nutritious meals.

There's certainly going to be a level of natural talent that exists, but everyone who comes from poverty are playing with major handicaps.

Poverty makes small children.

Genetics probably play the biggest role when it comes to natural abilities. Height, strength, explosiveness, body proportions, endurance.

This is inconsistent with the fact that average height has increased significantly over the last two centuries[1]. Our genes have not had time to change in that span, but our environment, including access to nutrients, has changed radically.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/human-height

Taller than average people are most successful in certain sport. Basketball, volleyball, etc

Shorter than average are very rare in most sports except for some niche positions.

gymnastics and olympic weightlifting actually both favor shorter statures.

Lots of top athletes come from either poor countries or from poverty within non-poor countries.

NFL teams are full of players who grew up in poverty and ate fast food and processed junk during the formative years of their lives.

There are a bunch of studies around the impact of poverty on athletics. Take this article with a bunch of them [1].

I'm not sure what point you are trying to make. Just because you can show that "hey, some poor people are awesome athletes" doesn't negate the fact that by and large you can predict who is even participating in sports based on their household income.

I'd also like to challenge you to provide numbers. What percentage of top athletes came from poverty? Not poverty nations, or cities, but actual poverty.

[1] https://journals.lww.com/acsm-csmr/fulltext/2021/09000/dispa...

I can also tell you I was homeless as a child and went to college on an athletic scholarship.

there's some truth here but it's being overblown.

the parents bear responsibility too, they are the ones responsible for feeding their kids. Poverty gets in the way, but poor parental choices and neglect share the blame. (I know personal responsibility is too passé these days, so sorry to bring up the topic).

And the time of the year you're born, too! Holy shiiit this fucked me up as a kid.

I always thought I was just "bad at sports," but I was born in August, so I was playing against a lot of kids who had up to like 11 months of development on me. That's _huge_ when you're a little kid.

A lot of those kids were "indeed much better." Because they were nearly a full year older!

Some people are indeed much better.

At what? I consider myself a quick thinker and generally high IQ. But my sister has a way of connecting with children that I will never be able to replicate.

So who is "much better"? And at what?

High IQ. I don’t believe in IQ but the commenters above are discussing inherent talents that our society chooses to reward.

Ps, I personally don’t find “I’m smarter than you but at least you can do X” to be a super comforting thing. I’m sure that comment makes sense in your context with your sister, but I definitely bristle whenever I read it. Smacks of prideful engineers & scientists trying to appear nice while still affirming their base insecurities about being superior to others.

But maybe all that’s just pedantic

I think the comment you're replying to has the same sentiment, ie who is to say what "talent" is better than any other

  but I definitely bristle whenever I read it. Smacks of prideful engineers & scientists trying to appear nice while still affirming their base insecurities about being superior to others.

Growing up, my sister had better grades than me and was tutoring me in math.

  inherent talents that our society chooses to reward

Society doesn't work if we can't raise children.

You just said it yourself, you are much better at abstract thinking, while your sister is much better at connecting with children.

I don’t think the OP was saying that most people are the same, he was saying that most people have talent. In your sports analogy think about the kid who might be good at wrestling but terrible at track. And vice versa. The worry is that more affluent people sub-consciously see themselves as “better” in a universal way. That is not too different then European aristocracies used to see themselves.

I don't believe there is a special part of your brain that allows you to be good at say chess, but leaves you with no potential in football (soccer). Of course some people are naturally faster than others or have a higher endurance peak but anything that involves working with your mind comes down to working memory (incredibly important), long term memory and spatial reasoning. That's why you will often see people talented at one thing change careers and still be successful. A good example is a Norwegian grandmaster who was also a national team football player: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simen_Agdestein

Also having good grades in math predicts having good grades across the board, including English.

My limited anecdata does not support this. The kids who are the best on my children's sport teams are the ones who play club sports in addition to the regular season, who go to sport camps and are on multiple teams. It's clear why they are better. They spend all their time not in class, playing or practicing.

Financially, we are at least peers to all these families that spend so much time on sports but we don't prioritize it the same way so my kids are mid level players.

Obviously genetic differences do account for some variability especially at the extremes. A 190cm sophomore is going to have an easier time on the basketball court than a 165cm kid.

I don’t think it is obvious how much is talent, and how much is sort of… path dependent or something. We enjoy doing things we’re good at in general, so we do them more, and get more practice as a result.

Huge differences among small children could be something as arbitrary as “this kid is just under a year older, and as a result 10% more mature,” or “this kid has played a similar sport.”

The correlation of IQ with income is 0.30[0]. Educational attainment is 0.32. So if you are intelligent (talented) or educated then you are statistically likely to have above average income. If you have both even more so.

[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01602... (https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.intell.2007.02....) page 5 table 1.

I didn't read the paper, but are we sure that A (wealth/education) follows B (IQ) and not vice versa?

We are almost sure that genetics (and perhaps nutrition) are the main determinants of IQ. We won't have a complete answer until most of the genes that affect intelligence are found. With regard to your specific question of if educational attainment is the main factor in causing IQ to increase, that would mean that everyone at high-school would have the same IQ because they all have the same educational attainment (inasmuch as what "educational attainment" means in this paper). Wealth of one's parents is a harder problem. I believe that it is not a significant contributing factor beyond not being malnourished. This is based on the fact that the average IQ of some poor countries is higher than the average IQ of some richer countries. But like I said a complete solution to this problem, or – more boldly – an answer that blank-slatists would have no choice but to accept, would involve a more complete understanding of the genetic component including most genes as well as relevant ncDNA sequences.

Genetics account for roughly half of the variation of intelligence between individuals.

That leaves a ton of room for other factors, such as nutrition, health, and education, to create significant disparities.

Do you have a source for that claim? Might you be misquoting a different popular statistic that g accounts for roughly have of intelligence between individuals? Or perhaps the figure that intelligence is about 50% heritable?[0] It is important to note that heritability of a trait and the extent to which a trait is genetically caused are not the same. It is possible for a trait to be eg. 80% caused by genetics and only 60% heritable, even on the average. This can be the case where the trait is defined by multiple genes (and non-coding DNA) where the proportion of the different genes matters and where specific combinations of genes are necessary. Also heritability of intelligence has been reported as higher than 75%.

[0] Eg. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-021-01027-y#Sec8

I pulled that number from this article and I am pretty sure I paraphrased it correctly: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-intelligence-h...

The article may be conflating genetics with other types of biological hereditability, (such as epigenetics?) however I think that is generally pretty common and fine in every lay conversations.

My subjective impression from the correlation studies that I have seen is that the remainder largely is a long list of purely negative factors - i.e. in the "nurture" stage there are many ways to screw up the development of children with a large impact, but limited ways to meaningfully improve it over the genetic 'baseline'.

I.e. the correlation of nutrition in IQ is mostly driven by malnutrition, not by differences between great nutrition and mediocre nutrition; the impact of parenting is heavily driven by the outlier cases of severe abuse or deprivation, not the differences between great parenting and mediocre parenting, the impact of peer groups is largely set by the minority of cases that result in severe addiction or gang membership, not the difference between lousy friends and great friends, etc - that's the pattern that I seem to see there.

Even if genetics is the "main determinant" what does that mean? Is it the the plurality of determinants? 51% correlation? 99%? Depending on the number, there's lots of room there for other factors.

I think you're oversimplifying with your example regarding educational attainment. The results say it's not a 1:1, so not all high school students would be marked the same, but it would mean that if you finished your post doc you're likely to score higher than someone who didn't complete grade 9. Would we argue that graduating high school or going on to do graduate work is simply as a matter of intelligence and not a more complex web of economic, social, and cultural factors?

I think you missed my point re. educational attainment. My point is that if education attainment only exists as a difference after high-school (for the most part). Therefore if "IQ follows educational attainment" IQ would be the same until after high-school. I do think wealth, nutrition and education have some effect on IQ. I do not know to what extent. You had asked if we are sure that IQ follows those other factors. To answer completely, IQ follows genetics as well as other factors, mainly genetics. I truly believe that this is a scientific question that can be answered with observation. I think in twenty years or less we will have cataloged most of the genes that affect intelligence and the nature vs. nurture argument will have a direct answer. (or, at least, the nature side of the equation will be mostly solved.) Currently the hardware to collect this data is expensive (Illumina machines are $1M last I checked) and the methods of analyzing the data are somewhat crude (eg. GWAS). As these two fronts advance more and more genes will be found until most of it is known.

If you control for socioeconomic status of the parents (which does have a big impact and definitely has to be controlled for, and is controlled for in every reasonable study), the socioeconomic status and educational attainment of the kids is still correlated with their IQ.

That's correlation at best (as you said, but worth emphasizing).

And IQ is a problematic metric for anything other than how good you are at taking IQ tests.

IQ measurement definitely has major flaws.. But IQ is better correlated with job performance than job interviews are.

As they say, perfect is the enemy of good. IQ tests are good. We do ourselves no favors by attempting to downplay what standardized testing tells us.

After a point, say 130 IQ, the differences between people's capacity become intangible. But there is certainly a big difference between someone under 80 IQ and someone with 130 IQ, which is why the US military doesn't even accept individuals under 80 IQ.

IQ tests are not exactly designed for poor people, eh?

Are they not? Most I've seen tend to be sorts of abstract pattern matching things. As opposed to basing IQ on ability to play piano or other traits less prevalent in poor communities.

Obviously nothing is perfect but it seems disingenuous to claim they're not designed for poor people to be able to complete them.

Since men make more money than women, does that mean men are smarter than women?

Hmmmmmmmm. Maybe statistics isn't the crystal ball it seems.

Coming from the middle class, I've never met anybody talented coming from a shitty school who didn't also get filtered into a gifted program at a good school. Maybe your school system just wasn't competent at filtering people?

Those that I know who have made bad life decisions (kids too early, dropping out of college, leaving extremely supportive parents) could totally have been expected to based off looking at GPA/SAT signals.

I've never met anybody talented coming from a shitty school who didn't also get filtered into a gifted program

I'm not sure I understand this one.. how would you know the gifted program missed them if they're now spending their life dealing with poverty? I'm guessing you don't mingle with the poors?

I've never met anyone that lives their entire life in the middle of a rainforest. So weird!

Also what the fuck is a gifted program lmao. That must be some London thing, aye? We were lucky to have teachers of the subject teaching the class up north haha

Gifted programs are American things. Talking to my California born partner it seems to be a kind of streaming thing. They don’t seem to have as much ability setting here as I was used to in UK (where for certain subjects classes are split by ability.)

Ahhh, gotcha. The focus on UK in the article and many comments put me in a UK-centric mindset. My bad there.

Aye we had splits in some subjects like that. Weirdly all the rich kids (for my town, mostly middle class really) were in the top classes and the poor kids in the bottom haha

Even if such programs exist and exceptionally talented people get filtered into them, it completely ignores the fact that there is still a huge disparity in outcome for people who are merely modestly above average.

many schools in the US will take the most gifted students and put them in advanced classes. They typically move faster.

In most poor countries, there isn't even such a thing as "gifted" programs.

And those that do, there's so much competition that people in deep poverty can never join it, you'd see mostly lower-middle class people.

Perhaps leave the US, travel for a while and you'll see that the average US life experience is very different in comparison to the rest of the world.

And to wrap up, a lot of gifted kids end up never having the opportunity to study in a school or environment that catapults them into any kind of gifted program.

Just be glad you were born American and start comprehending that you are lucky, but most of the world isn't. The best you can do.

I've never met

Quite.

I have a similar experience but have a different opinion.

I am 100% lucky that I was in the right place at the right time so that I could be offered the opportunities that I had.

But I think you have to be disciplined in that you must try and try and try to do everything in your power to put yourself in the right place. Of course, even if you do this, you might never be given the opportunity. But if you don't try, you _definitely_ won't.

Many of the people I grew up with did not do this. They had the ability to do it, but they lacked initiative or the ambition. They were complacent with what they had, even though it was very little.

Not everyone comes from an unbroken home, or had a support network to do these things - I get that. But I see many people that could do better and just don't do it for what I'd guess is because it's hard. Instead they make bad decisions that are easy and increase quality of life on the short term: racking up debt, having kids at a young age without a career, etc.

Do people not shoulder some of the blame in today's information age?

A lot of talented people try hard and end up in poverty.

Luck > any attribute (IQ, etc)

Strongly disagree. I went to an average school in Russia where I was from one of the poorest families, then hung out a few times with people from a selective maths focused school where I was invited but didn't go to because I was lazy, then later lived for a few years in a worse neighborhood and hung out with my neighbors (ranging from ex cons to people working construction and loading dock), and I've worked in tech obviously.

Sure there are better and worse people everywhere, but on average the more meritocratic the system, the more poor people suck! With the exception of immigrants who start from 0.

In completely non-meritocratic system like Soviet Union you could have people living next door to each other in similar conditions, who went to the same schools and had the same opportunities, and one would be a Physics professor and the other a raging alcoholic. A system where equality is not forced just sorts them better.

Many people are really much better than others at most things, including merely being a decent worker/friend/partner. And many are worse

These things are cultural and collective in nature, they're not the fault of any individual. "Poor people suck" in Russia and elsewhere because their upbringing has failed to educate them with the middle-class values that are the foundation of any genuinely prosperous society. (To be sure other things are important too, such as social cohesion and even some degree of egalitarianism.)

> humanity could progress faster if we focused instead in eliminating poverty, creating more possibilities for everyone...

Those with the wealth and the power to change this, don't have an interest in spreading out welfare and therefore making themselves less wealthy and powerful in the process, but enriching themselves or at least maintaining the status quo, and that usually comes at the expense of keeping those less fortunate where they are.

A lot of goods and services that we take for granted in the west, like commodities in our daily lives: cheap cocoa, cheap coffee, cheap exotic fruits, cheap sneakers and clothing, cheap electronic gadgets, all rely on an underclass of less fortunate people who have no choice in life but be prisoners in a neo-slavery system where they have to work in their given conditions for the give pay, with no way up or out.

Please google and check out the human exploitations going on in cocoa and coffee farming at your own discretion.

Do you think the kids and adults working on those farms for pennies in the beating sun and bitten by mosquitos, wouldn't rather do something else with their lives than picking coffee beans, like go to school/university and work in an office? But if we would spread welfare for them to have that choice, who would then choose work in those bad conditions for nothing to provide western consumers with cheap commodities? Robots aren't even remotely there yet. Same with mining minerals to make iPhones, PlayStations and EVs.

If we were to make their lives and jobs fair while also watching over the environment, then the price of commodities would explode, so the mega conglomerates who own these markets, like Nestle or Apple for example, would have to take a missive hit on their profits, or the western consumers would have to stomach the explosion in prices, or both simultaneously, neither of which are acceptable trade-offs in the west, so we keep the status quo of having to rely on perpetual underclasses of people slaving away in poverty for us, while pretending we're great humanitarians and benefactors.

I said "we" here, because it's not just the great evil billionaires like Bezos, Jobs, Saudis, and so many others who profit from and enable this exploitation, but also the western governments like US, Switzerland, Netherlands, etc. where they're HQ but have the audacity to lecture them on human rights and environment concerns, plus the individual shareholders, employees, taxpayers and consumers who enable them as well.

Sure, a lot of people in poor nations got out of poverty "thanks" to globalization and mega conglomerates outsourcing of less desirable manufacturing and services there, but let's not forget they didn't do this out of the goodness of their hearts, but to extract even more profits. People getting out of poverty was just a happy side effect.

Well said, I think we would be friends. Please send me an email at the link in my bio if you want!

It's hard to explain what life is like as a formerly very poor™ person to people who have never experienced it.

Like, every once in a while I get a craving for poverty comfort foods like ramen with frozen veggies, a slice of American cheese, and a sliced up microwaved hotdog.

Or trying to explain why it's so hard for me to let go of a 20 year old pickup truck that still works because I used to sleep in it.

Or how no matter how much money I earn now I always feel poor and one step away from homelessness.

How I won't go and buy new clothes, why I shop at thrift stores and pawn shops when I can afford new, how I don't feel like I own anything, why I always plan for and expect the worst out of every event and encounter I have, how I dedicate my self to working hard so that the places I work at can't "afford" to fire me, so much so that I have been accused of being an overworker and a slave driver.

On an income basis I'm probably at the top for my entire family right now, but years of homelessness and over a decade of extreme poverty have made their marks on my life and I don't know if it will ever get better. I could win the lottery and I'd still be cutting coupons and searching deal sites for discount codes, wearing discount clothes and shopping in pawn shops.

you can reprogram your brain.

Journaling and meditation have helped me a lot, and I've heard of others who have had success with therapy.

If these habits/accumulated traumas are causing you pain, know that there are ways to heal that. :)

Stephen Jay Gould said it best:

I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.

That is it. Just imagine. We would already have found all rules that govern our universe.

I agree with you, talent's abundant. Something is very badly wrong with our societies and economic systems if so much of that talent is in the mud and unusable.

Nobody is really much better than others

This took me several decades to grasp and then "forgive" myself for not being the person I wanted to be. I also think it is a message that is worth spreading, particularly among young folks.

It's quite easy to amalgamate the concept of meritocracy with that of success, such that a lack of the latter implies a lack of the former. This is (or, at least for me, it was) an endless supply of anxiety of pain, which is completely unfounded.

Everyone fails dozens of times before hitting on something good, it's just the nature of things. Some lucky people can just fail as much as they need to, while some other's can't even afford to try even once. I read this somewhere else and stuck with me, "people don't make better choices, they just have better choices".

Luck is the big differentiator.

https://theamericanscholar.org/the-disadvantages-of-an-elite...

A university professor's personal observations about how a typical city college student faces myriad obstacles to success with little support, whereas a typical student at an elite college must practically struggle to fall through all the safety nets and actually fail. The article should be required reading for anyone who is or has been in any way involved with a higher-tier university in the United States.

I think plenty of people are well aware of this. That's why parents insist for the best possible education for their children - they know that it's the credentials carried by the diploma, and not the child's actual talents (or lack or thereof) will decide the future quality of life of the child. Cue in tutoring, extensive paid college exam/SAT prep etc.

Associating wealth with discipline and virtue is a successful propaganda campaign with framing rooted in strict father / conservative worldview.

Per George Lakoff (full interview: https://newsarchive.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2003/10... )

The conservative worldview, the strict father model, assumes that the world is dangerous and difficult and that children are born bad and must be made good. The strict father is the moral authority who supports and defends the family, tells his wife what to do, and teaches his kids right from wrong. The only way to do that is through painful discipline - physical punishment that by adulthood will become internal discipline. The good people are the disciplined people. Once grown, the self-reliant, disciplined children are on their own. Those children who remain dependent (who were spoiled, overly willful, or recalcitrant) should be forced to undergo further discipline or be cut free with no support to face the discipline of the outside world.

So, project this onto the nation and you see that to the right wing, the good citizens are the disciplined ones - those who have already become wealthy or at least self-reliant - and those who are on the way. Social programs, meanwhile, "spoil" people by giving them things they haven't earned and keeping them dependent. The government is there only to protect the nation, maintain order, administer justice (punishment), and to provide for the promotion and orderly conduct of business. In this way, disciplined people become self-reliant. Wealth is a measure of discipline. Taxes beyond the minimum needed for such government take away from the good, disciplined people rewards that they have earned and spend it on those who have not earned it.

"And my main point is that poverty and privilege are largely accidental. You don’t choose to be born into an income bracket, a country pile, a housing estate, a double barrelled name or a damp tenement bedsit. But ignorance is a choice. And choosing to use your privileges to patronise people whose lives are entirely beyond your experience and comprehension, is a choice."

But ignorance is a choice.

No, it's not always a choice.

You might be born in a family and community that actively brainwashes their members and prevents you from coming into contact with conflicting information.

This can even be true in less severe circumstances, such as being bombarded with propaganda on social media, which essentially hacks your brain.

I had a friend from a rough upbringing who called it, "poverty mindset".

Eg you have a success in your life? Prepare to be shunned and thought of with disdain by your community.

It's good to be humbled.

Envy is far from a virtue.

We can't choose how other people behave. We can choose how we react to their behavior.

And what do we call it when somebody loses status, and are shunned and thought of with disdain by their community?

If it's because of their achievements ? Misplaced jealousy !

The flip side of this is privilege mindset: you have success in your life? Your upper middle class upbringing, social safety net, financial security and financially successful peer group played no part in it, it's all because you worked hard (or smart) and now enjoy your just desserts, might as well kick down the ladder behind you so those lazy bums don't get a leg up.

Arguably this is more common among privileged folks (including those fleetingly getting a whiff of privilege, aka "temporarily embarrassed billionaires") than "poverty mindset" is among poor folks. And of course the accusation of "poverty mindset" usually isn't what you hear from the kinds like the author who actively take time and money out of their meagerly successful lives to help those worse off than them. It's instead something you're far more likely to hear from those who "made it out" (often "against all odds" without any consideration what the idea of "odds" means in this context) and incidentally don't believe they "owe" anything to those they "left behind".

Yeah, a very interesting piece of cognitive dissonance is when people are all "a person's behavior is a product of their environment, which they can't be held fully responsible for" until the person in question holds views or engages in behavior that we want to hold them personally accountable for.

I know neither the "product of environment" or "personal responsibility" view is absolute with anyone, but I've noticed that different people draw the line in widely different places.

How is that what this author is doing? Did you read the article?

How is behavior NOT a product of ones environment?

One only has the information to make decisions about the world they have gathered from their environment.

No one is born knowing correct way to behave.

As an example do you think everyone in the Middle East is Muslim because they've made the decision to be? Or because that is what their environment has taught them is correct.

When you're a public figure, you hopefully do not have those issues. Any isolation or ignorance is a choice you're making. The author is very obviously not talking about people who are in a cult, or even the average person on Facebook.

They are talking about public figures lecturing poor people on how they should behave.

I too disagree with that statement. Ignorance is just ignorance. What would make the GP's comment more accurate would be willful ignorance, but even that is stretching. To me, willful ignorance is just a sugar coating for a much more accurate/harsh description of what is actually happening.

And choosing to use your privileges to patronise people whose lives are entirely beyond your experience and comprehension, is a choice

Not sure how that way of thinking is productive. Patronising people is bad in itself. Thinking that people you perceive as "privileged" can't comprehend you is a choice too and a form of ignorance.

Thinking that people you perceive as "privileged" can't comprehend you is a choice too and a form of ignorance.

In my experience they can't, and I do have experience in this.

In one example, a few years ago I worked with some extremely rich people. I mean, exceedingly rich. Once kept negotiating on everything, even if it was to only save a few pounds. I asked for a little cash advance (£180) to allow me to do some work for them (I was very skint then). The guy said he would give it to me - provided I committed to working for them for six months.

Well, nice try but I had my pride so it was a No anyway.

It was not done in any way nastily, to him it was a game and he didn't mean to hurt me, but he literally had no idea of how things could be to other people. He had never in his life had to live off loss-leader baked beans and bread. I've a fair number of rich people and they can't understand the struggle it can be for others. This is first hand experience and multiple data points.

Edit: the ££ involved corrected

Do the wealthy not read books or newspapers? Watch film? Listen to music? It's unfathomable to me how anyone can grow up without gaining some understanding of poverty. I know it can happen, but I personally think it's more likely they pretend to not understand because it is inconvenient.

Adjacent point based on your comment: I want to emphasize that this is not a difference in understanding between the rich in the traditional sense and the poor in the traditional sense, at least in the US. I know people with significant multi-generational family assets that don't call themselves rich. This crowd is largely (obviously not exclusively) white, US-born, and from the upper end of the middle class going up. Based on my interactions, very few seem to have experienced significant portions of their life without basic food, housing and medicinal security.

A whole lot of people within all striations of the middle class assume that they kind of "get it" through osmosis because they're not rich and they were probably friends with poorer people growing up. But barring stereotypes, we always assume other people's lives, problems, decisions, challenges, and affordances are more similar to our own that others. People from the upper end of the middle class are often blind to the difficult realities of growing up lower-middle-class in meaningful ways that create similar cultural discrepancies.

Thinking that people you perceive as "privileged" can't comprehend you is a choice too and a form of ignorance.

You've kinda proven their point with this statement, no?

She's obliquely referencing Jacob Reese Mogg's sister who grew up in a Grade II listed home in Somerset, overlooking the medip hills. Her life experience is only slightly more relevant to the poverty crisis than the Salman of Saudi Arabia. There is no fucking perceived.

The author did not say can't. In the entire piece, the only person the author used the word can't in reference to was herself, when she was poor. Choice implies a don't and a won't.

But, y'know? When those self-same people go on about how You Can Just Cook when--and this is a keyhole view, a single strand of a very nasty knot, don't you dare well-actually on the vertex and not the shape--poverty is directly tied to mental health problems and the attendant executive dysfunctions that frequently come with? It's reasonable to assume either ignorance or malice (or even, though the author does not, the incapability of can't).

And adjusting one's pince-nez to hmm-hmm-hmm about perhaps it's actually the poors who are ignorant is, to put a point on it, gross.

Especially considering what the author's been through with vindictive council busybodies making her live even that much more difficult out of sheer spite - like when they cut off her bennies before her first check even came in because they'd read about her deal in the paper - I think she held back rather more than I could in such a situation.

Man, so many comments here playing the word dissection game, it's tiresome. The author is responding to a singular person here, a person who basically did say "Let them eat spuds", and based on that statement really does seem to be unable to empathize with people who aren't the children of Barons. Whether or not all people in such privileged positions are capable is irrelevant. Ms. Rees-Mogg has shown she is incapable, by her own words.

Well, a world where wealthy political leaders understand the state that the poor are in and still make statements about how they should just buy raw potatoes is an even clearer example of heartlessness.

She didn't say they "can't", she said that they "don't."

"Beyond your experience and comprehension" doesn't preclude the acquiring of more experience, it just suggests they don't currently have it.

She's pointing specifically at the people that are patronizing, and explaining why specifically their words are patronizing, not saying that nobody with any wealth could ever understand her - if they couldn't, what on earth would be the point of her blog?

But ignorance is a choice.

Is that true for this case?

Understanding the actual on-the-ground situation for all types of people and situations in the 10 largest countries will probably take up most of a normal human lifespan. And that's assuming they spend several hours a week, 50 weeks a year, learning.

Understanding India and China alone to that level would probably take up 30-40 years.

It seems literally impossible for the vast vast majority of people to have enough time for that ignorance to have been a meaningful choice.

i.e. This is likely the baseline default for nearly everyone, who are not especially interested in the UK or who are not super-geniuses.

When you consider the actual context of the essay and that the person to whom the author is speaking directly is the sister of an MP and herself a MEP, this kind of well-actually does ring hollow.

When you make an argument in general terms, you can't call no-fair when someone takes it at face value and counter-argues in equally general terms. That's not cheating, it's just assuming good faith.

When people point out that one's counter-argument, by virtue of ignoring the context the original argument is steeped in, is not actually countering any argument, they aren't saying that the counter-argument is "cheating" - they are adding context.

You can call it "adding context" if you concede that said context implies the original argument was badly phrased, in that the most direct reading is not what the writer really meant.

Or I could just call it "adding context". I could also expect readers to not have to be spoon-fed, and to avoid launching themselves into "counter-arguments" before they have understood what they are arguing against.

An argument that doesn't contain adequate context to be understood is a bad argument. You can't expect people outside your exact bubble to have enough context to figure out things you're literally not saying.

The sister of a generationally-wealthy MP, both the products of extremely wealthy families who did not have to work for their money (which is why they are both in politics - because they're pretty useless everywhere else).

Sister

I'd say "ignorance is a choice" misrepresents this as a problem of individuals rather than structures. Miss Mogg isn't the problem. The world would not be much better if she took the time and energy to try to learn about the author's life experience and attempt to empathize with it - which is no easy feat given they are worlds apart and each other's life experiences are likely mutually incomprehensible because they lack any frame of reference.

The ignorance is inevitable. The system that produces and enables this ignorance and that allows this ignorance to result in harm (by creating ignorant laws that create ignorant legal structures that ignorantly harm people the people who created the laws didn't understand) is the problem. You can guillotine the entire House of Lords but that wouldn't change anything other than the names and the number of dead aristocrats.

Everything you do is luck starting with the day you were born, you decide to eat an egg? Yeah it’s because you are t allergic or have money, you have money? Your parents had money. You have money? Because you had a job. You have a job? Maybe because you had a functioning brain, good hand/feet. It’s all luck in that sense. You decide to just wait for luck to come after reading this? It was also luck you read this comment

The next sentence is:

Choosing to use the powers vested in you by the constituencies you serve, to deprive those same constituents of light, heating, food and home security is a wilful and deliberate act. And it has to stop.

It’s abundantly clear that the whole passage was speaking to Rees-Mogg, calling her out for her Marie Antoinette ‘let them eat potatoes’.

This passage isn’t a generalism, is a specific response to the words of a former politician, a former Conservative MP and MEP for East Midlands.

To reduce the articles substance to a specially selected out of context quote such as OP highlighted seems disingenuous.

This keeps happening to me. I read a feelgood story, visit the wiki page and then realize how muddy the water is:

> Monroe has been described as an "austerity celebrity". In a January 2023 interview with Simon Hattenstone in The Guardian, Monroe acknowledged that she had recklessly spent money given by backers; she claimed "I'd go online absolutely shitfaced and buy nice furniture."

Granted most poor people do stupid stuff after getting monies, but the charm of the tale is diminished.

Edit: I meant touching not feelgood.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Monroe

I think the story highlights a problem irrespective of the messenger. Some people cannot help but judge and opine on other's behavior where they have no context, or any moral basis to render that judement. We do this all the time in private, but politicians, or public figures, use the same propensity to pass devastating and life hampering policies, or inflame public opinion against a group of people. All I'm really hoping for is a wide spread culture of more humility and compassion in how we communicate in public, despite the exact opposite tendencies capturing the current herd mentality.

The problem is that sometimes humility and compassion are not what's needed. Sometimes a person needs a kick in the pants. A close friend willing to tell you to stop impulse buying furniture, or get a fucking job, or get off your ass and work out.

The tricky part is knowing when which tactic is called for.

Have you ever told a friend that and them respond with something along the lines of, "You know, I'd never thought of that. I'm just going to go get a job. Thanks!"?

Me neither.

If your friend is screwing up their life and you are enabling them by validating their bad choices, you're not being a good friend to them. Close friends are pretty much the only ones who are in a position of trust to be able to deliver harsh truths to someone in a way that actually gets through (unlike internet strangers, media, authorities and in many cases also family), so it's the duty of friends to actually do so when needed.

Nobody's making the case for enabling bad choices - I just don't think being an asshole is the only alternative.

I also don't know anyone in a similar situation who isn't acutely aware of the situation - they don't need their friends constantly giving them the most obvious advice in the world, they need support.

If you're going through a tough time and need compassion, don't mistake that for thinking everybody in every situation always needs compassion

I don't think I said that. Likewise, though, if you're too blind to notice your own bad behavior, don't mistake that for everyone else being too blind to notice their own behavior.

I'm also not really sure why you're playing this card, since I referenced other people in my previous comment... but oh well.

Counterpoint: Literally nobody needs 'darkerside' from hackernews to tell them to "get a fucking job".

You don't tell your friend to get a job. You tell your friend they sound like a miserable fuck and some of their problems are of their own making.

I'm glad I'm not your friend.

Right back atcha.

I have given hard truths to friends before. If you care about someone, there's a point where you need to. Even if they don't respond well in the moment, truth once heard cannot be unheard.

Its fairly obvious that an anonymous stranger on the internet, or a politician proselytizing for their punative economic policies is _not_ that type of friend. But it seems some people derive a great deal of satisfaction out of imaginging themselves as knowing better how people should live their lives.

It may not be a much better approach than pandering and patronizing their feelings, but it's probably at least a little bit better.

Unsolicited internet judgement and condescending advice is worse than nothing and significantly worse than compassion. Too many people on the internet are way too over confident in their assessment of others' situations, and I dare say that with your 'tough love' position on this, you may be one of them.

I find this argument is utterly destroyed by the fact that the message is a complaint about the 'other side' telling her to modify behavior to spend less money. Yet her behaviors include some really egregious spending. How could I separate the two?

Admittedly, I didn't have to know she made such an egregiously bad decision with her money to know she's wrong. I judged that immediately upon starting the essay because it's yet another angry rant against trivial financial advice that makes no difference and that no one forces you to take. The defensive and personal tone lets me know.

"The lady doth protest too much, methinks."

Happens every few months/years, people get up in arms about the Suze Orman meme advice to stop buying $5 coffee. If you're this angry about advice you're under no obligation to take, I know you're getting drunk and spending hundreds of dollars buy Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs or have some expensive substance addiction (e.g., cigarettes or weed) you could cut but choose not to. The anger is just so personal it's impossible that it's not coming from self-hatred.

You consider this a “feelgood story”??

In the end she describes herself as being a rotten husk of a human being, clawing at the floor and sobbing at the drop of a pin. Sure she’s not economically impoverished anymore, but she’s certainly mentally and spiritually impoverished. I don’t feel so good.

This felt too real and too close to home. I loved reading it in a sense—it’s well written and interesting—yet it also made me feel kind of sick. I have no idea how someone gets feel good story out of this.

If you've never come across Jack before, most people I know in poor communities think she's a hero regardless, and quite a few would just say "Good on her" for the spending. She is a hero.

God I hope to one day have enough to see this as a feelgood story and not a summary of my last couple of years (the pre-book deal bit) lmao

Recklessly spending is a symptom of poverty (also, ADHD, which she mentions) - spend it before it runs out. Comes from a life of having plans (No not those life kind of plans - plans to buy food, pay rent) then something urgent happens and takes away the money.

I'll be the first to agree it's stupid, but I can't blame her too harshly on that point. Seen it play out too many times. Also been there done that after a broken hip settlement (saving my other one for retirement!) - I got so fat lol

See also: lottery winners that go broke inside a few years

I think casting this as "a feelgood story" and her behavior after reaching success as sullying that is completely missing the point. She's writing about herself, but the goal is to convey some of the horror of living in poverty and the absurdity of people who've never experienced anything like it acting as if poor people would be perfectly fine if they just followed rich people's advice. It's absolutely not to tout herself as a heartwarming rags-to-riches story.

This comment is tone deaf as hell.

Humm, I have a feeling part of the story is missing here, even though i can relate as i was myself a minimum wage worker in the hospitality industry in Britain for a while (back in 1999, my annual wage was something like 8500 pounds). Long odd hours, not so pleasant interfacing with customers, 7 people sharing a flat in London, so broke at the end of the month that walking from Mayfair to Canada Water was reality because no money for public transport....

Yet, as a foreigner, I (We, as a matter of fact, since all my friends and colleagues were either german, italian, spanish, chinese...) had no real social safety net to rely on. We couldn't go back to our family (500 miles away) with our tail between our legs in case we really fucked up.

Something isn't clear in this writer's account of the reason of her living in poverty, whether it is a story of mental illness, child abuse... things i witnessed years later when i bought a flat in Barking (poor white area of greater London) and this i feel would need to be clarified for me to be able to accept the conclusion that "poverty is largely accidental", especially coming from someone quite so articulate.

It's pretty clear if you read the article, and even more explicit in the news paper articles in her photos. She was a single mother with zero family support. She couldn't just work odd or long hours (and was forced to leave her existing better paid job) because there was nobody to care for her young child.

with zero family support

The article didn't say that - are you relying on another source of information?

She mentions her family, but implies she wants to remain independent:

  Sometimes I just want to run back home and live with my parents, at the age of 32, and beg them to take care of me. I’ll be very quiet. I can cook, and I promise not to say f*ck in front of the children, Mum. I won’t fold the corners down on your books, Dad.

Without more info, hard to say how her family did or didn't help.

"My brother was in the RAF last time we spoke, a couple of Christmases ago, when he described Iain Duncan Smith as the best thing to happen to this country and told me I had chosen to have a baby outside of marriage so deserved everything I got. It’s fair to describe us as ‘estranged’ these days."

This is where I'm getting the family info from.

That's one member of the family not being supportive. Doesn't equate to zero support from the whole family. The paragraph quoted above seems to imply that going back to her parents was an option.

Checking the article again it might have been one, but not one she was capable of taking at the time.

"Back – or forward – to 2012, and as my world shrank into a tiny flat, as friends fell away and I started to isolate myself from my family in shame and self-loathing and depression"

Take a read through https://amp.theguardian.com/society/2023/jan/07/jack-monroe-...

When she got pregnant she tried to hide it from her family (parents in particular) because she felt shame and feared the kid would be taken away.

Her parents fostered lots of kids and so she saw lots of kids going into the system and didn’t want that for hers. I disagree that would have happened, but understand how from her life experiences she may have thought that.

Similarly, once her parents did find out, they bought her lots of food to help her during the pregnancy as during that time she was very underweight.

She also shares parenting her sons father.

Again, all this is based on info from the Guardian article.

I lived in the UK during the period of her rise to fame and honestly I don’t remember her in the news. But that bit about it costing £3300/month to run her home (rent + services + food etc) seems rather high. You could easily get a 2 bed in London for under £2000/month plus expenses, so seems rather odd to be living in such an expensive area outside of London yet still cry poverty and woe-is-me.

It feels like a lot of it is due to her mental health - not just the ADHD, but general insecurities, and also alcoholism (drinks as both a symptom and cause).

Yet, as a foreigner, I (We, as a matter of fact, since all my friends and colleagues were either german, italian, spanish, chinese...) had no real social safety net to rely on. We couldn't go back to our family (500 miles away) with our tail between our legs in case we really fucked up.

You didn't have kids though. That changes everything. I do agree from experience as well, a single healthy young person in good spirits can make it work. Knowing you're responsible for a little baby that can die or be hurt for life changes the stakes.

I assume there wasn't an extended family that was near enough, kind enough, or able enough to take them in for a few years. That kind of support is indispensable when you have kids and don't have a lot of resources. Generally material poverty is experience very differently when there is also social relationship wealth. But nowadays in US/UK, there is a lot of social relationship poverty. When combined with material wealth it is not great, but combine social poverty with material poverty, and you have a big problem.

I assume there wasn't an extended family that was near enough, kind enough, or able enough to take them in for a few years.

Her parents were foster parents to 100s of children. They helped her during her pregnancy etc. She just has issues asking for and accepting help.

https://amp.theguardian.com/society/2023/jan/07/jack-monroe-...

WOW. That's incredible. Well, that explains it. Ignoring the foster part, it's not the same to have a parent for whom you're one of 100 chldren! I certainly would feel more like I was imposing too.

“This account of misery likely conceals the reasons that the author, in my estimation, would deserve their suffering.”

deserve?

No one deserves suffering...

your comment is in bad faith, no point discussing this any further with you...

this i feel would need to be clarified for me to be able to accept the conclusion

So you are inclined to dismiss her stated experience because she didn't choose to share every little detail of her life to your satisfaction?

Parent doesn't want to dismiss the writer's experience, just the conclusion.

Seems reasonable to me to want as many details as possible to accept a conclusion. An experience is a different thing.

The passage where she runs and cowers in a corner from a random knock on the door hints at something gone really wrong mentally. Could be something developed as a result of poverty, but it’s certainly behavior that will perpetuate poverty.

I suspect, this author is driven in some peculiar way. I’ve seen it with other strongly artistic types, the drive isn’t to make money, and that allows them to do great things. Sadly, if they don’t align with value of the populace in a way that makes money, they will simply toil in poverty. Worse, is they are often easy marks to be take advantage of. I’ve even seen it in tech, people who should be making way more than they are, but continue to be underpaid because there’s a kind of playground for them to explore.

One if the worst parts of poverty is that it steals all of your time!

All your time is devoted to just surviving, so you can never really better you situation.

You want to improve your situation? Not happening, you gotta work 60 hours this week so you cant study for that AWS cert or medical coding cert.

Then the job you work is most likely dead end with no advancement or fake advancement.

So you live pay check to paycheck with no hope of escape.

Then if you dont have parents or luck... to help one catastrophe and youre doomed.

And luck is not a strategy.

You literally are trapped by capitalism.

Then even if youre able to scrape together some time every week to better yourself... so many artificial walls have been erected to prevent smart hardworking people from entering professions.

That includes jacking prices on universities and industries requiring university education for licenses instead of a test/apprenticeship.

Things you used to be able to do without formal schooling: law, cpa, PE, teaching, hair dressing, and more.

Basically massive friction has been added to smart hard working people trying to skill up instead of supporting people skilling up to their potential.

Tech is one of the few actually meritocratic middle class industries left but is now getting watered down by the entire world entering the industry.

As a side note, think of all the wasted potential that could be bettering the human race who are trapped in the cycle of poverty.

There could be a Mozart out there whose parents can't afford a fucking keyboard.

You literally are trapped by capitalism.

I'm not sure that capitalism is the creator of poverty. There have been poor throughout history and nearly all of them living in vastly worse material conditions than the poor in modern capitalist societies.

Every oppressive social and economic system has mechanisms to ensure that most people have to work to produce value they don't get to enjoy. Whether that's slavery, the estates of feudalism, or structural unemployment and low wages under capitalism. It's just that the system that OP is specifically trapped by is capitalism.

Amen to stealing time, especially if you get yourself into debt.

The amount of hours I've spent on calls with the bank or filling out their damn budgets when I could have been spending the time working and earning.. I'd have probably been able to pay them off lol

Never mind all the paperwork and appointments and journaling you have to do if you need to claim benefits.

Luckily I managed to get freelancing off the ground in the 6 or so weeks I was waiting to see if they'd give me food money.

One day I'll earn enough to get to £0, then imma start helping everyone else in this situation. Being poor fucking sucks.

I don't know how you got into debt but a lot of people do it to survive. lol

Student loan debt is massive simply people trying to better their skills to participate in the economy.

Housing is massive debt people trying to get shelter.

Just some types of debt.

And big banks are at the top just profiting off of every single person trying to function in society. lol

We used to be able to pay for university with a summer job.

Used to be able to pay a house off in under a decade.

Modern society has kind of turned humans into cattle to pay bank interest rates.

What you said has been my lived experience since I graduated from college in 1999.

I'm coming up on 25 years of living month to month, with nearly all of my hopes and dreams dashed by the necessity of having to pull the yoke in the workaday world. I was one of the gifted kids who probably should have worked at NASA, but nobody warned me that I'd grow up to be a people-pleaser due to ADHD symptoms. I didn't know how important it was to set boundaries to protect my mind and body, because as a geek, I didn't value my own time and had no real need of money if I could just be left alone.

But see, that's the thing: poor people can't get left alone. Borrowing money makes one a slave. Working as a wage slave at a low-paying job makes one a slave. Not having the money to afford to live alone, much less date or travel or do middle class things - destroys mental health and makes one a slave. Despite periodic financial stability and healthy relationships, I know deep down that I've mostly lived as a slave.

The big epiphany came for me during the pandemic. I hit such a rock-bottom low after developing food sensitivities and chronic fatigue from stress that rendered me unable to work for 6 months in 2019, that I left logic-based reality when COVID hit in 2020. I had to shift laterally through meditation into a neighboring reality where magic returned (where we are now at the time of this writing), in order for my soul to want to continue in this incarnation. TikTok was the gateway drug to Alan Watts, Terence McKenna and Dolores Cannon (among a great many others).

Now I view Big Tech as a clear and present danger to world peace, especially with the arrival of AI. All creative work will lose its value within 5 years. Even the security of our programming jobs isn't something that can be counted on, as AI will perform better than us at all problem solving within 10 years. Nearly all projections for environmental health, wealth inequality, the rise of authoritarianism, etc etc etc predict collapse between 2040 and 2050. We're either going to defeat the status quo or all be enslaved.

The fix is so easy and obvious that most people can't see it: tax the uber rich. Start undoing all of the trickle-down legislation passed since Reagan and put the new tax revenue towards automating the work that slaves must perform to acquire the resources to survive. Specifically: fund universal healthcare, affordable college, low-cost housing/staple foods/natural monopolies like internet service, and most importantly - UBI.

Unfortunately about half of thought leaders have either never been poor, or been poor but arrived at a pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps worldview through survivorship bias (why billionaires usually subscribe to right-wing ideology). A vanishingly small number of people go on a healing and growth journey, eventually experiencing a spiritual awakening and arriving at a leftist or trans-political worldview based on the dignity of all living things, valuing conscious awareness most of all.

I've let go of expectation that things will get better through practical application of logic, as it's probably too late for that. But I've put conscious effort into manifestation and witnessed how outer reality improves as inner reality heals. Now I lead a life of service, often sacrificing what might have been in this life to improve the lives of others, in recognition that I may be them in my next life, because we are all one. As above, so below. And so it is.

Edit: I forgot to make my point: it only takes 1% of the population waking up to cause a shift towards world peace. That's why the wealthiest 1% wield ego-based tools like fintech to suppress awakening and build empire. But the rise of the dark side is always balanced by the rise of the light side through natural law. So I believe that the meekest among us - the poor, the infirm, the light workers - are our best hope for healing and eventual peace as we transition into the New Age.

This is all just so true. I managed to get into law school while struggling and ended up dropping out the first time around because I worked too much. I made it through the second time, but was crushed by $100-$700 fees for random required things. For example, some test required access to special computers for $300, or some trip that you're 'really supposed to attend' but it's $250. They just expect you to have this cash on hand to go through the program. Obviously a gatekeeping method for the poorer students.

Wage slavery is the reality for far too many Americans. The freedom to choose whether you're working at Starbucks, McDonald's or Amazon's warehouse doesn't matter much when all of them pay juuuust enough to make rent, as long as you let them treat you as an interchangeable, disposable cog.

And just as an addendum, tech is more meritocratic than many fields, but even tech has long-standing issues with gender, race, and age discrimination. Whether it's a pipeline problem or not, it's clear that many things besides talent close people off from working in the field.

This is a great article. How it ended up on HN I don't know, but can somebody please start submitting more like this, and fewer techno-babble thinkpieces by junior javascript contractors who host their own mail?

Agree, found this really moving and thought provoking.

The only thing you should be moving is her furniture. The only thought it provokes from me is disgust for a person who's stupid decisions end up on my own shoulders and shoulders of my kids.

What she does is endemic in US and nothing good will come from promoting this.

At the same time, Reddit exists, and this is a community of people created by a VC company explicitly to have wonky tech discussions with other professionals called "Hacker News". It's fine every once in a while but I don't want this to be filled with generic human interest stories.

I see you’ve been on hacker news for about as long as I have. Used to be content like this would pop up more often on weekends for some reason. I too appreciate anything this thought provoking.

I agree this was a great article. The "techno-babble thinkpieces by junior javascript contractors who host their own mail" was annoying, unnecessary snark, that also is basically not true. I have rarely, if ever, seen uninteresting "JS technobabble" bubble to the top of the front page.

Notably, it got downranked pretty hard: it's currently in spot 49, after getting almost 300 votes in two hours. (I agree with the sibling comment that the snark was unnecessary, though.)

Incredible writing.

Reading this, I kept feeling a sense that something was missing. It wasn't until later in the blog that I hit me.

"Where is her community?"

To a 3rd world immigrant, the idea of being this isolated in your the country you were born in, feels unfathomable.

Back home, It's common for kids to live with their parents until the kids are ready, often until age 25-30. Alternatively, people will stuff themselves like sardines in a large house, to save money; but even more importantly, to find an accidental community among your fellow poor.

Among poor people, a rotating-rep would buy in bulk for the whole community and then distribute among themselves. Saving money and time. The father sounds like a deadbeat too, given his curious omission from the whole blog.

Jack really did suffer alone. As someone who has moved from a 3rd world nation to the US, this part of the west scares me. The lack of assistance from your local and blood community is one of the west's greatest short comings. I for one, hope never to give that part of my 3rd world self up.

Individuality and Independance, should not mean distancing yourself from your support system. Or so I hope.

Jack really did suffer alone.

Not due to the lack of others help. Sure, one of her brothers didn’t help, but her parents fed her and helped her during her pregnancy. The father of the son shares responsibility. See the below Guardian article[1].

I get the feeling she is one of those people who is an exceptionally brilliant narrator, knows how to captivate and truly reach their audience. Like a lot of politicians and public figures.

1. https://amp.theguardian.com/society/2023/jan/07/jack-monroe-...

We used to have a reasonable welfare state in the UK, where the government took that duty upon itself.

It's been wrecked by the current right-wing government.

The father sounds like a deadbeat too, given his curious omission from the whole blog.

Maybe he passed away. Maybe she left him because she just wanted the kid. I don't know why you assume wrongdoing while, as you pointed out, no details is given.

From another article about her:

Before long, Monroe was using a food bank. “It had taken me four or five weeks to pluck up the courage to go. The first time, one of the women looked at me and I looked at her. She went to church with my mum. She said, ‘Your mum will be devastated.’ And I said, ‘You can’t tell anyone. You haven’t seen me.’ She said, ‘Your parents will help you,’ and I said, ‘They can’t know.’”

That’s what I don’t understand, I say. Why didn’t you tell your parents when they were in a position to help? “Because … ” For once, she slows down. “I was ashamed. I was ashamed that I had had a good job and I’d fucked it. I was embarrassed that I’d ended up not being able to provide for my son, and I was worried that if I told a soul, the walls would come crumbling down. Because my parents had fostered for most of my childhood, I’d grown up with this fear that if I ever had a child, he would be taken into care. That I would be an unfit mother. I’d grown up with almost 100 children revolving through my childhood home. So in my head, nearly every kid went into care because nearly every kid I came across was in the care system. I was terrified that if I told anyone, my son would be taken into care.”

So the shame itself was one of the biggest obstacles - compounded by the idea that poverty is evidence of personal inadequacy or moral weakness.

There is a problem with lack of community there: the feeling that really struggling means that you don't deserve help, because that's the message you get from your society. (And it certainly doesn't help that lack of money excludes you from all kinds of normal social activities, as she mentions in the article.)

"Where is her community?"

You could ask the same of homeless people, drug addicts, people with mental issues, people from foster care, criminals, the elderly. Some people lose their community, and don't have the tools or capacity to build a new one. Single mothers are one of those groups that can quickly be kicked out of, or need to escape from, their community, and have a hard time building a new one.

Growing up in the USA, I don't think it's the West that has a problem with community - I think it's the Caucasian West. Latin/Hispanic families are highly connected, as are Asian, Indian, Middle Eastern, etc. Some cultures are highly collective and have strong support structures for extended family. Immigrant communities also tend to have stronger bonds as they may depend more on each other in a new land. OTOH some cultures are more individualist, having expanded the concept of the "nuclear family" in the early 20th century, weakening extended family bonds. In the conservative caucasian West, the nuclear family is now seen as the "traditional" family structure, which is odd, because everywhere else in the world it's non-traditional.

> My brother was in the RAF last time we spoke

> Sometimes I just want to run back home and live with my parents, at the age of 32, and beg them to take care of me.

Well this doesn't sound like someone who is destitute and with no safety net whatsoever.

What's so wrong living with your parents? For most of human history it was the normal thing to do. Parents will take care of kids and one of them will inherit the parent's house and take care of the old parents. Have his own kids and have the grandparents helping with raising them.

Also I'm not so sure about UK but around here there's quite a significant rural population. Not everyone can or wants to make it in the big city. Life in the countryside is a lot cheaper, everything's cheaper. House prices are a joke compared to big cities and still villages get slow but steady depopulated.

On the other hand I do know people, excluding the homeless, who really have nothing. Father lost the apartment to gambling then disappeared, mother died, kid got evicted in the street in the middle of the winter, worked heavy construction jobs until got sick and had to file for disability and now all his income is a miserable pension that can't even pay for food let alone a rent in the city. And he's better off than the homeless or the gypsies who live off the city's garbage dump.

So I'm not saying the author has it easy but rather than some of it is a deliberate choice.

She said her brother said she deserved everything she got. This suggested to you he would support her?

Wanting to beg her parents to take care of her does not imply they would. Many people want things they cannot have.

Her parents fostered 100s of kids. They helped her, she has her own issues asking for and accepting help.

Except below from https://amp.theguardian.com/society/2023/jan/07/jack-monroe-...

“” That’s what I don’t understand, I say. Why didn’t you tell your parents when they were in a position to help? “Because … ” For once, she slows down. “I was ashamed. I was ashamed that I had had a good job and I’d fucked it. I was embarrassed that I’d ended up not being able to provide for my son, and I was worried that if I told a soul, the walls would come crumbling down. Because my parents had fostered for most of my childhood, I’d grown up with this fear that if I ever had a child, he would be taken into care. That I would be an unfit mother. I’d grown up with almost 100 children revolving through my childhood home. So in my head, nearly every kid went into care because nearly every kid I came across was in the care system. I was terrified that if I told anyone, my son would be taken into care.” Monroe decided to flog pretty much everything she owned to pay for her rent. She waited until her parents were away, then put a notice in the local paper. It ended up running a story about her and, unsurprisingly, her parents found out. “They were really upset. They came round with two Sainsbury’s bags for life. It was like Christmas. All this stuff that we hadn’t had for ages. There was a box of Coco Pops! I sat there like a child and ate bowl after bowl.” “”

She is not someone who has no safety net evidently. Anyone considering donating to her deserves to know this. But the claim I challenged was specific statements did not sound like someone who has no safety net. The difference is important when considering people who are not her.

She doesn’t have a car or license. So living in the countryside in the UK is a non-starter. When you’re living life on hard mode already due to poverty and the pernicious destruction of control over your own time that that causes, trying to exist without personal transport and a child is impossible.

I know. I’ve experienced it first hand (as the kid).

To your point about deliberate choice: What I do recognise from the article, and it was clear before she mentioned it, were the signs and symptoms or untreated trauma and ADHD. The deleterious effect of those conditions on decision making often seem to us observers as ‘deliberate choices’. This can be very frustrating for those of us who would and do make different choices in similar situations.

What the heck is going on with this page, it gets struck in some kind of high speed reload loop on my phone (iOS Safari)

Blame WordPress / Jetpack.

I am a follower of her site for years, have all her books. What crashed her site I have no idea but it has never been the same since. It's a shame that Automattic - who created Jetpack - never reached out to help her restore the site. They have no obligation of course, but given her profile, given the massive good that she does, it would have been decent of them to do that.

WordPress person here: How is Jetpack at fault here? I deal with "redirect loops" on WordPress websites on a regular basis, and I've never found Jetpack to cause the issue - do you have insight here?

FWIW I see no redirect loop on mobile (iOS/Safari)

Ex-Automattic person here.

How is it at fault? I have no idea.

But hey, it's a WP site, with Jetpack and I'm sure with Automattic's 'shadow site' ability they can diagnose it.

They - Automattic - as I have said could do the decent thing and help Jack Monroe to restore her site to being functional.

still don’t have contents insurance (a hangover from poverty, I just wasn’t in the habit of insuring things and now keep putting it off, because paperwork terrifies me)

The author seems to be from UK. Is contents insurance a thing in UK? How many renters really do buy contents insurance? Genuinely interested to know how many think that contents insurance is worth it?

FWIW, I've seen rental contracts that insisted on it. I imagine it varies by jurisdiction how legal/enforceable that is.

I did for a short while. Then I realised I don't own anything of sufficient value to be worth it long term.

I've had content insurance as a renter before, and it was useful (my flat was burgled; my flatmate did not have insurance).

That was a while ago, when things like CDs were still targetted by theives, and I got everything replaced, which would have cost me thousands.

I still keep contents insurance; haven't claimed on it more than once in a couple decades though - it's there for the case where my appartment is destroyed (I live in a block of flats), and it's nice to have the lost property/damaged devices cover for travel and general use.

I can't read this, it makes me too sad for what my country has become.

It's a work of fiction. Care to elaborate on your issues?

Yes...but you might also want to avoid most works by Charles Dickens, or ...

This kind of suffering has been around far, far longer than recent history.

The author suggests her work applies to "obesity", but she is not obese. The obesity rate in the UK is 27%; the poverty rate is 17%, and I doubt the overlap is that strong (the link below supports me). Many of her examples in fact deal with people who can't afford things that aren't food, like a kitchen, or free time.

On the one hand, it's certainly true that the support for the poor is insufficient, but the price of food, being perhaps the lowest it has been in thousands of years in real terms, is probably the wrong lever to pull. Consequently, "food poverty" is a misclassification, since, while spending £7 per week on food, she probably spent more on transportation, housing and possibly clothing (which can be essential to actually getting work), and it would make more of a difference to tackle that. (She recounts severe problems getting a home!)

If she had been able to spend half as much on food, would that meaningfully improve her life? An extra £3.5 per week isn't yanking anyone out of poverty.

In fact, there is more evidence that obesity causes poverty than that poverty contributes to obesity! See:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5781054/

There are some suggestions that deficiencies in certain minerals, particularly zinc, which is most concentrated in relatively expensive foods like beef and oysters, are correlated with obesity and disordered eating. A bottle of zinc gluconate makes potatoes look like matsutake (at least at wholesale prices), but the safe and effective use of the supplements (avoiding overuse) is not well established or normally recommended.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12011-020-02060-8

The point I guess I want to make is that we should have compassion for the author, but that compassion should ignite the best faculties of our minds — the desire to really understand the problem, because that is where solutions come from.

The obesity rate in the UK is 27%; the poverty rate is 17%, and I doubt the overlap is that strong

US, not the UK:

Counties with poverty rates of >35% have obesity rates 145% greater than wealthy counties.

Back to Europe:

The Paradox of Poverty and Obesity

Among the reasons for the growing obesity in the population of poor people are: higher unemployment, lower education level, and irregular meals. Another cause of obesity is low physical activity, which among the poor is associated with a lack of money for sports equipment.

Counties with poverty rates of >35% have obesity rates 145% greater than wealthy counties.

Not causal. Read the rest of the post.

Among the reasons for the growing obesity in the population of poor people are: higher unemployment, lower education level, and irregular meals.

Claims that should be evidence-based. Again, the correlation between poverty and subsequent obesity vanishes after correction for publication bias.

It's worth listening to this episode of Blocked and Reported on Jack Monroe: https://www.blockedandreported.org/p/premium-the-literally-u...

tl;dr: She's not exactly honest about being poor.

How are we supposed to listen to that? It's behind a paywall.

Sorry. Here is something you can read.

https://katieroche.net/jack_monroe_investigation_main.html

Would it not be better if they spent more money on wholesome things like oranges and wholemeal bread or if they even, like the writer of the letter to the New Statesman, saved on fuel and ate their carrots raw? Yes, it would, but the point is that no ordinary human being is ever going to do such a thing. The ordinary human being would sooner starve than live on brown bread and raw carrots. And the peculiar evil is this, that the less money you have, the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food. A millionaire may enjoy breakfasting off orange juice and Ryvita biscuits; an unemployed man doesn’t. When you are unemployed, which is to say when you are underfed, harassed, bored, and miserable, you don’t want to eat dull wholesome food. You want something a little bit ’tasty’. There is always some cheaply pleasant thing to tempt you. Let’s have three pennorth of chips! Run out and buy us a twopenny ice-cream! Put the kettle on and we’ll all have a nice cup of tea! That is how your mind works when you are at the P.A.C. level. White bread-and-marg and sugared tea don’t nourish you to any extent, but they are nicer (at least most people think so) than brown bread-and-dripping and cold water. Unemployment is an endless misery that has got to be constantly palliated, and especially with tea, the English-man’s opium. A cup of tea or even an aspirin is much better as a temporary stimulant than a crust of brown bread.

George Orwell - The Road to Wigan Pier

The question is are those decisions the consequence or the cause of poverty?

'The Road to Wigan Pier' and 'Down and Out in Paris and London' (also by Orwell) are the starkest accounts of poverty and what it does to you I have ever read.

The first portion of this had me thinking constantly “this person must have ADHD”. It was almost a relief when it was mentioned.

I feel like this is the dark side of the condition that isn’t talked about as much. If you have adhd, you are far more likely to wind up suicidal, in poverty, abusing drugs, etc. But these things occur on a spectrum. That is to say, far more of us still might not be in abject poverty, but the same tendencies and deficiencies hold us down and cause disproportionate suffering. It’s a constant struggle not to let it pull you even further down. You might not be in the suicide/poverty/drug abuse part of the statistic, but you might be working pretty hard not to be. It’s not a great way to exist, sometimes.

Although I own a nice home and have a good job now, I don’t think I’ll ever have a sense of security or safety, or even stop having the internal sense that I’m still living in poverty. It’s hard to shake that.

Yes I thought this too. Perhaps because it mirrored my experience of similar situations. I glad to see a comment like yours because it could mean we’re starting to recognise this condition in adult women a little more than we have been over the last few decades. That gives me hope! Not least because i have seen the horrible impact it can have if left untreated.

Good heavens, this is some writing. Deeply relatable as someone who has also lived in not so nice circumstances in the UK for much of my life. I like to think i'm on the way to escaping it but we'll see.

Aye, likewise. So damn relatable.

Especially the pics of rice with various vegetables. I'll always have a bag of rice and a bag of frozen veg just in case, even if I become a billionaire somehow.

Survived for literal years on that combo, lol.

Good article

“Sometimes I just want to run back home and live with my parents, at the age of 32, and beg them to take care of me. I’ll be very quiet. I can cook, and I promise not to say f*ck in front of the children, Mum.”

This seems spoken as a cry of desperation, but outside of the anglosphere it would be quite normal. If I were living as desperately as this person seems to be, and with a child to take care of, my (elderly, immigrant) parents would be begging me to come home so they could help me get back on my feet. Not because they are wealthy, but because in most of the world family is the most important thing.

A recent UK Channel 4 TV programme talked about the recent decline in quality of food too. https://www.channel4.com/programmes/the-truth-about-food-pri... (down right now)

It included a section about modified starches being used to save ingredient cost, as well as the more obvious reduction in meat content. https://twitter.com/hwallop/status/1734687477347254678

Part of this frustrates me, gives me ill thoughts, about the many various dysfunctions. But I think it kind of won me over anyways, gave me some connection to long hard trauma that starts to explain trauma response. Amid a system with collapsed safety nets.

But speaking of connection, the humble beginnings story, of how she wrote her way towards something somewhat better makes me somewhat swell with pride, that people have these devices & are connected & can speak as we do:

I wrote the majority of A Girl Called Jack by email on a Nokia E72. I still have it in my desk drawer, and every now and then I just stare at it, and its tiny awful buttons, and wonder how the f*ck I did it. Because I had no other choice but to. It was my one chance at escape, my yellow brick road, my shiny red slippers, and I took it.

Before reading this essay, it may be useful to get some biographical background on the author, as she talks a lot about isolated snippets but otherwise provides no context for her life and how she got where she did: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Monroe

Context on this post from 2020 on a now widely discredited person - https://tattle.life/wiki/jack-monroe/

Hero

Reeks of self-pity.

At what point does Monroe own her choices and their consequences? She did have a child while she was economically precarious, and chose to. No one forced her.

I dunno why people who clearly, viscerally project that they are from the “unfortunates” outgroup so insist that it is their “choices” that landed them there. Clearly they look down on them and don’t feel that their status is going to improve by haranguing them. It’s easier to understand the social proof chasers who easily adapt to the milieu of privilege-speak; then they fall over themselves to insist that they are from an even more disenfranchised background than the previous speaker—and certainly that they are humble too, oh so humble, because they might be in the top income bracket but right over there gestures to old friends for the Grace of God go I.

This is one of the things that makes me just generally angry about politics. It's very clear that Jack is right, being in poverty isn't about pick Y ingredient instead of X, it's a complex interaction of a thousand ways in which your life is difficult - not the least of which is living in a society of people who want to blame you for the things you are the victim of.

It's obviously true what Jack says, and the people who espouse the right wing view of poverty being the fault of the poor often fall into this trap - make a stupid suggestion that indicates they know nothing about the issue. What's frustrating though is that the people making these stupid suggestions never actually engage with the clear and obvious shortcomings in their philosophy. They have taken a stupid position, it results in them making dumb comments, and when it's pointed out that what they're saying is dumb... they either just ignore or double down. It makes you wonder what on earth this person is doing in politics given their quite clear lack of interest in the real lived experience of the people she would wish to rule over.

It takes great amount of skill to be mostly right and still come out as extremely entitled and unsympathetic. She passes with flying colors.

But reading her wikipedia controversy section - exactly what I expect from professional activist turned grifter

In a January 2023 interview with Simon Hattenstone in The Guardian, Monroe acknowledged that she had recklessly spent money given by backers; she claimed "I'd go online absolutely shitfaced and buy nice furniture."[56] Hattenstone wrote "The guru of thriftiness was chucking away tens of thousands of pounds, given to her by the public to support her work, on items she didn't even want, let alone need", noting that she didn't deny she'd "abused the goodwill of well-meaning backers".[13]

Writing for Pink News in September 2022, Lily Wakefield noted that Monroe has "faced accusations of inventing experiences of living in poverty",[57] while in October 2022 Killian Fox noted in The Guardian that "critics claim that she makes herself out to be poorer than she actually is".[58][57] In January 2023, Kathleen Stock (writing for UnHerd) stated that Monroe was "wedded to a narrative of personal struggle and sudden dramatic changes of fortune, for better or worse" with an "inability to keep a story straight about whether she's really a downtrodden victim of a cruel system or rather #winningatlife", which had given rise to "an army of determined internet sleuths" and "a multi-headed hydra of critics on Twitter"

Never ate preserved potatoes, are they any good? It's so easy to cook potatoes today with the instant pots, why buy preserves? Or is that the peeling work that is beyond the dignity of the 'poor' person?