I’m serious- I keep seeing numbers similar to 25% of the population lives on less than 25k per year. This seems astounding to me; making the equivalent of $12.50 per hour or less seems really low for a real job, not a high school or college summer job.
Is it a matter of fundamental job scarcity, i.e. all we have is relatively low-paying convenience store clerk jobs and things like that?
Is it a matter of lack of planning? I can’t imagine that people go through childhood and adolescence planning to work at Wal-Mart or stock shelves at Home Depot.
Is it a matter of some kind of natural talent sifting? Maybe 25% of people are only suited for jobs under 25k?
Is it a matter of transiency? Maybe there’s enough people at any time making the low wages before promotion to a higher wage to account for that 25% of people?
Is it a matter of location? Is it possible that 25% of people live somewhere that the only jobs are things like fruit picking, or other historically low wage jobs?
Is it some other factor? Is it a combination of a lot of factors?
I’m serious- I keep seeing numbers similar to 25% of the population lives on less than 25k per year. This seems astounding to me; making the equivalent of $12.50 per hour or less seems really low for a real job, not a high school or college summer job.
Is it a matter of fundamental job scarcity, i.e. all we have is relatively low-paying convenience store clerk jobs and things like that?
Is it a matter of lack of planning? I can’t imagine that people go through childhood and adolescence planning to work at Wal-Mart or stock shelves at Home Depot.
Is it a matter of some kind of natural talent sifting? Maybe 25% of people are only suited for jobs under 25k?
Is it a matter of transiency? Maybe there’s enough people at any time making the low wages before promotion to a higher wage to account for that 25% of people?
Is it a matter of location? Is it possible that 25% of people live somewhere that the only jobs are things like fruit picking, or other historically low wage jobs?
Is it some other factor? Is it a combination of a lot of factors?
I’m not looking for various screeds about the evils of the Republican party or the horrors of globalization.***
I’m looking for a more or less factual discussion of the proximate causes of the poverty than anything else.
Others will be along with more replies, but a lot of people are born poor and will thus die poor. I know Americans like to think that we are a nation that has a lot of social mobility, but in truth, you pretty much die in the class you were born into.
There are no more factory jobs, where you can make a decent living. Take the USA auto industry-at one time, you could quit HS at 16, and take a $20/hour job at an auto plant. UAW memebership guarateed you a full pension after 25 years, so you had lots of people with excellent incomes.
Now these jobs are gone (in China and Mexico), and Detroit is a ghost of its former self (the biggest industry in Detroit is tearing down abandoned houses).
As we import more and more manufactured goods, our payrolls shrink…and people become poor.
Nice future, hh?
Who exactly defines which jobs are “real” and which are fake? I’m guessing it’s the same sort of intuition that Sarah Palin uses to determine which parts of America are real.
I am a high school teacher and my annual salary is about $31,000, which is slightly higher than the $25,000 figure that you’re referring to. I could earn more money if I wanted to. I have a Masters in math from a top-25 university and a decent amount of experience in computer programming and other, more profitable fields. I taught colleges classes while I was in graduate school. There is no problem that is keeping me from earning more. I chose this job and I feel quite all right about my salary.
I would imagine that many people out there earn $25,000 or less and feel quite all right about it. Some people enjoy being bartenders or waitresses or bus drivers.
Clearly it’s not “all” we have because 75% of households have higher income than that. However, I think it’s fair to say that there are not tens of millions of jobs that pay >$25K sitting there, waiting for the poor to get trained for them.
I was using “real job” as a term to define the difference between temporary summer type jobs, and a job that you support yourself (and your family) with - that was my definition of “real job”. It wasn’t a judgement of real/not real based on salary.
And that’s fine if someone chooses to make that kind of money. The thing is, most threads on here are predicated on the idea that nobody could possibly be happy making 25k a year, and that they’re angry and militant about it. That made me wonder how, if that was the case, do so many people end up in that particular income bracket?
I am sure that some of the jobs are gone to China and Mexico, but a much bigger problem is that a lot more are being done by robots. I am having a hard time find stats, but for vehicles the US still made 8 million passenger and commercial vehicles last year, down from 13 million in 1999. Looking at the data, it looks like a big part of that drop is due to the recession as we were holding steady at 11 million up until 2008. You can look at the statistics here (OICA.net).
This is a structural change in the world economy that is going to be a problem for decades. People just do not add that much value these days, and every year the problem gets worse. Smart, knowledgeable people are still valuable as these skills are hard to replace with automation, but even here wages are flat as we can replace more and more tasks with computers and smarter programs. Just look at the news, IBM’s supercomputer Watson is going to start doing medical diagnosis. This is the wave of the future, can you image the savings for Kaiser (or whoever) if 50-70% of all diagnosis could be done by a computer? How many of those expensive doctors could they get rid of?
Even in my industry, the optimization code on the design software I use is brilliant. It will be many years before a computer is going to be able to replace me, but it is getting closer. It is possible that the current tools have made it possible that I could be replaced by a lower skilled worker (say an engineer with a BS degree). There are libraries of solutions out there for every problem, and computers know how to put the together into a system…
What we are going through is a very profound structural change in the world economy and it is only going to get worse. It is almost enough to turn me into a socialist because I really think that the day will come when governments and corporations realize that they are better off without huge percentages of their citizens. We are getting close to the point that governments are less their to serve their citizens than to serve their economies. This is huge when the value of an individual worker is dropping rapidly world wide…
I make just under 25k. The main reason is simply because I don’t have a college degree or any specialized training. I went to college for a little while, but had to drop out (long story). Now, I can’t afford to go back. Tuition/fees keep increasing while aid becomes more scarce. I tried bartending school, and passed, only to find that it’s an extremely difficult job market to break into. You basically have to know somebody.
The only places that hire someone with no degree and no experience are typically retail and fast food (and a few other, similar type things). Once you’re in that type of job it’s hard to move onto something else, unless you acquire a degree. And it’s hard to acquire a degree when you’re trying to support yourself on a low income. You may be thinking that managers etc. make more, but those positions are hard to come by.
Yeah, actually, especially since you’re comparing (or ignoring the fact that) now to a time where a significant portion of the developed world (Europe, Russia, Japan) lay in ruins because of WW2. In other words, what you’re describing is an abnormal situation, and not the way things “should” be.
You’re not going to have a cite for this, so I won’t bother asking.
Social class generally tracks educational attainment, and college graduation rates have consistently risen in the U.S. for decades.
Also, there’s no real apples to apples comparison about what it means to be “poor” now vs. in the past. Not only have social welfare programs balooned (giving the hypothetically-striving working poor even more of a leg up to move up the ladder), but our collective understanding of what the basic necessities of life are has risen. Many “rich” people (call it top 5% of income earners) in 1971 lived without air conditioning, color television, restaurant meals, certainly cell phones. Every nominally poor person I see has all these things. Doesn’t mean their lives are perfect or that some needs aren’t going unmet, but it’s clear that the attainments of the producer class have beneficial spillover to the lower classes.
And you’re right. Social class does tend to track with educational attainment, but there’s a link between parental social class and educational attainment. The better off your parents are, the more likely you are to do well in school, and the more likely you are to get a higher education.
The New York Times had an interesting feature on this a few years ago: link.
Basically, twice as many people who were born into wealthy families end up living in the lowest income bracket as there are people who are born into the lowest bracket and make their way up into the highest.
Less that a quarter of those born into the lowest income bracket make their way into the middle or higher brackets.
ETA: I’m mostly responding to those who stated that our society is not as class mobile as we think it is.
It is a constant source of confusion in these threads to conflate wealth and income. There are plenty of people I know who have assets of over a million dollars, yet they have a tiny income. They are retired and live on their savings. And I know plenty of people with high paying jobs who have zero or negative net worth.
Someone making $25,000 a year is very likely to have zero or negative net worth. But that’s not because they never inherited money from their parents. It’s because their income is so low. It’s simply not the case that if your parents never went to college that you’re doomed to never go to college. My parents never went to college, and it was really really easy for me to go to college, paid for by student loans.
Yes, if you grow up on the streets, you’re probably gonna end up fucked. But are we talking about street kids, or are we talking about kids with working class parents with crappy jobs that pay $25,000 a year?
I’m the first person in my family to go to even a cheap state college and I got a job making fifty grand as an engineer. As far as anyone in my socioeconomic class is concerned, including all my friends and family and acquaintances, I’m a rich genius.
If my parents were millionaire CEOs, I’d likely be considered a miserable failure.
It’s not that poor people can’t go to college, it’s that they have no idea how, and even if they did they would probably have no inclination and very little support. Without college, I’d have no idea what networking was or why it was important, I would have no preparation for a job interview other than answering “what’s your availability?”, “do you have reliable transportation?”, and “are you good with people?” when I filled out my application for a McJob. Any job that relied on initiative, where one wasn’t told step-by-step what to do on a daily basis would likely be beyond me, simply because the whole idea of a job like that is foreign to poor people. Starting your own business would simply be unthinkable.
That’s not even touching the actual, physical and financial barriers like how does one afford transportation and training in the first place if simply having a roof over your head is asking a lot.
Sure, it’s possible, and it has certainly happened, but the odds are heavily stacked against it.
