Part of the reason I’m so baffled, is that in many ways, my family is a sort of rags-to-riches story; of the 4 great grandfathers, 1 was a dairyman, one was a butcher, one was a blacksmith, and the 4th was an uneducated longshoreman. His son started as a bank teller, and ended up a bank VP, with no college. My parents both went to college at state schools, and I’m the first person in the family to get a Master’s in something. It’s all expectations; my grandfather was expected to graduate from high school, come hell or high water, my dad was expected to go (and graduate) from college, and I was expected to go to graduate school.
That’s why the whole motivation aspect of poverty baffles me- it sounds like there are no expectations of improvement in the crowd that DrCube describes.
There has been some discussion recently about the “signaling” effect that a college degree has. In particular, bump, I’m not at all confident that your grandfather(?) who started as a teller with no college could ever become a VP today without getting a degree. It’s basically impossible.
In my field there are almost no non-degreed employees, although in the older generation (some of whom are still around) there were plenty.
Location is one of them. When I lived in Texas The most I ever earned was $29k a year and that was good money. I was able to pay rent on an apartment by myself, I owned a car that was in semi-decent shape, I ate very well at some very nice restaurants, and I managed to save up a significant amount of money over the course of a year so that I could move across the country. I wouldn’t ever have considered $25k “poor” in Texas unless that was the only income you had to provide for an entire family or something.
Part of it is that some people don’t really need to earn a ton of money. They are happy to earn very little because they love their job or they have a spouse that brings in a bigger check or whatever. Some people believe they have a calling that is more important than a paycheck. I’m sure the guy who spends his mornings asking people at the train station if they’ve found Jesus isn’t putting in a full 40 hours on a time clock somewhere and he seems perfectly content with that.
Part of it is that there are a lot of people in this country that aren’t really in a situation where they could feasibly work a job that paid more than that. I see at least 2 or 3 people every single day that are functionally illiterate, mentally imbalanced, or otherwise not in a position to hold a job that has higher expectations of them. For example, the guy this morning who got really angry and punched the M100 bus because he couldn’t figure out how to get on the bus without paying for it probably doesn’t have Fortune 500 companies lined up around the block looking to hire him. The woman on the subway who reeks of cat pee probably isn’t going to get too far in the interview process. 99% of the people I see in a day don’t have those problems, of course, but I do also see plenty of people who struggle to read Dr Seuss books to their kid or have covered their faces in tattoos or otherwise have stumbling blocks in front of them that are going to cause a problem when job hunting.
Part of it is that right now the economy really sucks. There are lots of companies that are lowering the pay for positions they are trying to fill in hopes that people are desperate enough to take less than the job would normally be worth. There are lots of companies that aren’t hiring at all which makes the prospect of working at Starbucks not seem so bad when you compare it with not working at all.
There are many, many other reasons that other people have mentioned here and will mention later in this thread. If there was only one thing that we could point to and say, “By Jove, that is the cause of poverty in this country!” we would have fixed it by now.
Today, he couldn’t be a VP without a graduate degree. A BA/BS is so devalued at this point that while you’ll certainly do better than a high school graduate, you won’t be ascending beyond middle management. Every place I’ve worked for the past ten years has administrative assistants with graduate degrees.
There is a mindset between the poor and the wealthy
The poor plan for today…(how can I afford the bus, the groceries, the rent, what am I going to do today to earn money - and just plain, what am I going to do today.)
The middle class plan for tomorrow (can I fund my kids college, my retirement. What am I going to be doing in five years, in ten years. What will my life look like)
The wealthy plan intergenerationally (will my kids be able to afford my grandchildren’s college. What will my kid’s life look like, what will they do for a living, for fun.).
I’ve heard the theory (no cite, but it makes a lot of sense) that simply being able to think forward - as your grandparents and parents did - is a large part of upward mobility. And that not being able to think forward is part of downward mobility. I’m sure you know people who really can’t think two steps ahead - you want to slap them upside the head when they can’t think through “if I do A, then B is a pretty likely outcome.” Bet those people aren’t in danger of being millionaires.
Auto workers for one case ,have had their wages slashed about 50 percent. Their benefit packages have been slashed or eliminated. That trend went across the country on auto manufacturers and suppliers.
But bankers? No way. They caused the crash and got bonuses.
For the past three years I lived on $12 a year - half of what you find so astonishing.
I can’t speak for everyone, but here’s my story:
Up through November 2007 I was earning 50k a year at a nice corporate job, with a solid 25+ years of experience in the corporate world. Then I was laid off. Then the Great Recession hit. I have been repeatedly told that despite my many years of experience and college degree I am not desirable to corporate employers. As one headhunter told me, I’m too young to retire and too old to be hired.
So I make ends meet by mowing lawns, working on construction sites for crap wages, painting houses, and working the Census. Um… yeah, that’s around four different jobs, isn’t it? And there was the three month stint at the candy store until they did layoffs. Meanwhile, I keep looking for more/better work.
Location is part of it. There are plenty of areas where year round jobs are scarce and the norm are seasonal jobs: fishing, lumber, drilling, recreation, tourism, agriculture, etc.
It’s not a lack of motivation, it’s that the world of the rich is entirely alien to most poor people. The culture and mindset are the most important part, not the motivation.
And there is a difference between motivation and expectation. Everyone wants to be rich, but no poor person actually expects it to happen.
Something that was written about in Nickel and Dimed is that being poor is actually quite expensive for what you get out of it. Poor people are less likely to have good credit, savings, access to an actual grocery store, etc. Paying for your own health insurance is more expensive than getting it through an employer. You’ll end up having to pay more interest, deposits, spend more time traveling if you can’t afford a car, etc. All these things really add up and really stifles social mobility for people.
Bricker, founders can do what they want. And times were different in the past when a lot of those CEOs got started. Ask those guys you listed if they would hire an executive today without a degree?
Thank you for the information. Many of these started their own businesses, which is not really the point I was making. There is little doubt that founding a successful company is the single best way to move significantly up in the class structure.
Still, there are a few that started at their companies un-degreed, so it’s good to know that it’s still possible.
That said, I think a strong argument can be made that it is exceedingly difficult to move up in an existing business structure without, at a minimum, a BS/BA. Hell, it’s difficult to get in the door without a connection (which at least one of the people on your list, Diller, had).
There’s a huge difference between being rich, working hard and making a decent living, and being poor. It’s not a binary thing.
I don’t believe for a minute that most poor people, with the exception of pbbth’s pee-stinking and illiterate people, that people can’t eventually work their way into something better than bare minimum. I’ve known way too many people with no college degrees, etc… who worked their way into lower-level management or responsible staff positions in plenty of industries.
For an example, if they’re under what… 42, they could enlist in the military. I’ve never understood why this isn’t an amazingly attractive option- you get paid, you have low to no living expenses, they’ll teach you stuff while you’re in, and they’ll pay for college once you’re out.
I firmly planned to go that route if my parents couldn’t afford college- it was a no-brainer, even at 17.
Who are we counting? If it’s 25% of workers, then it includes lots of people in high school and college, who typically, and unsurprisingly, hold lower-paying jobs than the average worker. If it’s 25% of adults, then it includes lots of retirees, who by definition are not working, but instead live on their assets and government aid that they paid into while they worked. Poverty certainly is a real problem, but maybe it’s not as dire as this statistic makes it seem.
While we’re at it, how could I go about finding salary statistics? It would be useful to see numbers that exclude those who are typically not expected to support themselves/a family without aid, ie. minors, people in school, the retired, the permanently disabled, and those who choose not to work (ie. homemakers and the idle rich).
It’s not very attractive if you are the primary caregiver for a younger sibling or a child of your own or a sick relative. There are people with responsibilities or burdens that you can only imagine who don’t have the same opportunities that you had.
