What are some of the mindsets of poor people that keeps them poor?

In My Humble Opinion
21

Ha oh yes I know how credit can be damaged by our parents somewhat. When I moved into this house and went to get utilities in my name for the first time I discovered there was an outstanding bill with my social security number attached. It was my father’s old apartment, and the bill was from when I was still a child. They STILL made me pay it before I could get my utilities turned on. We lived here for almost a month before we had lights because we didn’t have an extra 600 dollars just laying around.

And yes I’m terrified when I fill out forms for my daughter’s state health insurance and food stamps. One wrong entry can delay or deny you. I already went through it once, losing her insurance for 8 weeks because of a clerical error. I was reimbursed through appeals but 1200 a month in OT and speech therapy meant she missed out on all but two sessions.

I realize this sort of thing happens to everyone, wealthy, middle-class or poor, but it just seems to slam me over and over and without tools to combat it I just fall deeper and deeper.

And here I am now unable to find any work, relying on my SO’s 11 dollar an hour roofing work, knowing any day he may just not come home and I won’t know until he’s already been deported.

22

Why do poor people frequently reject education? For my family, education was the way out of poverty-my uncles all went to school at night (GI Bill), and obtained degrees-this led to good jobs, and the way out of poverty. My other relatives used the technical training they got in the Navy and AirForce, to open businesses. Their kids all went to college.
So, it is ironic that the thing most usefull in lifting you out of poverty (education), is frequently rejected-look at the discipline problems in ghetto highschools-most have to ahve full time police officers, to avoid crimes of violence.

23

I assume your SO is illegal? This may be a stupid question; however, could you not get married and and least not have to worry about this? I mean, I know there’s a charge for getting the license although it may be money well spent if it means one less thing for you to worry about. (Again, this may be a super naive statement - I’m really not up to snuff on US immigration issues).

As to why poor people stay poor - I think at least in part it’s because they haven’t been taught how to NOT be poor. One of my good friends in high school lived in a single parent home with her 3 siblings, mom on welfare, dad not paying any support at all. Mom would spend her welfare check on a new painting rather than buying food for her children - it was quite a sorry state of affairs. I will say that after many years of sort of floundering in the same boat (unwed mother, on welfare, no prospects, no high school diploma, etc) my friend did get it together and get an education (I believe she’s a legal secretary now, which pays a decent wage), married a nice man, etc. so it can certainly be done; however, I also get the impression that in Canada there is more assistance available for poor people to improve their lot in life.

I have to say I’m mystified by the ‘education is a waste of time’ mentality that I’ve seen many (older) poor people have. I know I’ve heard people say that their child doesn’t need an education because they should be working and supporting the family and look at me - I have no education and I do just fine, ignoring that ‘just fine’ is just scraping by, deciding which bill to pay this month and which one can wait.

24

I agree with all of the points you cite, but I thing this one is the most important. It frustrates me to see how much talent gets wasted and how many people suffer. And it frustrates me as a libertarian, because whenever I try to make a case for less government “help” for poor people, like cutting back on AA programs, no one listens and I’m branded a racist. :frowning:

25

Plan B, that victim’s mentality isn’t going to get you anywhere. Buck up.

26

But there is a definate mindset of very poor people. I had a temp job in a factory and the people I worked with form the temp agency are really poor.

The mindset is just so different. It’s a different logic. I worked with one young kid, just out of prison. His girlfriend is having his baby and he’s talking about wanting to have a boy next time. He’s 20 years old. This job is sponsored by the State of IL and get’s him $300 a month. That’s all he makes $300 a month.

To a 20 year old kid having spent a year in prison, I guess this is a lot of money. But this kid doesn’t know how to think, if he’s planning on a second child.

Here is an extreme example that proves my point. There is a guy at this factory and he has TWELVE KIDS by five different woman. We were talking and I was like “No way.” And he showed me their pictures, he has two sets of twins.

Now he worked at the factory not through the temp agency like me. When I mentioned that that must cost him a packet, he told me he makes $15/hour and he clears about $800 month. The rest the state takes out for child support.

So to take example of the mindset

He makes $31,200 year or $2,600 a month. Let’s say he loses a fourth to deductions. That’s $1,950 clear. He is taking home $800 of that so $1,150 is for child support. That’s $95.83 per child per month.

(Yes I am also assuming he is paying support evenly among all children, which I don’t know if he is or not, but let’s just say for the sake of an example)

Now what blows my mind even more is the other woman at the factory, through the temp agency I went with, think this guy is “all that.” They just love him.

Because the mindset of the really poor is, “But he pays SOMETHING. Everyone else I know their baby’s daddy’s are in jail or don’t pay nothing.”

Now if you’re not really poor, you’d be thinking. $95.83 a month ain’t nearly enough to help rear a kid. (Yeah I do realize they are most likely getting other forms of assistance like food stamps and such)

See it’s a different way of looking at things.

Look at teeth. You can’t get a decent job with missing or horrible teeth. Yet few places will fix them. Cook County, the public hospital in Chicago will pull a tooth for free, but they won’t fix it.

What’s the first rule of a job, “always smile and be nice.” You can’t smile with a mouth full of missing teeth. So even a entry level customer service job would be out to most of those people, even if they could get it.

Poor people also get taken advantage of, mostly by their own people.

Let’s look at the loan shark. Oh we all see them on TV and movies, but it really works more like this. You need money, you get it from your neighborhood loan shark. And we all know if you don’t repay they break your legs.

Not really. Oh for sure, they break a few legs and bust a few faces to let everyone know they mean business, but if you bust too many faces, or break too many legs, word gets around awful fast and you don’t get any business.

So what do they do? They forgive the debt, well sort of. Most loan sharks loan small amounts with huge interest after two or three payments, they got their money back and few people default before then.

So the loan shark forgives your debt. Conveniently ignoring the fact you paid back the money you borrowed and simply owe the outrageous interest. BUT…Now they own you.

You wind up working the debt off. Maybe you’ll have to run some drugs or stand look out or even take the loan shark’s momma out in a wheelchair in the park everyday at a rate of $2.00/hr.

Of course the poor person’s logic is this:

Wow what a nice guy the loan shark is." He helped me with money, when a bank wouldn’t.

He didn’t break my legs, when a bank would’ve had me thrown in jail.

He is even giving me a way to pay him back. Of course that overlooks to hire anyone to push his momma in a wheelchair would be at least minimum wage, and he’s paying you a fourth of that. Or the fact a drug runner or lookout would get a much bigger cut.

So you see how quickly the mindset of a poor person is convoluted?

The biggest problem in today’s world of political correctness, we simply write off any behaviour as a “different culture.” And wash it away with “we can’t fault their culture as it’s different from ours.”

In my day the ghetto was something to be gotten out of, not to be glorified.

As for the ghetto, I can name you 20 people off the top of my head that lived in the Chicago projects like Cabrini Green or Robert Taylor and they did just fine. They got out of the ghetto.

So it’s much more complex than if you’re born poor you stay that way. Some people are able to overcome, some are not able to. A lot of times this comes down to no more than luck. Or the personal will of a someone.

27

Why reject education? Crappy schools, violence in the halls, bullying, teachers who don’t understand or don’t care. Problems like divorce/illness requiring another paycheck to keep your family in their house or apartment, so you drop out and get a dead-end job ‘for now’ and that turns into not returning to school, maybe getting a GED someday.

I already said I grew up on the higher end of working-class poor. Dad worked in a factory, Mom worked a bunch of different jobs through my childhood, including evening shift jobs. They managed to pay off the mortgage on their tiny house on the outskirts of our small city. We usually had one or two working cars for them to get to work with, but my dad would also ride his bike several miles to and from work in better weather, either when a car wasn’t running or to save wear and tear on a car that was suspected to be close to breaking down. We lived near enough to a good grocery store, and had busing to get to good schools, in good neighborhoods, full of teachers who were more or less decent and who usually cared. The public school system was pretty respected and funded well enough, and so the only private schools were religious ones that parents usually only sent their kids to if they were concerned about the effects of “secular” schools or students on their kids. I was smart enough, and my family poor enough, that I got a near-fully-funded ride through college. My parents both encouraged college, because Dad had gotten kicked out of college for partying too much, ended up going to the Army, then back to his hometown and worked in that factory all his life. Mom had come from a family of 7 kids and was told by her parents that college was for boys - but none of her brothers went, either.

Contrast that with how things could easily have been much worse. If I lived in a poor area of, say, Chicago instead, the public schools would probably have been much worse than what I had; my parents might have had to scrape for private/parochial school funding, even with vouchers helping some, and things like buying school uniforms and long busing trips. It might have been harder to keep two cars, especially if one wasn’t running, in a more crowded neighborhood - broken-down cars tend to get ticketed or towed, especially if you can’t move it in time for street cleaning/plowing. And so on.

28

For one thing, they’ve been taught that they are worthless stupid scum who deserve everything that happens to them. That doesn’t encourage any attempt to break out of poverty.

And thanks to the phenomenon Dangerosa mentions, one problem is the opposite of what msmith537 is talking about. Poor people will ignore government or other offers of assistance for things like scholarships or job training or whatever, under the assumption that there’s no hope so why even look for help? You can stick up a sign offering such things but they won’t even look at it, assuming it doesn’t apply to them. They’ve spent their entire life being told “no, you can’t have that”; it’s taught them that aspirations of any kind are not for them.

By exploiting those very poor people, making them poor in the first place, or by inheriting it mostly. Besides, the chance of a poor person ever becoming rich are minuscule no matter what they do. They’d be much better off looking at the middle class not the rich as role models.

And really, the rich pretty much are a monolithic group or close to one; they recognize their commonality of interest against the rest of us. They’ve been waging a one sided class war since forever in this country.

I expect the fact that it’s part of the system that they feel has kept them down and abused them. And because they likely consider it wasted effort since they feel that nothing they do will help. “Eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we die”; you might as well stay home and get drunk since you’re doomed anyway.

29

So many kids have learning problems that they can’t overcome on their own and nobody else notices or bothers to try to fix. A family member of mine routinely works with non-readers who have to do arithmetic on their fingers. They’re often shunted off to rot in special ed classes until they’re old enough to get kicked out. Given parental cooperation, she has a very high success rate, even for children whom the schools have given up on. However, these are situations where 1) the parents bother seeking help, 2) have money to pay for help, and 3) are actually willing to follow through and work with their child. 3 is the big one. She can only see a limited number of students and will sometimes “fire” parents so she can make room for families that don’t just have a “here is $$$, fix my kid” mentality.

So it’s not always that people are rejecting education. They may actually be smart, but failed utterly throughout school and never received any assistance.

30

While we’re talking about this, I think it’s important to keep in mind that poor people are usually stupid in the general sense. This is probably part of why they screw up in so many areas of life, why they do not pursue educational opportunities when most people would, etc. It’s an ultimate factor in many of the individual problems we’re discussing here. People like Der Trihs may want to deny it, but since IQ is also partially heritable, it makes sense that rich people’s children would tend to do fairly well themselves: the children of rich people are, on average, apt to have better-working brains than those of poor people.

31

It’s always interesting to hear people who have no real life experience being poor explain how to RISE UP out of poverty.

[quote=“msmith537, post:1, topic:550240”]

  • Not saving at least some money in an interest bearing account. (Yes, I know it’s hard. But guess what? However poor you are, I bet there is someone else 10% poorer than you. Live like them and put the 10% difference in the bank.)

But what if the guy who is 10% poorer is homeless? Save for the future-live under a bridge!

Is there a growing kid on the planet who can wear the same sized shoes for 4-5 years?

These comments and suggestions assume a level playing field of opportunity that simply does not exist.

32

There’s a really interesting book which I highly recommend everyone in our country read: “Random Family”, by Adrian Nicole Leblanc. She spent ten years following the lives of a group of people in the ghetto, and I’ve never read anything that gave me such a feeling of insight into the cycle of poverty.

One thing I think is really key is the mindset. I think it’s easy for middle class people to imagine themselves suddenly poor and what they’d do to get out of it, and then puzzle over why poor people don’t just do that, but it discounts the huge advantage you’d have by simply knowing what life is like on the outside. Not to mention the significant hurdles already mentioned in this thread: horrible credit, mercenary fees, no margin for error, higher costs, etc. It’s definitely possible, but it’s very, very difficult and requires a lot of luck.

33

And sense this is the true answer that the OP wants, I think we can go ahead and close up this thread.

34

Not even true in the least. As I stated in my companion thread to this one I was raised in a very poor household. Of my brothers and sisters I am the wealthiest but all of the (ALL) are at least middle class. Being born poor and then becoming wealthy is not a miniscule chance. It does happen and I didn’t exploit any poor people along the way. Sorry to burst your bubble. And I don’t believe I am in any solidarity with my rich brethen. Frankly most of my money has been made off other rich people and not off the poor. My projects tend to be for the stupidly rich who frankly are too stupid with their own money and I gladly take it away from them!

35

deleted, double post

36

Sorry, The Bith Shuffle, that’s not the way IQ works. IQ regresses to the mean, which means two low IQ people will produce offspring with IQ greater than theirs, and two high IQ people will produce offspring with IQ less than theirs. IQ is always going back towards average. There is no evidence that poor people have lower IQs.

Do poor people tend to be “dumber” as measured by middle class Americans? Perhaps, but it’s because of poor childhood nutrition, homes with no books and crappy schools, not because they’re genetically lacking. And, not to put to fine a point on it, but I wonder how smart you would be without a roof over your head and no paycheck. You have to have some intelligence, even if it’s a different kind of smarts, to stay alive in such a situation.

WhyNot,
Homeless and really, really poor. And smart. And going to school for nursing.

37

So where are you in the income spectrum? Middle class? Why aren’t you rich? being ignorant of how to increase your wealth is not limited to the poor in my opinion. And I will put up my IQ against yours any day my friend! My father was a laborer for the railroad and my mother was a stay at home mom–my guess is I inherited some pretty good genes there, and I don’t think I am unique among poor people. Or did my IQ suddenly increase when I became wealthy?

38

I think it is also important to note that America isn’t a terribly socially mobile nation (assuming we are talking about America’s poor). The US generally ranks at the bottom of social mobility among industrialized nations. We pretty much die in the class we were born into. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8162616.stm

39

This strikes me as being a spectacularly ignorant statement.

Further to that, I believe that many poor people may be ignorant of how to improve their lot, and resources that are available to them; but to say that they are stupid in the general sense is… remarkably poorly thought out to the point that I would say it’s flat out wrong.

40

My SO doesn’t have the proper identification. We’ve tried to get married in two states. But marriage doesn’t really do much these days. He’d still have to go back to a country where he hasn’t lived for most of his life and I’d have to make enough money to qualify to sponsor him. It’s pretty much impossible. It would be easier for us to both move to Canada I think. I’d try if I could afford it.

I agree with you on the not knowing how to move ahead thing. Mig’s cousin and his wife are in just as bad a shape as us but they just qualified for a disability check for their little girl, who has severe autism. When they got that first lump sum check they went out and bought an enormous large screen television. They live in a dump, he’s here illegally, she was a teacher but quit working to take care of her two small children, and now she’s pregnant with a third. The entire family is overweight with mom looking like she’s probably morbidly obese. They need a decent working car, the child with autism needs intensive therapy she could get in CDC but mom wants to homeschool her. HOMESCHOOL her? I have nothing against it, did it successfully myself for a while with my daughter, but she’s making a huge mistake. Her daughter needs structured social activities with teachers who specialize in severe autism.

But daddy wanted that television with DVD player and every possible channel on Comcast. With that extra 600 a month he can escape right into the screen for hours I guess.

I’m poor but I feel like I have at least a little more sense than that. If we can’t afford to pay the lights we don’t need to struggle with cable television. If my little girl eventually qualifies for disability, and she probably will, the money will go for her expenses, not electronics to entertain us.