Strange that little correlation data is provided. Microdata is available from the BLS on what people spend time on, sliced by income and poverty.
Checking whether poverty or low income are correlated with having little time should be a fairly straightforward python/pandas job. It seems unlikely that the money-poor are also time-poor (given that the main cause of money-poverty is not working), but it's straightforward to check in any case.
given that the main cause of money-poverty is not working
Is that really true? I'm not sure if my girlfriend's family qualifies as truly poor, but they certainly don't have much money. Her dad has two jobs--line cook and hotel janitor--and her mom is also a line cook. They frequently have to go to check cashing places, they have only one car so her mom relies on taking the bus to work (which takes over an hour each way, and also requires walking to the bus stop), and they rarely if ever do things like run the AC in their house. They do live in a house as opposed to an apartment, but that's a relatively new development. The house is also in a somewhat sketchy area--for example, her brother was robbed at gunpoint walking through an adjacent neighborhood at 10PM.
I wanted this to be an edit to the original post, but it looks like that post is locked into stone for now.
I wanted to expand on the robbery incident and illustrate how something like that is potentially even worse than you'd expect.
The reason he was walking through the neighborhood is because he doesn't have (and can't afford) a car, and he was walking back from work.
They made the "mistake" of calling 911 to report the incident. He was mildly beaten up, and they were worried about potential injuries, so they sent an ambulance. It turns out he was completely okay, and they put on a few bandages and that was it. Then he was hit with a $3k bill.
Her brother works part time at a minimum wage job while going to school. A random $3k bill out of the blue is really not affordable to him, so now he's on a payment plan paying off that debt.
This is on top of the items that were actually stolen from him, like his phone, which he had to replace, and the general trauma of having been robbed.
You could be right that transit takes up a lot of time, but why rely on anecdote? Stats are available. I linked to them. And if it wasn't 1:30AM (in India) when I posted that, I'd probably have munged them myself.
You're assuming that work is the primary consumer of time. Have you ever tried packing up a baby, a toddler, and a sullen/rebellious pre-teen and taken them on the bus for two hours each way to fill out paperwork that is so far beyond your comprehension level that it may as well be in a foreign language? That's a normal state of affairs for many of the non-working poor.
Lack of transportation, combined with living in "undesirable" neighborhoods far from the business centers, is an ugly combination. It makes even basic engagement like grocery shopping a very time-consuming experience.
You're one of the lucky retail employees that work a full 40 hour week. Your annual gross salary is somewhere in the 24-30k range.
That's not enough to support a 2br apartment and car, so you're relying on public transit. You work retail, so your hours suck and you're often stuck bumming rides or waiting for the bus, which only runs every half hour when the mall closes.
When I was in college, I worked in a mall restaurant. That was a pretty common scenario for waitresses, line cooks, retail assistant managers, and similar roles.
Not necessarily. Efficiency of delivery matters - the homeless are very time-poor because every basic necessity of life costs a huge amount of time to acquire, even if they are free monetarily.
Every meal involves a multi-hour line. Every shelter bed too. Every free clinic, etc etc, you get the point.
The net effect is, despite having well-funded charities providing for their basic needs, they have neither the time nor the bandwidth to make any substantial improvement in the long run.
Contrast this situation to transitional homes, where once admitted people are guaranteed shelter, clothing, and food for a period of time, where (basically) the same services are provided but without the daily time sink, and the success rates are much higher (this of course, should account for the fact that transitional homes mostly exclude those who still have major mental health or substance abuse problems).
Both institutions are a source of "free money", but one works a hell of a lot better, largely because it frees them up for higher-order goals.
One of the points of the article is that our welfare system is very expensive for the poor in terms of time, cognitive bandwidth, and opportunity cost.
It would be cheaper to just give everyone free money. In fact, that's the basis of the the various Guaranteed Minimum Income ideas that have been floating around for the past 45 years or so.
Not necessarily - one issue facing poor USA is the Financial Cliff of coming off of welfare. In some tax and unemployment environments, working that 2nd job actually nets less cash, because at a magic number ~27k, unemployment benefits kick out , and a little bit higher and income tax burdens raise ( there was one deduction in particular the last few years)
So, to make working a second job "worth the jump" it needed to bring in $5k+ more, which very few jobs do on the outset.
It's not only the cliff itself, but threat of the cliff and qualification hysteresis. For some benefits, if it's determined that your categorization changes, then getting accepted into the former level of benefit can take a long time. E.g. if you're told that more than X dollars in your checking account will result in a reduction of benefits, and getting your old status back might take a year, then it's logical to be risk averse and stay well clear of any jobs that could take you over the limit even for a day.
The actual numbers are far worse with children, between $20K and $60K there's a no (wo)mans land for single moms where they'll make more money off .gov at $20K than off .com at $60K. Its pretty sick.
Curious, but what by metric are you judging welfare to not work?
I'm pretty sure fewer people die of malnutrition and more people can eat better food as a result of welfare. I'm pretty sure more people have the ability to keep a roof over their heads because of welfare, too.
Given the current unemployment rates it also seems odd that we'd want to predicate the "success" of welfare on whether it is able to make even more people join the workforce.
There are, of course, many flaws with the system. But asserting that it doesn't work doesn't advance discourse in any meaningful way.
Comments
Strange that little correlation data is provided. Microdata is available from the BLS on what people spend time on, sliced by income and poverty.
Checking whether poverty or low income are correlated with having little time should be a fairly straightforward python/pandas job. It seems unlikely that the money-poor are also time-poor (given that the main cause of money-poverty is not working), but it's straightforward to check in any case.
http://www.bls.gov/tus/#data
If I have time tomorrow I may do it myself.
Is that really true? I'm not sure if my girlfriend's family qualifies as truly poor, but they certainly don't have much money. Her dad has two jobs--line cook and hotel janitor--and her mom is also a line cook. They frequently have to go to check cashing places, they have only one car so her mom relies on taking the bus to work (which takes over an hour each way, and also requires walking to the bus stop), and they rarely if ever do things like run the AC in their house. They do live in a house as opposed to an apartment, but that's a relatively new development. The house is also in a somewhat sketchy area--for example, her brother was robbed at gunpoint walking through an adjacent neighborhood at 10PM.
I wanted this to be an edit to the original post, but it looks like that post is locked into stone for now.
I wanted to expand on the robbery incident and illustrate how something like that is potentially even worse than you'd expect.
The reason he was walking through the neighborhood is because he doesn't have (and can't afford) a car, and he was walking back from work.
They made the "mistake" of calling 911 to report the incident. He was mildly beaten up, and they were worried about potential injuries, so they sent an ambulance. It turns out he was completely okay, and they put on a few bandages and that was it. Then he was hit with a $3k bill.
Her brother works part time at a minimum wage job while going to school. A random $3k bill out of the blue is really not affordable to him, so now he's on a payment plan paying off that debt.
This is on top of the items that were actually stolen from him, like his phone, which he had to replace, and the general trauma of having been robbed.
As of a few years ago, 36% of poor adults work at least half the year and 25% work full time. Original sources cited here:
http://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2011/why_the_poor_dont_wor...
You could be right that transit takes up a lot of time, but why rely on anecdote? Stats are available. I linked to them. And if it wasn't 1:30AM (in India) when I posted that, I'd probably have munged them myself.
You're assuming that work is the primary consumer of time. Have you ever tried packing up a baby, a toddler, and a sullen/rebellious pre-teen and taken them on the bus for two hours each way to fill out paperwork that is so far beyond your comprehension level that it may as well be in a foreign language? That's a normal state of affairs for many of the non-working poor.
Lack of transportation, combined with living in "undesirable" neighborhoods far from the business centers, is an ugly combination. It makes even basic engagement like grocery shopping a very time-consuming experience.
Imagine:
You're one of the lucky retail employees that work a full 40 hour week. Your annual gross salary is somewhere in the 24-30k range.
That's not enough to support a 2br apartment and car, so you're relying on public transit. You work retail, so your hours suck and you're often stuck bumming rides or waiting for the bus, which only runs every half hour when the mall closes.
When I was in college, I worked in a mall restaurant. That was a pretty common scenario for waitresses, line cooks, retail assistant managers, and similar roles.
The impoverished, at least in America, work more jobs/person than the non-impoverished.
The main cause of money-poverty is lack of money, not lack of work.
If that were true, welfare would work.
Not necessarily. Efficiency of delivery matters - the homeless are very time-poor because every basic necessity of life costs a huge amount of time to acquire, even if they are free monetarily.
Every meal involves a multi-hour line. Every shelter bed too. Every free clinic, etc etc, you get the point.
The net effect is, despite having well-funded charities providing for their basic needs, they have neither the time nor the bandwidth to make any substantial improvement in the long run.
Contrast this situation to transitional homes, where once admitted people are guaranteed shelter, clothing, and food for a period of time, where (basically) the same services are provided but without the daily time sink, and the success rates are much higher (this of course, should account for the fact that transitional homes mostly exclude those who still have major mental health or substance abuse problems).
Both institutions are a source of "free money", but one works a hell of a lot better, largely because it frees them up for higher-order goals.
One of the points of the article is that our welfare system is very expensive for the poor in terms of time, cognitive bandwidth, and opportunity cost.
It would be cheaper to just give everyone free money. In fact, that's the basis of the the various Guaranteed Minimum Income ideas that have been floating around for the past 45 years or so.
Not necessarily - one issue facing poor USA is the Financial Cliff of coming off of welfare. In some tax and unemployment environments, working that 2nd job actually nets less cash, because at a magic number ~27k, unemployment benefits kick out , and a little bit higher and income tax burdens raise ( there was one deduction in particular the last few years)
So, to make working a second job "worth the jump" it needed to bring in $5k+ more, which very few jobs do on the outset.
It's not only the cliff itself, but threat of the cliff and qualification hysteresis. For some benefits, if it's determined that your categorization changes, then getting accepted into the former level of benefit can take a long time. E.g. if you're told that more than X dollars in your checking account will result in a reduction of benefits, and getting your old status back might take a year, then it's logical to be risk averse and stay well clear of any jobs that could take you over the limit even for a day.
The actual numbers are far worse with children, between $20K and $60K there's a no (wo)mans land for single moms where they'll make more money off .gov at $20K than off .com at $60K. Its pretty sick.
Curious, but what by metric are you judging welfare to not work?
I'm pretty sure fewer people die of malnutrition and more people can eat better food as a result of welfare. I'm pretty sure more people have the ability to keep a roof over their heads because of welfare, too.
Given the current unemployment rates it also seems odd that we'd want to predicate the "success" of welfare on whether it is able to make even more people join the workforce.
There are, of course, many flaws with the system. But asserting that it doesn't work doesn't advance discourse in any meaningful way.