A challenge with poverty rates in the US is that they often essentially proxy for "what proportion of the population recently immigrated from low-wage countries"; immigration from e.g. Mexico to the US often causes the poverty rate in both countries to rise and every actual human to be better off. California has ~10 million immigrants; many of them arrived rather recently.
(I think this is a variation on Simpson's paradox.)
This is ancidotal, but there are a stupid amount of homeless in California. Virtually none of those immigrated here recently.
There is literally a second City of tents in Oakland under the freeway that stretches for miles. San Francisco has a similar problem, although it isn't as clear.
LA, San Diego, and other south west coast cities have beech bums and equal homeless problems. The fact is, homeless can survive here, where they wouldn't survive in Chicago, DC, New York, because it simply doesn't get too cold there.
And let's not forget all the cities in the US that send their homeless to CA, usually to SF or Berkeley, where the police and citizens are more tolerant than most places.
I befriended a homeless guy I saw every day walking to/from work. He never asked for money. I struck up a conversation, offered to buy him food and we talked for months, every few days (when I would sometimes buy him food). He had been a machinist in PA, got laid off, and got to N CA somehow. The weather made it easier to live outside, year round. I pushed him to get an ID, which is needed for pretty much anything, and he did. I haven't seen him in a couple of months, so I hope he got into a shelter.
So, the weather and tolerance is a big reason people come to CA when they are homeless or near homeless.
Is this really true for Mexican immigration? The stereotype is that the US gets Mexican peasants and Indian doctors, at least. Everything you say is true for the Indian doctor or Chinese software engineer.
Thus their departure would raise incomes in Mexico while lowering it in the US. So your point is mostly right, at least as it relates to this story.
NAFTA fucked rural Mexico as a tidal wave of cheap corn flooded the economy and killed the smaller scale agriculture, just as it did in the US. You also have periods where economic crisis and monetary devaluation in Mexico wipes out a lot of middle class type people. A lot of laborers and construction guys came because of this.
You also have an insurgency in many parts of Mexico where the cartels have taken over and often little functional government exists. People there bug out if they can.
Many of the "peasant" immigrants are from Central America and pass through Mexico.
As far as economic impact, it's a complicated issue there too. The big land interests in Western States generally control the senate delegations pretty tightly. A lot of people are making a lot of money off of illegals, so if there were some major change, you'd see some sort of guest worker visa or change to labor laws (especially minimum wage, workers compensation and overtime) to keep the farms picked and slaughterhouses running.
Middle class Mexican citizens can live good lives in Mexico, so they don't need to risk dangerous border crossing to end up a poor illegal immigrant in the US.
That's incorrect. As domestic wages rise in a poor nation, emigration rises because the burgeoning middle class is better able to leave. That's why the US saw such a dramatic increase in immigration from Latin America since 1980, as wages have soared (relatively) there. The US now sees more immigration from Latin America every ten years, than it did in a century from 1880-1980. The desperately poor aren't the primary source of emigration around the world, they're mostly unable to move from their location. It's overwhelmingly not the Chinese or Indian poor (a billion people earning sub $5 per day) that are emigrating to the US, it's their middle class and higher - the truly poor can't move from their spot.
One of the most obvious examples of this - for generations, health care professionals in low-development nations have been emigrating, seeking higher incomes in the developed world. That's despite the fact that they're almost always middle class or higher in their own country. You could see this in action over the last 50 years across poor nations in Asia, Eastern Europe and Latin America. Currently the middle class is flooding out of various poor Eastern European nations, seeking a better life in eg Britain.
There were about a dozen articles posted on HN about this concept when the Syrian refugee crisis was peaking.
I disagree with regard to Eastern European part. Most of the emigration was unskilled labor. They were not below poverty line, they could organize move to UK, but they were never middle class in Poland, etc, and they usually aren't middle class in the UK. The second batch of emigrants is graduates entering the job market sometimes with degrees irrelevant in current market. So they decide to start their career in another country, because they don't have much to lose. In another country they focus on climbing up, often in a career not related to their education or previous aspiration.
The doctors, etc are a minority. A visible minority, because their move harms their country of origin more than a loss of a builder from a social perspective but still a minority.
Right. When millions were starving in Ethiopia in mid-1980's there was no movement of migration towards Europe. People couldn't afford it, they didn't even know of the theoretical possibility.
Increased wealth and better access to information and information technology in African and Asian countries is what's pushed the recent migration towards Europe (via Turkey, Libya or Morocco) on the move.
I agree with this and support more or less open borders due to comparative advantage (even below average people can provide benefits due to trade). I was simply questioning whether Mexico is really sending us people above their mean/median.
Would they have to? The USA has a GDP (PPP) per capita around 3x that of Mexico. The sheer magnitude of the difference in purchasing power would make patio11's claim true, even if they were hypothetically, in our president's words, sending us drug dealers, criminals, and rapists.
I'm not sure exactly what you are arguing for here, so please correct me if I'm wrong. You seem to to saying that the middle class in Mexico are not the same as middle class in the US because their wealth + income would not be regarded as middle class by US standards.
I don't think that is a good argument, since once they move to the US they would be making middle class wages in the US, since they have the relevant skills to be employed in middle class jobs.
The poorest people are rural whites and southern/inner city African Americans. The immigrant communities, especially Hispanic immigrants and some asians are harder to assess because they do old school immigrant things like pool resources in the community/extended family and work a lot, but off the books.
"The poorest people are rural whites and southern/inner city African Americans. "
I don't agree.
There are very large numbers of Central/South Americans who come to Cali, largely unskilled, and they occupy the biggest part of the economic underclass.
Think of how many are not even 'on the books'? I'd argue it's very difficult for an undocumented person to make that much.
It's not a 'moral' statement, it's just a reality of the blending of people from different civilizations in one pot.
Large scale migration from poor countries will definitely be a factor.
And as one commenter above noted - the 'weather' does as well.
Nice weather attracts more vagabonds. This is true in Canada s well, BC has way more street people than Ontario where it's extremely cold and extremely uncomfortable for street people in the winter. Again, not a moral statement. Just fairly rational human nature.
In the US, Latino Americans are just slightly less likely to be 'in poverty' than African Americans. In California, with a 5x more population, that would very roughly boil down to 5x more Latino Americans in poverty than African Americans.
From NYC: "African-American and Latino New Yorkers are disproportionately affected by homelessness. Approximately 58 percent of New York City homeless shelter residents are African-American, 31 percent are Latino, 7 percent are white, less than 1 percent are Asian-American, and 3 percent are of unknown race/ethnicity."
You also need to be very careful with context and analysis of "latino". Statistically, Latino is an overlay term representing cultural origin. Many African Americans identify as Latino.
Again, we're talking about poverty rates, not homeless rates.
Yes, I understand 'Latino' is not always central/south American in the classic sense, but fyi - Latino's are far more likely to be classified as 'White' than 'African American' - i.e. Spanish, Cubans etc.
If the USA and Mexico set different thresholds for the poverty line, with the Mexican threshold being lower, then people above the Mexican poverty line but below the USA poverty line could emigrate. This would raise the poverty rate in both countries, but this is an artifact of the two countries differing definitions of poverty. But if you measured poverty in the entire USA+Mexico region using a single definition of poverty, you would see it decrease, assuming those immigrants are better off after moving. (Note that actually measuring poverty this way is difficult due to factors like differing currencies with exchange rates varying over time, so the concept of a unified poverty definition is mostly just theoretical.)
Are we talking about immigrants or "immigrants"? I seriously doubt the immigrants of the illegal -- excuse me, "undocumented" -- variety are anything but poor. That's the reason the Mexican government is so eager to keep the whole thing going -- they get to simultaneously foist their poor upon the US while said poor send back billions in remittances. It's a major industry for Mexico, believe it or not.
Well duh, because it explains how the definition of deportation has changed to include catch and release, which wasn't the case beforehand. This is literally an article reassuring Democrats that Obama's deportation numbers are higher but don't fret about it, because it's not really the case.
It takes a certain minimum amount of education and money to attempt the crossing. Poor yokels who try it get caught or die in the desert.
It also takes a minimum amount of ambition; lazy slobs can't be bothered. Fearful people don't want to risk being robbed or spending weeks out of work to end up deported and gaining nothing.
My relative's wife made the crossing because her husband was abusive and beat her and her son; he threatened to kill them both and had the connections to get away with it.
I'm not surprised. There are one or two particular foreign-crazed states in India where people often spend ~$50k on people to smuggle them across into Western Europe/US. They come apparently as refugees "fleeing religious persecution", but I fear this is often a mere ruse.
The routes they takes are often batshit crazy - the usual Afghanisthan-Egypt/Turkey-Europe route or the Guyana-Mexico-Texas/Cali route (this all the way from India!).
Urban areas in California, where most of the people live, such as the Silicon Valley have extremely high home ownership and apartment rental costs. The article notes this briefly and somewhat obliquely, but it is worth emphasizing.
The median home price in San Jose, CA is about $850,000 at present (March 12, 2017) according to Zillow.
Median monthly gross residential rent in the United States was $934 in 2014 according to the Census ACS survey. (http://www.deptofnumbers.com/rent/us/)
Other living expenses are often 10-25 percent higher in the major urban areas in California where most people live than other parts of the United States. (personal experience)
It is housing and rental costs that dominate the disparity with much of the country however.
The direct negative effect on the quality of life of high housing costs is astonishing. Yet there's no real public uproar. When the price of gas goes up, seemingly everyone is up in arms. But housing?! People complain, but no where near as much as they should. In areas with high housing costs, this should be the primary political issue. I guess nepotism just wins the argument...
There is an uproar, but there's an equal and greater uproar in the opposite direction whenever there's a new housing attempted to be built. Existing homeowners and establishment rally against it and they're quite organized.
Couple this with the fact that California is entrenched in bureaucratic red tape, and you can see why nothing ever gets done about it.
It's a split issue. Renters want prices to go down. Owners want prices to go up.
Who wins the political clash? Are there more voting owners, or voting renters?
Generally there are more owners, though California has one of the lowest home ownership rates at around 53%. Cities draw this average down -- most suburbs have higher ownership rates.
With this in mind it shouldn't be a surprise that owners outvote renters.
Renters fight new construction too. "Gentrification will raise our rents". It's absurd how hard it is to get a permit to build in SF. Mountain View fought new housing construction for a decade as google was ramping up. Nobody seems to remember first year economics when it comes to construction on their block.
> Are there more voting owners, or voting renters?
Doesn't matter. Owners win because we live in capitalist society, and capitalism means you must be an owner to get full rights. Non-gentry are second class citizens (no free movement, no access to clean water, no right to work the land, no right to build shelter).
No free movement: I can't travel to many places without a car because property owners decided only people who own cars should be legally allowed to access a place.
No access to clean water: water is a resource owned by corporations, the people drink at the corporation's pleasure.
No right to work/shelter ones self: all land has been sold off, new people born into this world must first serve the gentry until the gentry decide to pay them enough to buy some land of their own.
I guess one can say it's a similar system. But, while definitions might differ, I'm not sure how capitalist I would call one of the largest government run subway systems in the world [0], half century long water tunneling projects [1] or the longest running rent control system in the US [2].
> In areas with high housing costs, this should be the primary political issue.
Probably the best way to think of America is a society of land speculators. Europe was full, so we moved over the pond to settle a new land. During the expansion westward, communities built their towns up in the hopes that theirs would be the one that makes it big.
Today, renters are treated as slightly suspect drifters with 'no sense of community,' which is a coded way of saying they're okay with falling property values. Which is threatening in a society where the majority are invested in real estate. It's not too hard to look at policies and see the implicit high property value bias. Environmental regulations, property tax moratoriums, public schools, interest rate policies, urban growth boundaries, public transportation; they all tie in, if a bit obliquely.
So I'm not surprised in a country where 63 percent of people own the home they live in, that high housing prices aren't a political priority. When we've all collectively made a bet that home prices go up, should we be surprised when policies are voted in to support that opinion?
Well a lot of people own houses and are happy about it. There is plenty of uproar about it from renters. Mountain View just passed a rent control measure for example.
The problem with the way poverty is measured in the US is it measures relative income. Being poor relative to other people sucks, but consider the following. You can be poor in the US, and have:
- Clean running water
- Electricity
- Heat
- Phone, now plus internet access
- Paved roads
- Access to basic health care (for now, thanks Obama!)
Disclosure: I went through bankruptcy and foreclosure, so I know exactly how much not having money sucks in this country, but I would take being broke in the US over being broke almost anywhere else, with one important caveat, if you have a long term physical or mental disability and do not have family to support you, then you are truly fucked (but that would be true anywhere outside of northern Europe or Canada as well).
Everything you state is true, but are we really supposed to use third world countries as our baseline? If Michael Phelps used Terry Schiavo as his competition, I doubt he would be as good as he is.
In the US we should be comparing ourselves to the best countries with the least amount of poverty, the highest socioeconomic mobility, and the healthiest populions.
We can't and won't improve if we always look for the lowest denominator then pat ourselves on the back because we are better than that.
Should we be comparing the US of 330 million people versus tiny nations that have artificial advantages due to their small size and homogeneous culture? Which pushes further into how you compare such dramatically different examples in the first place.
Consider Finland. Five million people, 82% white, extremely anti-immigration, and they don't have to defend themselves for the most part. The US military shield has mostly taken care of that for them (thus their 1.3% of GDP military spending despite having a frequently hostile Russia on their doorstep). So you want to compare their outcome, to the US?
Comparing a wildly diverse nation of 330 million against Sweden, Norway or Finland type nations, is absurd. Those are the absolute elite outcomes of the world and Europe in particular.
Compare Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Minnesota, Virginia, New Jersey, Vermont, Washington, etc. to those nations. They all have median incomes equal to or higher than Switzerland (and that's before adjusting for the better cost of living in those states vs a Switzerland type nation) and are much closer on a population basis. Those are the elite outcomes of the US collection of states.
Or would you rather compare various of the bottom 25 US states to the relatively impoverished half of Europe nobody ever wants to talk about? Bulgaria, Belarus, Russia, Moldova, Hungary, Ukraine, Greece, Portugal, Spain, Latvia, Lithuania, Serbia, Croatia, Macedonia, etc.
The fact is, most developed nations struggle to match the median incomes of the poorest US states. Japan as one example has a median income 20% below Mississippi and Louisiana (and it's likely to continue losing ground to those states). Germany is about on par with Kentucky.
I'm sorry, but it doesn't boil down to per-capita GDP alone. The possibility that a tragedy could quickly exceed your health insurance limit and deplete your savings is something most Americans fear, while it's not an issue in Europe. Whether you would choose (if given that luxury) one system over the other is not obvious.
When considering household incomes, its more useful to consider both actual income and government provided benefits as well. Like a sibling pointed out, universal healthcare is just one of the perks offered by most developed countries.
I grew up without heat on many days. It was the 80s. Inflation ate into parents' earnings to the point where you had to cut something -- housing, food, heat. They cut heat. We used multiple blankets. Showers were usually with warmish to cool water.
I agree, we now have access to healthcare. Back then, we'd go to the ER for everything, you'd have to gauge whether the illness was worth 6 or 7 hours in the hospital. Those times might come back depending on where legislation heads.
There are certain things that can truly fuck you in the US though. For one thing, it is really easy to "disappear" in a country like, say, India: to move to a different city/state, start over with a clean past. You can be a brand new person and nobody would care...so e.g. if you're some kind of convicted felon, you could (for good or for worse) start over while it is much harder/impossible to do so in the US. I say this not to encourage felony (lol) but I do know some financial/computer crimes are regarded as felonies and can truly fuck you up forever in the US.
There are enormous swaths of the US where few or none of those things are available. You are fooling yourself if you think those are guaranteed in most heavily impoverished areas and contributing to the overall problem by doing so. In fact your comment is such right-wing dog whistling (greatest country in the world no matter what lalalala".
When I look around at approaches for reducing poverty in CA, almost everything I see is proposals for additional government subsidy programs. What I don't see is proposals for increasing the supply of the things that make COL so high in the first place.
How do you make things like housing, health care, and education more abundant, cheaper, more competitive in CA?
Fixing Housing supply is relatively easy: we just need to legalize construction. And maybe density too, such as the missing middle: http://missingmiddlehousing.com/
There's a reason the poor have been migrating out into the sub-suburbs: that's where houses can actually get built.
Not a surprise to me given that LA has the least affordable rent in the country (a measure of average percent of income spent on rent --- not absolute rent). But in both cases, my intuition is that this just means California is a very desirable place to live. If Dallas has lots of jobs and relatively affordable housing but you choose to live in California despite the financial burden, it must be because you think it has greater intrinsic value (weather, culture, community, etc).
> If Dallas has lots of jobs and relatively affordable housing but you choose to live in California despite the financial burden, it must be because you think it has greater intrinsic value
Or because you were born here and can't afford to leave; the share of California's population that is native born Californian has been growing for the last decade or so.
For many people, having family nearby saves so much money that a much lower cost of living elsewhere won't offset it. Having to pay for childcare (vs. having Grandma do it) alone is enough to wipe out the savings of moving to Dallas.
>> affordable housing but you choose to live in California despite the financial burden, it must be because you think it has greater intrinsic value (weather, culture, community, etc).
Agreed. In addition, migration and re-establishing a new life in a new place is stressful and not cheap.
This headline gets repeated a lot, but it is extremely misleading. Due to it's huge size, California has communities and cost of living that are vastly different. I don't understand how you can assign a single cost of living measure to the entire state. A cost of living adjustment that is true for coastal California will be wildly off base for people living on Mojave desert. A better study will reflect supplemental poverty rate broken down by their cohort regions.
Except they all face the same tax burden which, as a California resident until recently, is quite high: sales tax, property tax, income tax...they tax everything there, and there are few exemptions. Even at $60K the taxes in CA will eat you alive. Great weather (in SoCal), but the sunshine tax, it seemed to us, was perhaps as much as 50%!
To be fair though, its not like the tax money is going into the pockets of corrupt politicians (well maybe not all of it). California is the most progressive state and spends that money on its residents via education, healthcare, scientific research etc. I would be willing to pay more taxes if the State made good use of what I pay them.
California's public education system is below average. It is not what it used to be before Prop 13.
California's public funds are increasingly going towards paying public employee pensions. Given how generous these pensions are and how they can be manipulated for maximum payout I would consider it corruption.
>California's public education system is below average. It is not what it used to be before Prop 13.
That has nothing to do with Prop 13 or money, though. You pay more in taxes today than you did pre-Prop 13, and in constant dollars we spend double what we spent on k-12 education in the early '70s.
>California's public funds are increasingly going towards paying public employee pensions.
Yes. By and large this is where the money is going.
I definitely agree in the case of California. In the case of smaller states (Rhode Island, Massachusetts except Boston to an extent), I would imagine that state-level info is more useful.
After reading many mental gymnastics excercises of varying creativity in this thread that try to explain why the supplemental poverty measure is irrelevant and/or misleading, I'd like to know, how would you define a measure for poverty that's both objective and gives a realistic account of the quality of life in the measured area?
Following Julian Simon, I'd use "how much X can you buy with an hour's worth of work", where X can be food, a basket of goods [1], precious metals or whatever seems more appropriate. I think the official basket of goods can be taken as a good first approximation.
So, living in places like that and paying that much is definitely not normal.
For 1900 $/mo, you can get a bedroom in a really nice 2 or 3BR place in the desirable neighborhoods or a studio/1BR in the undesirable neighborhoods (sunset/richmond). I don't understand why the people in that article are living like that (Poor credit? Desperation to find a place fast? Ignorance of the existence of Craigslist?), but they're very, very far from being representative of SF real estate.
I think you making that an example of a great deal just shows how skewed the SF housing market is. I'm in the south of the UK, just within commuting distance of London, and for $800/mth less than that rent a 3 bedroom house with a garden in a well connected area, and that's a bit expensive for the area because its well located. The housing market in London is just as ridiculous at the moment and I'm so glad to have got out.
It's not an entirely relative measure. My understanding is that it:
a) Includes income transfers, like SNAP, housing assistance, EITC, etc.
b) Is based on the affordability of a bundle of food, clothing, shelter, and utilities consumed at the 33rd percentile.
In other words, after including most government anti-poverty transfers, is the person able to afford food, clothing, shelter and utilities equivalent to that consumed by the 33rd income percentile.
It is relative, but it's not strictly relative, because it's based on a small basket of necessities.
Is California a good place to live for your typical person? It has an enviable economy with Silicon Valley and whatnot. Places all over the country are trying to recreate that. But it doesn't appear to have particularly good schools, infrastructure, or public services to show for it. Does the vaunted economic engine really translate into prosperity for the middle 50% of Californians?
Not surprising as california also has one of the lowest minimum wages in real terms. For all this talk about progressive politics and a 15/hr minimum wage, 'backwards' states in the south have real minimum wages well above 15 CA USD/hr. Some even surpass 20/hr. Mean while California wages would be the equivalent of around $3.50/he in their terms.
I should have caveated that statement with the fact that immigrants must be good people who sell labor to willing buyers and don't victimize innocents. I thought I made that clear by mentioning comparative advantage.
Unfortunately most poor Americans refuse to work, commit disability fraud and otherwise exploit the taxpayer, and commit disproportionate amounts of crime. (Far more than Indians - I've never felt unsafe in any slum here, unlike in the US). You don't get any comparative advantage from people who refuse to trade and merely take things from you.
$30k for a family of 4 is $20 per person per day. That's 8 times more than $2.50, but the cost of living in CA is (probably?) approximately 8x the cost of living of Africa, rural India, China, etc (where these 3 billion people live.)
Context, yes. They can tell me about how they are struggling to make ends meet because of their two car payments and interest only mortgage. That's totally the same as having your kids die from diarrhea, because they get their drinking water straight out of a dirty river and you don't have access to simple medications.
Please don't post flamewar comments to HN. "That's totally the same as having your kids die from diarrhea" is exactly the kind of argument we don't need.
The problem is that in countries where you can survive on $2/day, you can also largely squat where you want and scrounge crude shelter whilst begging for food.
You can't do any of that in California, in any reliable way... and in many parts of the state, $30k/yr just isn't enough to rent an apartment and cover the basics (food, transport, medical care). So yes, the poor in the US are both better and worse off than poor in the developing world.
Ya, the bottom in the developed world, and especially in California, is much higher. In china you can find a moldy room in an apartment building basement (no window!), or even sleep in the restaurant you are working in (many people live in their shops in Beijing, and I don't mean above them in something like an apartment!). For food, there are plenty of places that cut corners to keep costs down, you'll live but you might get cancer later.
Pre-Katrina New Orleans was popular because survival was similarly cheap, not for the same quality of survival, but the bottom possible was lower.
Actually, $2/day is actually completely manageable in rural India. I mean you won't be eating fancy stuff, but you'd be nowhere as miserable as being alone/homeless in the US.
You've got a pretty stereotypical view of the developing world.
Nevertheless, SF actually has pretty good services for the homeless. That's why there's a lot of homeless people there.
Given also that the median black household income in California is $35k, it sounds like you can actually survive of $30k in Cali without your kids dying of dysentery. Alternatively, if you want to 'scrounge crude shelter', there's 11 million square miles of public land in California.
In short, my eyes just about goggled out of my head when the response to "kids die from drinking dirty water" is "yeah, but they can live wherever they want".
This is a meaningless metric. Food can't be magically shipped to the regions that need it. A better measurement would be waste per capita or farm land utilization.
The other thing of course to remember is just shipping food out of the US and into the developing world is how you break local farming economies. Who wants to buy food from the local farmer when there's ample free food from relief programs.
It really is. That's what Lothrop Stoddard called 'The Burden Of Civilization'. Essentially, this is to say that, in as much as civilization can be a good thing, it is also very difficult to attain and sustain; some people are willing to push themselves as hard as they can to do this and some people just aren't equipped to handle civilization.
(I think this is a variation on Simpson's paradox.)