Money Matters

[ladysprite]

Apologies for the rant that's about to follow, but....

So I've been thinking a lot recently about social classes, and financial privilege. And I have to wonder - at what point of material well-being does one become incapable of comprehending that there are people whose upbringing did not match theirs?

Because I have a significant handful of friends - good friends, good people - who grew up fairly well-off, who are just incapable of comprehending this. They weren't wealthy, and that's all that they see, and so they feel that they grew up underprivileged. And, by extrapolation, that anyone else who claims the label 'underprivileged' grew up in a situation like theirs.

And to be honest, it frustrates me, because... well, there was a bit more challenge to growing up on food stamps, or with sometimes not enough money for both heat and food, than to growing up with only one summer home and no in-ground pool.

I grew up lower-middle class. Food stamps, reduced-price school lunches, hand-me-down clothes from my cousin who was sixteen years older than me. And yet I understand that it could have been a hell of a lot worse, and that there were people out there who DID have it a lot worse - we had enough food (mostly cheap stuff like Hamburger Helper, but it was food), we had a phone and tv.

And I think that's what confuses me the most. It seems like, at some level of privilege, people become incapable of recognizing that some people have it worse. And I don't understand how this happens, or at what point - or when the assumption becomes that everyone starts life off with more or less the same resources as you.

(And on that note, don't get me started on 'We're not rich, we WORKED for our money!' So did my family. The only difference is we started out with a lot more debt and a lot fewer resources, and earned a lot less. We weren't poor because we were lazy; we were poor because no one paid for our education or sent us out into the world with a stock portfolio and a trust fund.)

That said... ultimately what I want is to understand, and figure out how to explain. Because it's no one's fault that they grew up in different circumstances, and ultimately, as I said, they're good people. But I think that finding a way to communicate clearly this difference in experiences and circumstances would go a long way to improving the situation in this country.....

Comments

[meranthi.livejournal.com]

"Have you no poverty on Beta Colony?"

"Poverty? Well, some people have more money than others, of course, but...no comconsoles?"

Vokosigan was diverted from his interrogation. "Is not owning a comconsole the lowest standard of living you can imagine?" he said in wonder.
---------------
It's hard to imagine anything not being water when you are a fish. Sure, there might be some shallow places, but it's all still water.

I think the issue is at least partly that people can imagine less than they had, but only a little bit less. I grew up solidly middle class in an extremely ritzy town. Compared to many people out there, my family was rich. We shopped at KMart for clothes, but at least we shopped for new clothes. But I had friends who got an allowance of $100 a week. $100. A. Week. I had a friend who lived in the rent-controlled housing way out at the edge of town with only a few tiny rooms for her family. But that's about as low as I could imagine. Food stamps? What are those? Homeless? Well, I've never seen one...

So, it's not that they can't imagine someone with less stuff. They just had more stuff to begin with, so it's hard to imagine having no stuff at all.

Don't know if that made sense, but my two cents anyway...

[etherial.livejournal.com]

This is my experience as well (right down to the "solidly middle class in an extremely ritzy town"). Having lived on a budget, I can imagine living on a smaller budget. Having lived with looming and mounting debt, I can imagine drowning in it. But I have a great deal of difficulty imagining what it feels like when one is unable to afford a checking account.

[alexx-kay.livejournal.com]

"It's hard to imagine anything not being water when you are a fish. Sure, there might be some shallow places, but it's all still water."

+1

[tpau]

this. very much so. esp the Cordelia quote. when iread that the first time i was like... yeah. this. and it is not jsut econiomic, it is prevalent everywhere, i see it always in myself. we assume others are liek us until proven otherwise an dehten we can't always fathom the differences.

[quietann.livejournal.com]

You will never catch me thinking this way. As a child, perhaps, but children don't necessarily notice a lot of things. But I learned pretty early that when a friend's parents got divorced, chances were that the friend, his/her siblings, and mom were going to move out of the nice house and into a cheap, run-down 2 BR apartment -- so I knew anyone's circumstances could change.

[umbran.livejournal.com]

They weren't wealthy, and that's all that they see, and so they feel that they grew up underprivileged.

Given what follows, here's their first problem.

well, there was a bit more challenge to growing up on food stamps, or with sometimes not enough money for both heat and food, than to growing up with only one summer home and no in-ground pool.

If they had a "summer home", they were wealthy. So, yes, they have a fundamental lack of understanding of common wealth levels in the USA, much less the rest of the world.

If this misunderstanding is based merely in ignorance, it isn't a sin. But it will be persistent. If they were raised such that they never saw how many difficulties others had, then we are talking about challenging fundamental worldview, which is never easy.

But, honestly, I don't think that many folks are really that clueless. Most of the time, you're facing a different challenge. Getting someone to admit that they came from an easier starting point entails getting them to admit two things:

1) Their achievements are less impressive than they think.

2) They, personally, are an example of injustice in the world, and their entire life is based on that injustice.

The former is butting heads with their ego, which is hard. But the latter is worse, as it carries moral implications few have the fortitude to address.

[cristovau.livejournal.com]

This is just to play devil's advocate, but in some countries a summer home is a farming cabin used so urban families can bring in food.

I had two college friends who had beach houses. One family rented theirs out and it was actually a source of income. The other had been in their large family for years. Yes, both families were well-off, but having seen wealthy, I would not say wealthy. Mileage may vary, of course.

[scifantasy.livejournal.com]

at what point of material well-being does one become incapable of comprehending that there are people whose upbringing did not match theirs?

None.

By which I mean, I don't think it's about level, but exposure. We have a natural tendency to assume that others are like us until proved otherwise...if you don't ever confront the fact that people can be much worse off than you, face to face, not in the abstract "give money to others" sense, not through just hearing about it, but really seeing it, smelling it, tasting it (as it were)...you don't really understand.

(I'll not mention exactly when it was that I learned this lesson. Let's just say it was probably later than you would expect.)

[siderea]

By which I mean, I don't think it's about level, but exposure. We have a natural tendency to assume that others are like us until proved otherwise...


Right. It's not just that that people who grew up financially better off don't know what it's like to grow up in more straitened circumstances, people who grew up in poverty have no idea what it was like to grow up with more.

The difference is that the poor are not in a position to do harm to the less poor by establishing let-them-eat-cake public policy.

The similarlity is that this, too, can have tragic consequences for those with less. We live in a competitive society, and it's bad enough not to have money for resources for competing, but it's worse to not even know what resources you're missing. If you knew, at least you have a chance of gleaning them or fighting for them. But if, for instance, you never heard of "test prep", you won't seek free or subsidized test prep for your smart, promising kid -- but your kid will be competing for college admission against kids who had it.

[wcg.livejournal.com]

Well said. The more we live in enclaves surrounded by people just like us, the less we see that there are people profoundly unlike us.

[starcat-jewel.livejournal.com]

I agree with this, with the caveat that sometimes it's also about empathy, or the lack thereof. Ken Lay grew up dirt-poor, and all it did to him was make him greedy and selfish -- he had clawed his own way out of the swamp, but he had no empathy for those still trapped there. (And probably also a bad case of, "If I could do it, then anyone can do it," which doesn't allow for either individual variation or just plain luck.)

You have to be able to (1) see your own privilege, which can be a very threatening thing, and (2) see those without your access to privilege as actual people, not just spear-carriers in the story of your life. And a number of people fail on either or both of those points.

[serakit.livejournal.com]

I think there's almost always a way to explain-- but it took me two years of dating someone who grew up dirt-poor, with food-stamps and stuff, to begin grasp it, and even now we don't always have the same assumptions about things. It wasn't any big explanation all at once, either. It was a lot of little grocery shopping trips and conversations about the grocery shopping trips and what we did or didn't do while we were out before I began to grasp it.

I was also something of a weird case to begin with-- I don't think most kids whose families have money get brought up being frequently told that the next book you want or if you want Chinese food tonight, we will have trouble paying the electric bill. Even though that was never true, the book or dinner out was often given anyway, and the electric bill was always paid. I have no idea whether this made it harder or easier for me to grasp the idea of actual poor people.

[leanne-opaskar.livejournal.com]

Hmm. There may be differences in definitions here. Summer homes do not fall into my definition of middle class, and neither do food stamps. This divide you're speaking of is a difference between wealthy and poor, not of levels of the middle class.

I do think much of it is exposure. There are reasons I hang out on forums with a wide user base -- while I may not know these people in meatspace, I do know people who have spent years living in RVs, years living with only a generator for electricity -- or less!, people on fixed incomes, people living off their investments, and people who have extravagantly wonderful homes and land. ALL of them are hard workers. America lends itself to industry. I know very few slackers of any kind. (That may be a sampling issue.)

It has been my experience that everyone defaults to the assumption that others start at their level, until something proves otherwise. This has been true for people I know on all levels of income.

How to raise awareness? Talk about it. Put it out where people can see. Money is often a taboo topic. My family never talked about money outside the family. We were taught fiscal responsibility, but it was not acceptable to talk about money with other people.

[scifantasy.livejournal.com]

Another good point, yeah. Everybody (except the extremes) thinks they're "middle class"--it's just a matter of upper versus lower versus middle "middle class."

[browngirl.livejournal.com]

Talk about it... and also listen. I have run into SO many people whose response to hearing about an experience different to theirs is to try to explain it away and to call the speaker a liar, implicitly or explicitly... it's wearying.

[meranthi.livejournal.com]

It's interesting, the comments about summer homes. Technically, we had one. We went there every year for the entire summer. But I never thought of it as a summer home. That phrase has severe connotations of people languishing on beaches, sipping cocktails in the Hamptons... We just had a cabin in the middle of nowhere and we spent the summer hiking all the time.

Back to being a fish, I guess...

[grum]

I spent yesterday at work noticing how many of my patients have had teeth pulled after a 40ish man made an offhanded comment about his dentist remarking in surprise that he still had all 32. Yeah... it trended by clothing quality and repair/cleanliness and state vs private insurance.
I remember my dad gettung dentires in his 40s but never new anyone else who had visibly missing teeth... and once he got the full set replaced, my dads weren't visobly missing anymore either...

Not much directly on topic to say except that I was raised to believe that middle class started above any need based government subsidies and well below the parents didn't need to work anymore.... so foodstamps and middlr class don't fit together in my mental scheme. Are you willing to help me understand where you put the lower end of middle class?

I always had friends who were less economically stable than my family. But it didnt affect me much because I didn't have a generous allowance, so we were always doing free studf together and I thought that was just being kids. I did get forbidden to see one of my friends by my grandmother because she was "not like us". My parents did not enforce that ban.

[ladysprite.livejournal.com]

Hmm. I'll be honest; I considered myself lower-middle class instead of lower-class because, all things considered, we had a decent enough lifestyle.

We had a house. We had enough food to eat (yeah; it was subsidized by food stamps and reduced-price lunches, but there was enough of it). We had cable tv. I could sometimes get new clothes (from K-Mart, but I had friends who didn't own anything that didn't come from Goodwill). One summer I went to sleepaway camp. We had two cars.

So... I figured that was middle class. Lower end, yeah, but I didn't want to claim lower-class status; I figured that would be offensive to folks who didn't have the benefits and assets that I did.

[mindways]

That said... ultimately what I want is to understand, and figure out how to explain.

On the explaining front, I am given to understand that individual stories - narratives they can imagine - tend to move people far more than statistics.

Two things I've read you could point people at are Nickel and Dimed (which is more specifically about working at minimum-wage jobs, but covers a number of poverty traps in the process) and John Scalzi's Being Poor - both essay and comments. (Of which there's one that wisely points out that it's not a competition; just because someone else was worse off doesn't mean that one's experiences are invalid / shouldn't be shared.)

[johnpalmer.livejournal.com]

Sometimes there's an issue where people's minds kind of shut down a bit. There's a kind of "if that were happening, surely I'd know about it; I don't know about it, therefore..." thought process.

It's helped a great deal by silent assertions (reference: http://classiclit.about.com/library/bl-etexts/mtwain/bl-mtwain-myfirstlie.htm). Basically, "nothing wrong here, nothing worth talking about too much."

There was a game out there that helped - it was a game for a low income person on a strict budget, and emphasized the difficulty of getting by, and the choices that one needed to make. (If a person wasn't lucky, they could have a car breakdown and a pet get sick at the same time - what do they do? They can't afford to handle both.)

[ladysprite.livejournal.com]

There's a kind of "if that were happening, surely I'd know about it; I don't know about it, therefore..." thought process.

......whoa

I think you just gave me the key words I needed to see through a wall that's been making me miserable for the past.... 20? 30? years, on a completely different subject.

I need to think about this. A lot. But... thank you; a world of thank you.

Being Poor

[mamatiger.livejournal.com]

John Scalzi wrote this out of his own experience, it might give you something to point people at who don't understand the difference between "underprivileged" and "Not as rich as the Joneses next door."

It starts with: "Being poor is knowing exactly how much everything costs."

http://whatever.scalzi.com/2005/09/03/being-poor/

[pixel.livejournal.com]

I grew up thinking my parents didn't have as much money as other people we knew, because we didn't drive brand-new cars and we didn't fly off for vacation every year. We drove cars that were a few years old(bought new, but kept for 8+ years) and drove to vacations that involved camping or (rarely) a cheap hotel.

Looking back, my parents started out lower middle class and by the time my father passed away in 2000 were near the line of upper middle class/wealthy, and now my mom and her husband are solidly in the wealthy category. We drove the cars we did and took the trips we did to save money, not because the money wasn't there.

Money is very tight for Vikki & I right now, but we are within 10K of the "average" household income, so despite feeling pinched we aren't actually poor. And the fact I was able to use some stocks my late father bought me for a down payment on a house, I am head an shoulders above a lot of people.

I used to, by and large, be able to ignore my friends' income levels. I knew some had more money than me and some had less and that meant sometimes I was being treated to dinner and sometimes I did the treating. But it didn't really register much.

Managing to buy a house has suddenly made it starkly obvious which of my friends have money and which don't. And even more obvious in a lot of cases is the ones who have no concept of how much money they have.
I had a friend posting long sad rants about how tight money was and how they were so broke. Then two months later they are having the entire kitchen & bathroom of the NYC apartment they own renovated. And she is talking about how she is being thrifty by finding the shower faucet they want for "only $1,300".

[mermaidlady]

I grew up privileged and I know it. In a lot of ways it was luck. My parents decided to move to Westport *before* the housing prices skyrocketed. I'd say I grew up upper-middle class in a wealthy old-money town.

When public school was making me miserable, academically and socially, my parents were able to send me to a private school for a couple of years. I never asked but I'm pretty sure financial aid and/or loans from grandparents was involved.

Even when I was struggling financially in grad school, in debt and barely able to buy groceries, I knew I had the security net of my parents, if I really needed it. They wanted me to be financially independent, so I was going to be seriously desperate before I asked for money. And I did -- Selene needed emergency surgery.

Lucky. Privileged. And seriously grateful to my parents for suggesting I get a job at 14 instead of giving me an allowance like my classmates.

[mneme]

I grew up privileged (decidedly), but not rich (certainly middle class, though, despite--well, you'll see).

My father had two jobs -- he worked as a social worker for welfare, and taught (still does, actually) piano at a music school twice a week.

We did have a TV, but it was black and white for most of my childhood, and we did not have cable (broadcast in NY is pretty good, but we did lose access to the Muppet show for some critical time, and Dr. Who was always snowy). We did not have a VCR (we did have a small projector, and would watch silent home movies or Disney outtakes, and also had several record players and a reasonable collection of records, including 20-40 for me). Most meals were home-cooked, with the occasional treat of a resturuant meal or a trip to Chinatown. Most of my toys were provided by relatives rather than my parents, although they made sure to always have -something- as a gift for the various gift-giving holidays (i.e. each day of Chanukah and my birthday).

I'm assuming now that we were just within the threshold, but at the time I always assumed my father practiced some creative accounting. Either way, our reported income was such that I qualified for free lunches at school and free lunches (at the nearby school) during the summer, and my parents made sure I took full advantage of this (not hard, particularly since my allowance was under a dollar until I hit mid to late teenage years and other parts of the family started subsidizing it). Via stubbornness and willingness to find loopholes (and, presumably, my testing well, which makes sense given that I always had enough to eat and my parents were both college post-grads), I didn't attend the middle-to-lower class public school near our home -- instead, I attended public school at PS6 -- a school smack in the middle of the upper east side, meaning that many of my friends were at the very least on the lower end of rich.

Clothes...I was the first child, so I didn't get hand-me-downs. OTOH, many of my clothes were bought on sale, and often years in advance; my approach to clothes was very much "wear what you're given," not "you're getting older, time to go pick out new clothes". My younger siblings (much younger; I was 8 when my brother was born) did get hand-me-downs, though, including my old toys.

Vacations...were very much done on the cheap, but for a car-less urban family. When I was very young we'd go to a cheap-ish resort for a few weeks every year, then spend a few weeks in Atlantic City with my grandmother (who lived there). As I got older, this switched to camp + AC instead (I think camp may also have been subsidized; my parents were -very- good at finding ways to save money, which is likely why I grew up as privileged as I did).

Now? It's an interesting question. I don't save much (my savings are more than my annual salary, but not that much year to year; no more than twice my salary, though), and I don't buy a lot, but I do keep semi-up to date on the latest tech toys, and I go to a sizable number of conventions a year, some of which I have to fly to. I don't own a house or any other large property (aside from electronics, which depreciate incredibly fast; enough that they effectively have no resale value); I don't have any debt either.

I peg that as "upper middle class", but I could be wrong.

[crash-mccormick.livejournal.com]

I will confess to growing up upper middle
Class in NYC which would be rich in the other 99+% of the world but which just allowed reasonable pace and reasonable education and access to enough books. Things which I view as basic human rights --probably explaining why people consider me liberal even in my fiscally conservative stage. It helps in part that my dad was the usual by his bootstraps sort of story of first generation born in America and having work through the depression was ... Conscious of the value of money but also of the obligation of the fortunate to help the less fortunate.

[vettecat.livejournal.com]

It is interesting how definitions differ. I consider that I grew up middle-class. My parents both worked, and we lived in a neighborhood that became expensive over time but wasn't so when we moved there. Vacations usually consisted of visits to family. I went to summer camp for one month as a pre-teen and despised it. Most of my teen summers/weekends were spent working, the savings from which allowed me to buy a used car when I started college. I worked 20 hours/week while in college to pay my share of the tuition.

Now? I don't know what we are. If S. were able to find a decent job we'd probably be middle class. As it is we have a house but are sliding steadily deeper into debt. It terrifies me. If G-d forbid we hit a real crisis we have no savings to speak of. I'm just focusing on trying to manage month to month and hoping that things will improve somehow.

I know intellectually that there are people who are homeless and would view what we have as unimaginable luxury. But I also recognize that there's no way I can truly understand their situation without experiencing it, which I selfishly hope and pray will never happen.

I do think that some people have a blind spot in not recognizing that starting out with more means they are more likely to accumulate more from that starting point. I've met some of them. It's hard to explain that "I worked hard for what I have" doesn't equalize someone whose father was able to stake them to start the business they dreamed up in college vs. someone who couldn't afford college b/c they were too busy working 2 jobs to cover their rent. That's what really worries me - people who think that poor = lazy b/c they can't see that they started off higher on the staircase to begin with.