Tales & Trails of a Traveling Wiseguy

Panama Travelog #33
Panama City, Panama - Sun, 29 Dec 2024. 4pm.

Today we visited Casco Viejo, the old town section of Panama City. It dates back to plans laid out in the late 1500s, with the city as an actual thing (i.e., streets and buildings actually constructed, not just planned) appearing in the later 1600s.

We toured on foot, and by ourselves. We could have bought into a bus tour like sites like Tripadvisor and Viator recommend, but that's not our style. We don't want to travel in groups of anywhere from 12 to 35, with the speed of the group being limited by the least healthy, least curious about foreign culture and history, members. And to get the full experience of getting around in Panama City we didn't even hire a car to get there. We took the subway.

Panama City's subway is relatively modern and appallingly cheap. A flat fare of 35¢ gets you anywhere you want to go. There aren't a huge number of choices about where to go, though, as there are only 2 subway lines. We boarded from a station 2 blocks from our hotel and rode to the end of the line, which was about a mile from Casco Viejo. That was fine with us, as we considered the walk through the street markets and old town part of the sightseeing.

I've got to say, touring Casco Viejo was not particularly fun. Panama City is not a beautiful city to look at. Yes, when seen from a distance, such as from the window of an airplane, the city's many bank and residential skyscrapers create an impressive skyline. But down on the ground, the spaces between and beyond those skyscrapers look like shit. Even where our hotel is, in the banking district, the streets are a mess. You can't walk 10' without having to step over or around a massive pothole filled with water or someplace where a tile is missing. In the old town seemingly half the buildings are abandoned, their roofs collapsed and once-stylish balconies supporting by scaffolding so they don't collapse, too, and kill pedestrians on the street. It's a shame because many of these buildings show beautiful architectural details from the late 1800s/early 1900s but look like they've been left to rot for at least 50 years.

For lunch we found a humble-looking taco shop in one of the squares. It was next to a total tourist-trap looking restaurant, which we were not going to eat at. Unfortunately it was owned by the same people who run the tourist-trap-looking place. It was the catch-tourists-who-try-to-be-smarter trap. 😖 A plate of 3 small tacos cost $15, a bottle of domestic beer that I could buy at restaurants in El Valle for $2-3 cost $8, and service sucked. But Tripadvisor is full of superlative reviews raving about "best service" and "delicious food". I guess places like that poll well with White Midwesterners who normally travel with tour groups.

Last week I wrote about the "Money Doesn't Buy Happiness" canard. I called it a canard because while it's literally true in the strictest sense— happiness is not a good that can be bought and sold— its widely understood meaning is grossly misleading to the point of being functionally false. Money may not literally buy happiness but, in a mature capitalist system such as ours, it's necessary for the basics of life. As I explained, try being happy without adequate food, shelter, clothes, or health care!

Or, to put it another way, one of the rejoinders I like to "Money Doesn't Buy Happiness" is "Money Doesn't Buy Happiness, but Poverty Doesn't Buy a Damn Thing!"

As canards go, "Money doesn't buy happiness" is a pretty big one. Basically much everyone (everyone who's fluent in conversational English, anyway) has heard it. Generally for a saying to become that widely known, and to endure for so many years, there has to be some sense, some particular context, in which it's true... or at least kind of true. It's got to have a kernel of truth somewhere inside, surrounded by qualifiers and clarifications that indicate that correct context— except nobody bothers with those because, let's face it, if it's too long for a bumper sticker, TLDR.

Here's how I'd rewrite the saying to make explicit the generally unwritten assumptions and qualifiers that make it true:



Read the fine print of what I wrote (yeah, that's quite a bumper sticker!) and what you'll see is that the proper use of "Money Doesn't Buy Happiness" is as advice to people who are already wealthy. Indeed, that's the substance of many of the advice articles and self-help books about why people shouldn't worry about wealth. They're full of anecdotes about envy, lifestyle inflation, etc. How once you can afford a vacation home, a boat, or a yacht you're not necessarily happy because there's always someone with a bigger vacation home, a bigger boat, a bigger yacht... or two yachts!

Well, you know what? That's great advice for people who can afford vacation homes and yachts. It's advice for the 1%. There's not enough money in targeting books and articles at just 1% of the country, though. Thus we get them pointed at the broad middle the the US, the middle and working classes.

Along with that shift in the target market comes a shift in how the advice is framed. Instead of being a self-help tip to avoid overindulgence it becomes a ridiculous sour-grapes canard. "Oh, poor people and those struggling to get by, you don't really want wealth. Rich people are miserable, too!"

Yesterday I wrote about the idea of Universal Basic Income (UBI). I teased at the end that it's not just an idea, it's something that's been tried... if only on small scales. One of those experiments happened near me, in the city of Stockton, California.

The Stockton Economic Empowerment Demonstration (SEED) program ran from 2019-2021. It gave 125 residents $500/month for 24 months. Recipients were selected at random from neighborhoods at or below the city's median income. The cash was completely unconditional, with no strings attached and no work requirements.

What were the results? I summarize a few below; you're also welcome to read for yourself. Studies commissioned by Stockton are linked to at the program page above. In addition there was also a variety of reporting on the program. Examples include a March 2021 article in The Atlantic, an NPR News article from 3 Mar 2021, and a KQED News interview transcript from 23 Mar 2021.

Key findings I found important about SEED's experiment with UBI:

• UBI increased recipients' earnings from wages. This completely refutes the standard canard of anti-welfare conservatives that pretty much any form of public assistance discourages work and simply promotes laziness and creates dependency. Program recipients used the $500/month stipend to bring stability to their lives that enabled them to seek higher paying, full time work instead of subsistence level, part-time jobs.


• Recipients by and large did not use UBI money to buy alcohol, cigarettes, or drugs. Only 1% of the money tracked went to such things. The majority was spent on essentials such as food, rent, utilities, and transportation. This contradicted another standard anti-welfare canard that a poor person given a handout will just turn around to use it on drugs, tobacco, or booze instead of something productive.


• Recipients enjoyed improved physical and mental health.

Great results. Now if only data could change people's minds....

An article in Buzzfeed today caught my eye. People Are Revealing Their Unwritten Rules Of Being Poor, And It's A Must-Read If You've Always Lived Comfortably (9 Feb 2021). It's a listicle drawn from a Reddit discussion this week. One redditor asked people who grew up poor, "What were the unwritten expectations of your world growing up?"

The article caught my eye because I grew up in a poor family. Granted, we weren't the poorest of the poor. There was always food on the table at mealtime, though it was almost always cheap, and visits from the sheriff to serve warning of eviction for unpaid bills were rare. Still, at least ten of the rules on the list resonated as lessons I very much learned growing up. Here are Five Things: four rules from the list, plus a bonus one I'd add to the list myself.

1. "Take care of your stuff and keep it nice because you're not getting more of it if you break it."

I'll start off with a rule that doesn't sound like a bad one to live by. Who'd argue against taking care of your stuff? The downside is the stress that comes from knowing that however minor a thing is, you need to treat it like gold because you may not get another one. That creates an anxiety about even using a thing that's consumable, like a box of chalk. As a 7-year-old given a box of chalk on a summer day I had to consider how much chalk to use drawing hopscotch boxes, sidewalk art, etc. vs. how much to save for the next week and the week after— because I knew I was only going to get one box of chalk all summer. And then imagine how disheartening it was to see that, while I wasn't looking, my little sister picked up a rock and crushed my chalk into crumbs because she didn't understand anything beyond the current moment.

2. "If your shoes don't require duct tape, you don't need new shoes."

As a kid I routinely wore clothes until they had holes in them. There wasn't money to replace them sooner. That went for shoes, too. My shoes always had holes in the toes, or the sides, or the soles, or all three, before being replaced. We had no duct tape, though— that was too much of a luxury! (My parents believed it was a gimmick and we'd just waste it. They obviously paid no attention to how I rationed chalk!)

I remember running for Student Council President in 5th grade and standing up on the stage in front of the whole school— 500 students— to give a speech about my candidacy, with my toes literally poking out through my sneakers on both feet. I got new shoes the day after that because my mother had come to school to see my speech and was mortified about my toes poking out right where everyone could see them up on the stage.

3. "Keep your aspirations to yourself. Telling anyone in your household/social strata about your plans to get out and do better may be met with bitterness and downright ridicule. People will call you uppity for wanting to go to school or stupid for having a career goal that isn't modest and local and vaguely dead-end."

My family lived in a working class neighborhood. That made living near the poverty line less of a contrast because most of our neighbors weren't far ahead of us. Still, they tended to have things we did not. Starting with shoes without holes in them. One thing we did have, though, was a middle class mindset. Education was always valued in our family, and going to university to earn a degree and get a good job was always the expectation. That was different from many of our neighbors, who had a just-get-by attitude toward life.

The just-get-by types were hostile to anyone aspiring to do better than them. As if to justify their kids' C- grades and their dead-end, subsistence jobs they sneered at anyone excelling academically. Yes, I said their kids... because this derision came not just from my childhood peers but their parents, too. Adults in my neighborhood bullied me when I earned the top score on a standardized test in my elementary school. So, like the rule above says, I learned to keep my mouth shut about academic accomplishments and career goals.

For the record, I didn't boast about my score on that test— I couldn't, because I was actually the last to know! The scores went straight to our parents, and my mom told other parents because she was so proud of me. I didn't learn about how well I'd done until the neighbor-lady across the street sneered at me in front of her kids, my friends. "I'll bet you feel you're so much better than everyone else, Mr. Smarty-pants! I'll bet you think you're a genius. Do you even know what an I.Q. is?" I didn't; I was 8. "Well, you can't really be that smart, then," she taunted. Yes, a grown-ass woman bashing an 8-year-old for doing well in school!

As my accomplishments grew over the years I grew ever more distant, personally if not physically, from the dullards, slackers, and proud idiots in my neighborhood. Like the rule quoted above implies, I stopped talking to any of them. We had nothing in common anyway other than mathematically similar addresses. By that point I didn't even go to the same school as I had tested into a magnet high school for science and technology.

Later, though, the sense of alienation turned into melancholy. Having less and less in common with anyone from my neighborhood became sad. I remember bumping into Kevin, one of my best friends from 4th or 5th grade, when I was 19. I had finished 2½ years of college and was working a professional job. I owned a new car and wore a suit and tie to work as a systems analyst for a big company. Kevin worked at a local gas station as a mechanic's helper. Understand, I respect people who work in skilled trades. It's honest work, it takes real skill, and it can pay enough money to support a family. But Kevin wasn't a mechanic; he was an odd-job boy. He did menial stuff like oil changes and mounting tires. He wasn't in a training program or apprenticeship to earn a certification; he was just floating along on a slightly-above-minimum-wage salary, hoping— with absolutely no concrete plan— that something better might come along some day. Kevin, who'd been like the big brother I never had when I was a kid, had become like my ne'er-do-well cousin.

4. "Going to the doctor isn't an option until your fever is sustained at 104, a bone is broken, or the tooth rotted and won't fall out on its own. I am in my late 30s with full insurance and still have a hangup about going for medical care."

Trips to the doctor were rare growing up in my family. Like the quote above suggests, unless it was an acute problem like a 104° fever or a broken bone, the rule was to tough it out for a few days and see it goes away on its own.

Part of the situation, obviously, was that medical care was expensive relative to my family's means. My dad had insurance through his job but it was essentially a high-deductible plan. The out-of-pocket for a simple office visit was equivalent to a $100 co-pay in today's (2021) dollars. At $100 a pop, when you can't even afford to keep your kids in solid shoes... yeah, you're not taking your kids to the doctor for every scrape and cough.

While the cost of medical bills was part of the limitation it was not the only part. The other part was the cost of even getting to the doctor's office in the first place. That's where I'll add a rule of my own to the list:

5. "Going anywhere is difficult, and if one goes, everyone goes."

How do you get to the doctor's office? You drive, right? What if you don't have a car? For many years my parents could afford only one car. My dad needed it to drive to work. That meant doctor visits were only for illness severe enough to be worth the cost and hassle of hiring a taxi (waaay different in the suburbs from big-city business/entertainment districts) or begging help from a neighbor.

Next, what do you do about the other kids? Even when my mom had a car available, the challenge still was having to pack up the whole crew. For many years my parents couldn't/wouldn't leave us home alone because either the oldest wasn't old enough or the youngest was too young. Babysitters were expensive (remember, we didn't even have hole-free shoes), and you know what happens when you drag a bunch of kids to the waiting room at the doctor's office? At least one of them who wasn't sick before catches something from all the kids coughing, sneezing, drooling, etc. while waiting for an hour or longer.

The hassle factor of taking the whole family anywhere limited other activities, too. Things as simple as a trip to the public library became major efforts that were only granted a few times a year. Drop the older kids off at a movie? Ha ha, the younger ones would be in the car and would spend the whole rest of the day crying once they saw their older siblings were getting to go to a movie and they weren't. Join a sports team? Your practice schedule needs to work for everybody, because they're going to be sitting in the car at the ball field 3 nights a week while you're at practice. Past some point you get so tired of hearing, "No" or, "Yes, but..." with an untenable requirement, you stop asking.