canyonwalker: wiseguy (transit)
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.

canyonwalker: Mr. Moneybags enjoys his wealth (money)
A few years ago I wrote about the $400 challenge: the reality that 40% of American families couldn't afford a $400 emergency expense and would have to borrow money or sell items to cover it. Now it's being referred to as the $500 challenge. Well, I guess it makes sense with inflation the past few years that the challenge is 25% higher now. 🙄

The topic of the $500 challenge popped up in my newsfeed this week. The source of it is actually from last August, though. A survey by SecureSave, a company founded by financial advisor/personality Suze Orman, reported that 63% of US employees are unable to cover a $500 emergency expense. Example news coverage: NBC News, 31 Aug 2023.

"Well that's what credit cards are for," you might scoff. "Just put the charges on credit and pay them off over the next few months."

There are two huge problems with that reasoning. One, a lot of families live paycheck to paycheck. And that describes more than just "the poor". Many families in the middle- and even upper-middle class are living paycheck to paycheck. (More about the upper-middles in a separate blog.) For them there's no "Just charge it and pay it off over the next few months." Their budgets are already stretched, so an unexpected one-time expense means long-term consequences. I've written about how my parents went into debt that took decades to pay off, for example. Huge problem number two, it's so easy for an emergency to add up to $500 of costs nowadays it's not a matter of if you'll face an unexpected $500 expense, or even when an "Oh, shit!" thing happen, but how many times "Oh, shit!" will happen.

A few examples:
  • Even a minor illness that requires medical care can cost several hundred dollars to treat. This happened to my spouse a few years ago. Yes, we have insurance; we still paid hundreds out-of-pocket after insurance. And it was a minor illness.

  • Got pets? They get sick, too. When a relative's cat disappeared and was found a few weeks later acting strangely, they rushed out to the vet for a checkup. $500 later it turned out the cat's just pregnant.

  • When an appliance breaks it can easily cost $500 to replace or repair. And that's if it doesn't cause any damage when it breaks, like water spills from a busted water heater that damage flooring and drywall.

  • Car repairs easily go past $500. Each of the last two repairs on our Nissan, a $28k car when purchased new in 2011 (read: not fancy), cost over $1,400. Insurance repairs? Yeah, $500 deductible. Plus the costs of getting around without a car while the car's in the shop. Just replacing two tires on a fancier car costs can cost over $500.


canyonwalker: Mr. Moneybags enjoys his wealth (money)
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:

More Money, past a certain point of basics being covered, Doesn't necessarily Buy Increase Happiness*

*because once you've got the basics covered then things like purpose in life, self determination, and connections to other people start to become at least as important as increased material wealth


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!"

canyonwalker: wiseguy (Default)
Recently in my newsfeed I saw yet-another "Money Doesn't Buy Happiness" article. This one is based on an interview with Barbara Corcoran, star of the TV show Shark Tank. Example coverage: CNBC article 14 Jun 2023. These stories bother me because they're almost invariably written by or about people who are a) wealthy today and b) have never really been poor.

What's my stake in it? I grew up poor. Mind you, not poor-poor, but not higher than lower-middle class. We had food on the table but couldn't afford doctor visits except in emergencies, and I regularly wore shoes with holes in them. Although I'm doing much better, financially, in life as an adult after completing an advanced degree and building a well-paying career, I don't forget where I came from. I draw on that life experience to understand the challenges that people currently in poverty face. And it pisses me off when yet-another 1%er trots out that canard that poor people should be happier because "Money doesn't but happiness".

I call it a canard because while the statement "Money can't buy happiness" is literally true, the implied meaning, the meaning that almost everyone understands, is false. Money is actually pretty important to happiness in the 21st century US.

Consider these three basic determinants of whether a person can life a happy, satisfying life:

Money is critical to having a place to live— and not just having a roof over your head from night to night, but having certainty about your living arrangements. Couch surfing, where you depend on the generosity of friends week to week or month to month, creates a lot of stress.

Money is critical to having adequate food— and again, as with housing, it's also about food security. Not knowing if you're going to have money to buy food next week, or having to choose between buying food and being late with the rent check or utilities bills again, is hard.

Money is critical to adequate health care. Yes, you can show up at a hospital emergency room and technically they have to help you, but there's a huuuge gap between getting only minimal, life-saving emergency care and getting proper health care. You might not see that difference if you're young and healthy... but wait until you're older, or think about it again when you have a chronic health condition you can't afford to address.

It's pretty darn hard to be happy (in any non-self-deluded fashion) when you don't have certainty around housing, food, and health. And the reality for genuinely poor people in the US is they don't.

canyonwalker: Sullivan, a male golden eagle at UC Davis Raptor Center (Golden Eagle)
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....
canyonwalker: Sullivan, a male golden eagle at UC Davis Raptor Center (Golden Eagle)
The issue of Universal Basic Income (UBI) came up in a friend's blog recently. In responding to it I did a bit of reading on the topic— because researching actual facts rather than repeating what some radio/TV personality said in a mocking tone is how I roll— and realized I want to give it its own discussion in my blog.

UBI is a social welfare idea. It's the proposition that government provide all citizens a basic stipend for living. UBI is independent of wages or income earned through other means— meaning, unlike many welfare programs in the US today, you don't lose it if you get even a low wage job.

UBI may sound like some newfangled progressive/socialist idea, or like something that came out of the flower-power 1960s.... Both are right (sort of), and yet UBI is also older. The idea traces back to Enlightenment thinkers such as Thomas More and Thomas Paine. It came up again in the US in the 1920s/30s with proponents such as Louisiana governor and US Senator Huey Long. (Yes, America, there were "socialists" in the US long before AOC got branded one by Republicans looking to draw attention away from their neo-fascism.)

The idea of UBI gained currency again in the US 1960s Civil Rights movement, lasting through maybe the early 1980s. President Lyndon B. Johnson discussed it. Martin Luther King, Jr. discussed it. Even noted economist Milton Friedman discussed it.

Friedman and some other economists proposed a different name for UBI: the Negative Income Tax. The idea there was that the IRS would administer it, addressing the argument from critics that to implement UBI would require a huge and hugely expensive new federal bureaucracy. Everyone would get a certain amount refunded off their income tax; those who didn't earn enough to pay that much tax would effectively owe negative tax, drawing a net benefit instead of paying tax. "Negative Income Tax" is how I remember studying it in college economics classes in the 1990s.

So, the idea of UBI has been around for quite a while— and not just in the US, BTW. I've described the US history because that's what I'm most familiar with. It's a big idea... but would it work? Has it been tried anywhere? Actually, it has! Stay tuned for another blog....

UpdateRead about a 2-year experiment in Stockton, California

canyonwalker: wiseguy (Default)
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.


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