How can you tell if Americans are "poor"?

For white people particularly, the divide is educational, rather than straight income.

Black Americans overwhelmingly vote Democrat. Latinos and Asians are a bit more complicated.

American living in UK here. Yes, of course. America has really deep poverty, like unlike anything you see in the UK. It’s very obvious when people are poor.

But you don’t generally see tv shows with poor or working class people in the US, not like you might with more working class people here, like various soaps. Americans, even poor ones, are aspirational. They don’t like to think of themselves as poor or see that represented in film. There is a tendency to be obsessed to thinking you are more middle class than you are. Hence, why poor whites think Trump is just like them.

I grew up quite middle class, but come from a very working class family. My working class family members would never have called themselves ‘working class’ (even though they worked at Burger King or in a factory floor and lived in a trailer park or tenement housing). They would have seen themselves as middle class and watched tv and very much aligned with the middle class characters in it because that’s the ‘life’ everyone is taught to aspire to (even though generational poverty means none of them will likely ever leave the shitty areas we grew up).

Years ago I was reading a Michael Connelly novel ( his books are set in LA) which depicted a man hunting for a missing prostitute. He was searching her home which was described as a bungalow and it sounded quite spacious from the description.

I have family who grew up in a high rise on a notorious scheme plus my own background is also very 'working class' so reading this description of prostitutes living in bungalows (a bungalow is a sign of affluence in these parts!) boggled my mind. Then I watched some American tv prog showing run down bungalows crammed together and understood better.

Agree about Sprung! Thank you to whoever recommended it.

My children have very bad hayfever so I have been told to dry their clothes inside or tumble dry them

Which is a shame as I love the smell of clothes that have been hung on the line.

Fantastic post. Very insightful.

Well the electricity use of the dryer can't that low if it dries a load of washing in 40 minutes.

It's also completely unnecessary if you have outdoor space, the weather is right, are able bodied, it isn't pollen season, don't work long hours while caring for people with SEN who don't like line dried clothes. I can't believe we have whataboutery about putting the washing out. The collective impact of the fraction of all those millions of loads that could be line dried will be enormous.

Just for comparison, this picture illustrates my heritage as far as hanging washing out is concerned. You see it hung across the streets of back to back housing in northern England, which opens straight out into the street at the front and there is another property at the back.

So, while no-one does that any more, it's not in my upbringing to see lack of outside space or perfect weather as a barrier to hanging outside.

I'm also sure that plenty of people are able to walk short distances without getting attacked by bears, alligators or urban hoodlums nor freezing or boiling to death. Sometimes it will be nothing more than laziness that prevents them from doing so.

But I'd like to thank the poster who recommended the Sprung show, I've now watched most of it, and it's been great.

There's a Simpsons episode where the joke is "The Big Book of British Smiles" :-)

I think you need to think again.

www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/upshot/election-2016-voting-precinct-maps.html#6.07/37.53/-83.38

Not a lot of what you seem to have gleaned from this thread is actually true.

People choose to live in HOAs. The rest of us are happily living in areas where we do our own thing.

The assumption that tumble dryers have a decisive impact on the environment is a curious one. The dryer I use takes about 35-40 minutes to get a huge load dry - towels, bedding, jeans, sweatshirts, etc, all bunged in at once, and set to 'low'.

"The US" does not get a uniform number of sunny days across the board. The Pacific Northwest, for example, is notoriously damp and chilly. Additionally, some parts of the US are too cold to make outdoor drying of clothes practical in winter. Many people dry clothes on a basement rack.

As well as having several different climates, the US has several different cultures and hugely different environments, beginning with the basic urban-suburban-rural divide. Bigger metropolitan areas tend to have public transport and thousands of people who do not drive because they don't need to in their daily lives. The idea that people get looked askance at all over the US for walking or taking public transport is just plain silly.

You would be thought incredibly foolish if you were to walk somewhere in the current heatwave in the south west, or through the hills of Appalachia where you might be sharing the road with bears. Many parts of the US have snakes and/or alligators living in close proximity to people. Many have incredibly dangerous urban neighbourhoods.

Even aside from extraordinary heatwaves or wildlife or urban gangs, the humidity experienced in huge swathes of the US in summer is something Britons generally don't appreciate. Nobody likes to venture out and have their clothes soaked with sweat and stuck to them in minutes, and in winter the cold can be brutal across all but the southernmost states.

If you have the choice of a car, it's a practical alternative to weather-related unpleasantness. All the same, people do walk places, go out jogging, biking, walk their dogs, do yoga in parks, kids play in playgrounds and on tennis courts and pitches, etc.

I imagine the poor of America to be like in Dopesick.

Just the sort of place where I would HATE to live.

My DM's neighbour has a DD who lives in the US and hangs her washing out, because it is what we do here (NZ). Her neighbours think she is crazy!

I would refuse to live somewhere where I wasn't allowed to hang my washing out - I don't even own a dryer because I have no need of one.

Interesting thread.
Not being 'allowed' to hang your washing out, especially when the US gets a lot more sun than we do here, sounds positively Stalinist. Very strange for a country that values individual freedom, not to mention the impact on the environment if everyone is using tumble dryers. I would also hate not feeling free to walk to places rather than use a car, or to be looked down on for using public transport. Not surprising the US has such a high carbon footprint if this is really the case.

On the other hand the sheer amount of living space Americans have (outside the big cities) is amazing compared to the average in the UK and Europe. I remember a scene in Breaking Bad (which does actually show quite a range of rich, poor and middle class Americans) where Walter White and Skyler are buying their first home on a single schoolteacher's salary. It's described as a starter home, but is nevertheless a big suburban home with massive rooms, plus a garden and a swimming pool!

I did mention earlier that "Good Times" was a depiction of a poor working class family in the city. The show is from the 70s when you were more likely to find shows about low income people. The late 70s and especially 80s brought us things like Dallas, Falcon Crest and Dynasty so the complete opposite.

People would find it very weird to hang your underwear outside where neighbors can see if.

But why is that the side of America that is shown to the rest of us. I mean, even we know that most Americans don’t believe it. So in that way it is so bizarre, if it doesn’t represent the people.

Have you considered that it is because US T.V. shows and movies are made for American consumption and the shows are later picked up by other countries?

There are plenty of tv shows and movies that show the negatives of the U.S. and plenty that show positive sides.

The U.S. isn’t the only country where some of its people view their country as the greatest in the world. There are plenty of other people around the world who view their country the same way, many countries centre their own in their media (why wouldn’t they?) and if you speak the negatives about it, you’ll be told to leave or be told at least we’re not like xyz country (usually the States) which I’ve seen on threads here talking about the UK.

I find it fascinating that everyone depicting the poor in the US has illustrated the rural poor. Are we all ignoring the urban poor?

Watch The Middle.
Typical working class family in middle America (Indiana?). Their home and lifestyle would be typical of the working class. Poor and likely living paycheque to paycheque. However, still a step above the truly poor who survive on foodstamps.

There's definitely a culture of orthodontia (part of which is that teeth are a class marker so middle class and up parents are extra focused on it), but comparing to people I know and things I've heard about other countries, the UK and the US are extremes on a spectrum amongst high income countries. TBH the NHS is overly stingy with orthodontia in my opinion and waits as long as possible, when the treatment is more difficult. (Also the opinion of one of my relatives who is a UK dentist.) Meanwhile Americans who can afford it get orthodontia for minor corrections.

Amusing statement given the near inaccessibility of nhs dentistry.

I have found that American dentists are far more interventionist than even private British ones to the extent that virtually all of my classmates had orthodontics. Yes, having bad teeth is a social marker in America, but most Brits would have ‘bad teeth’ by American standards.

Yes, I agree. Not unlike Britain’s Tories + Reform who, if they’d stood together, would have received more of the popular vote than Labour earlier this month.

There's some truth to that but there's also a nice chunk of fairly well off suburbanites who are voting Trump because he nurtures their sense of cultural and racial grievance. And of course, the "forgotten America" mostly applies to white Americans. It certainly doesn't apply to Black or Native Americans who were left behind by economic change; they don't vote for him. The Trump GOP draws together several strands of people.

Your last two paragraphs are so accurate. When people on this site marvel at how anyone can vote for Trump; how Americans can believe the garbage spewed by Maga types; why they’re so beholden to cars, fossil fuels etc, they betray an ignorance about what daily life is like for many millions of Americans (which is fair! I don’t know anything about Hebridean life or Northern Irish life for example!).

That America is rarely seen on TV. The closest glimpse I’ve seen is True Detective, first couple of series. These places are remote; probably had industry and/or agriculture and/or fossil fuel exploitation as their core source of income until some decades ago; probably southern or north western or mid western; probably have churches of whatever denomination to center community. Since those industries died, these places and the people in them have been forgotten in the rush to make $$$$ out of financial services and then tech. Incomes are low, educational aspirations extremely low, employment rates low, quality of life low. These people are exploited by pharmaceutical companies, the military mine them for human fodder, churches bleed them dry. Drug and alcohol addiction are rife. Life’s heyday was back when white people ruled the country, the Cold War was on and communists of whatever colour were the devil, when work was abundant, standards of living could be expected to remain stable or rise. Patriotism was a duty and defined Americanism in such places.

That America has nothing whatsoever in common with the America of Sex and the City, Real Housewives, the America people see on TV.

Now, that America - and there are millions and millions of people like this - vote for Trump because he tells them he hasn’t forgotten them, he wants to make America great again (ie as it was back in that heyday). That he has a proven track record of doing absolutely nothing of the sort, in fact doing the very opposite, means nothing in the face of such a strongly felt hope and recognition he gives them. He makes them feel heard, and he gives them an identity again. The people you saw on Jan 6 descending on D.C. (the “swamp” (recognisable to southerners), full of “elites” (meaning educated coastal Dem voters) etc) in their pick up trucks and Hulk Hogan moustaches and wife beaters etc, those aren’t the Americans you see in Emily Goes to Paris. They’re an entirely different people, with different values and goals.

Like it or not, Trump has changed American politics for an entire generation or more. There’s no going back from what he’s done. Democrats have forgotten those Appalachians, ex miners, ex car factory workers etc, and so did old school Republicans. Both will pay the price for it. There are many many many reasons never to vote for Trump. But nobody else has spoken to that forgotten slice of society (and neither has Trump in reality, he’s just another billionaire telling them he loves them while he plunders them for their last $5, feasting on their desperation and hopelessness and lack of education, bleeding them dry - and when he’s rinsed them of everything they can do for him, he’ll drop them and retreat to his gilded life. But they’ll still believe him, because he made them feel like they matter).

Around here I would assume quirky/environmentalist. But that is because if you are poor here, you probably can't afford a house with a yard to dry things in.

I live in a "right to dry" state. This means that HOAs can't enforce rules that prohibit drying on a line outdoors. However, I don't know anyone who does. I haven't seen clothes drying on the line outside for many many years. I wouldn't necessarily think that someone who does is poor. I would more likely think it a bit quirky.