To think money ends poverty- not education, not mindset, not budgeting advice, just actual money?

[WildHazelCritic]

I keep seeing discussions about “breaking the poverty cycle” or helping people escape hardship and the solutions are always long-term or conditional: learn to budget, go back to school, change your mindset. But poverty is often just not having enough money. And people giving money - whether through better wages, benefits, or direct support, would make the biggest difference. AIBU to think we over complicate it because people are uncomfortable with the idea of redistribution or just giving people what they need?

Giving people in poverty a pile of cash and walking away is pointless. You need to give people the means to make their own money, and that is mostly through education.

Nail on the head. With an education you have more choices and options to work yourself out of poverty.

No, not everyone needs to go to uni, but we have a shortage of tradesmen and manual skilled workers - and trades like plumbers and electricians can earn very well, as can garage mechanics, telecoms engineers, train drivers, firemen, etc., basically anything that needs a level of skill and training, so that brings us back to education.

There is always access to water though, it may at first be a minuscule catch but we have to learn to invest.

That was my dad, he did just fine. The reality is his parents wanted him to do well and it was drilled into him that this was how you got out of poverty. He was clever and I’, not going to lie, having the gift of intelligence is underrated. He had a really hard poverty stricken childhood, I mean genuine poverty not UK poverty. He clawed his way up. He was never going to be rich but ended up probably lower middle class.

People are selling each other a poverty mindset, don’t try, don’t bother, wait for someone to give you something.

Yep,same. My Grandma was widowed young, she was very proud so the only government help she was willing to accept was a council house and the universal child allowance. She grew their veg in back yard, cleaned, babysat etc, anything to make end meet. My mum said she always are well, well dressed, no extras, but everything she needed. Encouraged to go to grammer, get qualifications

My other Grandma was an only child from wealthy parents, she got bought a house when married and given a large inheritance. Her husband was an alcoholic who couldn't hold down a job and drank all the inheritance away. My Dad was fed someday at all, neighbours and school fed and clothed them. He was kicked out at 15 with just clothes wearing, shoes with holes in, no coat in the winter. Sofa surfed, worked 4 jobs to get enough money to rent a room,gradually worked his way up and now well off.

Giving people money acheives very little in the long term to break the poverty trap.
Attitude and education make the difference, with the caveat that people do need decent housing for health and progress.

Exactly. The water sometimes needs to be looked for, it won't just appear in front of you, but it's there

I actually agree with this, some people are just not capable of raising kids and some people are disadvantaged through no fault of their own by impaired cognitive skills. Giving them more money is not going to help them improve their circumstances.

However there are a bulk of people who could do better. That study I posted showed that people who are poor do less hours than people who aren’t. It seems obvious but I think our welfare system is set up to discourage people working extra hours and getting to self sufficiency.

Years ago I was housesharing in a deprived area and I was in the garden where I overheard the neighbour's kid saying that he couldn't wait to turn 18 so he could 'get his giro'. So I'd say more education isn't a bad shout, this kid had obviously grown up in an environment where reaching benefits age was seen as something to aspire to

OP this can of worms is enormous and so multi-faceted in the modern world that really the old maxims need to be torn up and strategies re-evaluated.

Things have changed / are changing so fast on a global and personal level it's difficult to know where to start. I broadly agree with you by the way.

After WW2 the world said "never again" and actively sought, in most cases to re-build with a sense of optimism. Technological progress started to speed up - ironically a "benefit" of the military industrial complex. While some, inevitably were left behind, there was a collective will to improve things for everyone, and this saw "standards of living" change and broadly improve for most.

This started to destabilise in the 70s / 80s, IMO. The next generations were encouraged to be more individualistic; opportunities were to be pursued more ruthlessly, more aggressivey and with a probably misplaced sense of security due to the state provided safety nets like the NHS and the welfare state - which incidentally was not a purely altruistic innovation - it was partly brought into being to prevent civil uprising and ensure any army potentially needed in the future was healthier and more efficient.

We're now on essentially a downward trajectory as the wheels have fallen off the economic bus. Geopolitics and the stock market drive the ever changing cost of living.

People wave away the huge influence of big changes in "the world of work" such as how even previously "safe" careers such as law and accountancy and medicine are becoming dominated by AI etc, which means working one's way up to a good salary is now going to be more dependent on one's ability to embrace and manage the technology, rather than the skills involved alone. The speed of these changes is creating a psychological minefield, on top of the ever present "grind" to pay for the basics.

The "give a man a fish" analogy can be expanded. PPs have said there will always be water, and education is a fishing rod. However, if you have to pay for access to the water, and the fishing rod comes at a price that goes up on what seems like a daily basis, without being able to eat a fish to fuel yourself, you're on the back foot from the get go And then someone turns round and says "there's an app for that" and fishing on a personal basis becomes essentially obsolete.

On an individual level, grit and determination and hard work are of course admirable traits. However, how many threads have we seen on here where parents have worked hard, sacrificed everything, and the find their children going NC as adults because emotional well-being was neglected in favour of acquisition and aspirations. And achieving a work / life balance becomes more and more difficult.

Most people want a relatively simple life, but our "accelerated progress" and outsourcing of things like childcare etc have gone to an extreme because it's not longer about levelling the playing field, it's about profit above all else.

I am by no means advocating for a return to "trad wife" scenarios, no siree, out sourced child care is an essential tool to put women on a fairer footing. But it's a crazy making situation where a woman's salary is entirely swallowed up for five years paying in order to progress down the line, when down the line that progress might well be compromised due to yet more Technological advances.

Currently the cry is "it's all lack of resilience" and "adapt or be left behind" but nobody and nothing is invincible, and one personal catastrophe can tip a person into extreme financial hardship before you can draw breath.

Oops, I've done the word salad again - please feel free to add the dressing of your choice.

TLDR: it's extremely complicated these days, and there appears to be no easy solution on both collective and personal levels.

But we are all lucky enough to live in a country where we do all have access to the water, and there are free fish for the taking. They won’t jump into your net but they’re there if you make the effort to find them.

poverty often isn’t caused by some personal failing or fixable flaw. It’s caused by low wages, high housing costs, inaccessible childcare, unstable work, or a broken benefits system.

I don’t think you’re talking about actual poverty here. Potential poverty is often avoidable in childhood if parents make sensible choices because we have a support system and there are opportunities available, but it means supporting education, only having the children you can successfully provide for and avoiding unnecessary debt. There are some circumstances where poverty is unavoidable such as when disability is involved, but simply making use of the free contraception available would do the job in many cases.

Education can help in some cases but it doesn’t pay the rent today. Giving people money does help immediately - it gives them breathing room to make other changes. You can’t sort your life out if you’re constantly in survival mode.

The idea isn’t to get into poverty and then receive lots of free stuff so you can then sort your life out. The idea is to prevent it in the first place through education and good choices, therefore avoiding the need for someone else to pay your rent and ‘breathing room to make changes’. Education and good parenting avoids the need for changes because it enables people to set themselves up with a life they can independently support.

My husband grew up in extreme poverty and was out of work with no skills or qualifications of any kind when I met him. My dad didn’t want me to marry him as he thought I’d end up broke all my life married to a waster.

My husband got his first job as an office junior when he was 19 - the year we married - and for the next 12 years, studied at home and at night school to become an accountant. He’s 52 now and employed as a Finance Director.

Education is absolutely key to pulling people out of poverty but it’s not an easy fix and takes determination and hard work.

It’s education. Plenty lottery winners end up poor. Poorer homes usually have a “instant gratification” mind set that’s a proven barrier to education. You see it in the parents mindset with relationships, education and housing. It’s why poorer migrants do better in education as religion encourages delayed gratification. It also explains one of the reasons why social mobility was better in the 1950s, people didn’t want everything instantly.

I haven't rtft so apologies if someone else has said this already but I think choice of partner is important with regard to how successful people are at getting out of poverty. If you have a partner who is on board with your efforts and willing to make sacrifices, stick to the budget, not spend any extra money obtained but be willing to save and then, later, invest for the future, that can be half the battle.

If you have a partner who sabotages any efforts you make to improve your circumstances, you're stuffed!

This post seems deliberately obtuse.

As communism has shown over and over again, simple redistribution of wealth does not work for a variety of reasons and in a variety of ways.

Ultimately people need to be able to earn money or else their “non-poverty” is outside their control. Yes, some people lack the ability to ever earn a lot. But it is just possible that wages would go up if taxes went down. And of course the government could incentivise that happening. But benefits is better? The system is broken.

That's a fair point, but who then does the jobs that as the pp you quoted said "keeps the world turning by cooking, cleaning, driving, sweeping, marshalling, delivering, caring, entertaining and many other jobs which pay minimum/v low wages."?
Because someone needs to do them. They need to be done, they're essential so that other people can go and do the better paid jobs and so society can function.

We keep hearing how 'service is shit' in these areas, how social care is falling apart, how recruitment and retention in these areas is poor, how the people doing them aren't invested and don't care - so there's a demand for them to be done, and done well - but when the point is raised about them paying poorly and the effect that has the 'answer' is to educate yourself out of that - so who should be doing these roles if people should be educating themselves out of them? Who's going to provide the basic services that we need? And to a level that society feels is acceptable?

No one ever seems to have an answer for that, it's ignored in favour of rags to riches success stories or people that can't be bothered to better themselves, with a background of complaining these services aren't good enough.

I wonder if it's because we subconsciously know they're essential, we know on a societal level we can't do without them and are to some degree exploiting other people and don't want to admit that, because it doesn't feel nice, so we instead tell ourselves they're the problem instead, they're too lazy to work their way out while we rely on them to provide the services we need for wages that they can't survive on.

Thing is, in some communities claiming benefits instead of working is a rational choice. Loads and loads of people can only ever do minimum wage jobs. Absolutely nothing wrong with that and society would collapse without them. But, people who do them are often no better off financially than they would be claiming benefits. Plus, unlike there benefit claiming peers, they have to work full time in boring, hard, thankless jobs, they're not free to play video games and laugh with there friends all night.
The fact is, work like this does not pay.

So many people have degrees these days so education no longer automatically lead to a well paid job.

The issue in the UK is that we have extortionate housing/rental and utility costs so that even someone who earns an average wage can still have a poor quality of life.

Add to that the fact that some people have disabilities and/or long term health conditions made worse by poor access to mental health support and health care in general as the NHS is struggling to cope. Social care also lets down carers.

Wages are also not keeping up with inflation.

So poverty in this country is caused by many factors.

Usually politicians and the right wing media simplify things to fit their own agenda by repeating the concept that if people are poor it is their own fault for being lazy, work-shy and lacking the right attitude when it is obvious that this is not the case.

This type of propaganda then absolved politicians from having to fix housing, social care, the NHS and allows the right wing media rich mates to continue to pay staff poverty wage...

The UK actually has very low benefits & state pension when compared to the rest of Europe, but somehow the propaganda would like us to believe that people on benefits are living a life of luxury.

I couldn't agree more, noone can answer who is going to do those things.

The onus is always on people to 'better themselves' and the story is always to show rags to riches is possible so its your own fault. This let's us (at a society level) treat people who haven't bettered themselves badly because its there own fault.

Thank you - that is exactly the point I think needs addressing, but everyone keeps avoiding it. We need these job roles, they are massively underpaid and undervalued. These are the millions of working people in poverty in our country. They are working hard, long, unsociable, inflexible hours, but can't ever earn enough to feel safe and secure or save for their retirement or build a safety net.

You have described the problem perfectly.

I think that education is the most important thing but that doesn’t necessarily mean a university degree. We are desperately short of skilled trades people. I think people are conditioned to think they need to go to university. Really it may be pointless going to a poor university.

Essential jobs should be paid at more than minimum wage.
Free education at all ages should be available and free childcare so parents can access it
It needs to become completely socially unacceptable to spaff your free education, housing benefit, universal credit etc etc on bullshit and drag up feral scrotes.
We need a difficult conversation about genuinely supporting those who cannot contribute and making those who can contribute, contribute.
Governments all over the world need to bite the bullet and start properly claiming all the tax that isn’t being paid by wealthy individuals and businesses.

You need to be the change you want to see. You go to countries with a better standard of living and you see manners, no litter, no cheap nasty fast food shops and vape shops every 5 yards, no scrotes on nicked bikes, no clouds of weed everywhere, no dangerous dogs being walked in public places, no dog shit etc etc. I doubt their governments are spending billions on dog shit pickers - the people there do what they can for themselves and each other.

You have to have pride in yourself and where you live and a sense that you live with other people who deserve a level of basic respect. And that goes for people of all levels of income because rich people can be fucking awful in how they treat people with less than them and they could at least appreciate their good fortune.

So much of the problem of poverty come back to housing. We need council housing for working people. Unfortunately, try to build some and the comfortable nicely housed are up in arms and vigorously object.

The pyscology of money book, one of his first anecdotes is the rich flashy tech millionaire who looses his money and the steadfast cleaner who left a few million in his will because of steady investing.

This should be rolled out to all school children. Steady small amounts put into companies will grow

Secondly yes education is a way out but we have to remember so many dc are locked out of education because of small things they need to learn that our system isn't capable of giving them.

Eg phonics. Many dc with literacy issues won't get phonics and yet because of the the phonics test they are still forced because the test has he come more important than the actual point of leaning to read.
If they have inherited their parents literacy issues we are suddenly trapped in a cycle in which the child, school and parents are stuck in and there is no way out.
By a very young age that child's self esteem will be damaged making everything seem to hopeless and beyond them.

I agree the thresholds need raising which would help people get more money but also we can only target those most in need in the UK by addressing the education issue.

British citizens who have been here for generations will be getting left behind because of the aforementioned issues. However children of poor immigrants probably don't have these baked in literacy problems so they can access our eduction and move on

My poverty is caused by me becoming disabled. No amount of education will take away my disability.

A lot of employers don't want a disabled person, they may claim the do but it just doesn't happen.