Is is true third-world poor buy TVs instead of education?

November 15, 2009 10:20 AM

I heard once that many people living in poverty tend to make more luxurious purchases, such as televisions, as they see simple luxuries as way to enjoy their life in a way they deem possible. Is this true? Can anyone point to a source?

The general idea was that rather than gets their hopes up by pursuing education or a quality home they would save up and buy a TV for their shack, etc. This seems backed up by the number of antennas and satellite dishes always seen in photos on the Indian slums and Brazillian favelas but I cannot find a source to attest to this sociologic habit.

posted by UMDirector to society & culture (33 comments total)

I think this is called conspicuous consumption.
posted by The Toad at 10:22 AM on November 15, 2009

"How the world's poorest really spend their money."
posted by Jaltcoh at 10:27 AM on November 15, 2009

This is more about them having just given up on having long term hopes or dreams of improving their lives vs. impressing the neighbors. It's - "Our lives will never truly get better so we should just enjoy the small luxuries in life like watching tv." This ends up being a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy, not necessarily for each individual person,but for the poor society as a whole.
posted by UMDirector at 10:27 AM on November 15, 2009

I've read about this phenomenon more in the context of "smaller" luxuries - why, perhaps, the poorer you are in America, the more likely you are to smoke cigarettes, eat fast food, etc. Charles Karelis wrote a book about it called "The Persistence of Poverty" - here's a blog post about the idea: http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2009/10/the_persistence_of_obesity.html
posted by downing street memo at 10:28 AM on November 15, 2009 [1 favorite]

I have no scholarly resource to back this up, but I work with a lot of poor people and my off-the-cuff hypothesis is that the poor often spend surplus money more extravagantly than many more prosperous people would.

It appears that the poor are skilled at getting by on very little; their "default state" is to have little extra money, so they develop ways of coping with this.

So when they get what to them is a windfall, there is little apparent reason to save it, since they manage to get by on very little.

Example: A young woman, who is a high school dropout with a minimum wage job and a child she had out of wedlock, got some kind of unexpected check and went on a shopping spree, spending $700 on clothes. I am a graduate school educated person with a damned good job, and I would never spend $700 in a shopping spree.

My theory is that, because she can get by without that $700, the pleasure she is afforded by a shopping spree exceeds any pleasure or utility she would have gotten by hanging onto the money. Her perception may have been that she didn't need the $700---she got by alright without it---so it was not imprudent to spend it.
posted by jayder at 10:48 AM on November 15, 2009 [6 favorites]

My wife works with new immigrants, baby-mommas, the recently-out-of-prison, and the truly destitute... basically anyone that qualifies for free money. In order to qualify for free money—in this country, in this state—you have to have nothing. For instance, they've started cracking down on people coming in with cell phones—the people waiting for assistance learned quick and now they say they're "borrowing" one from a friend.

Anyway, one of the things she recently told me that just blew my mind, yet at the same time made perfect sense, was that what a lot of people in the shelters do is, once a month when (/if) they get their social security check they'll go and rent a hotel room, getting a bunch of beer, a couple fistfuls of beef jerky, a couple packs of cigarettes, and just go nuts--blow it all in a weekend. That money, while not a lot, could conceivably keep them living (not great, sure, but better, certainly) throughout the month, yet they just splurge on McDonalds Big Macs and 40s and in two days go right back to being flat-on-their-ass-broke.

I presume because two days out of thirty filled with hotel rooms and cheap hookers gives you more to live for than 30 days of slightly-less begging-but-still-in-abject poverty.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 10:59 AM on November 15, 2009 [5 favorites]

My theory is that, because she can get by without that $700, the pleasure she is afforded by a shopping spree exceeds any pleasure or utility she would have gotten by hanging onto the money

True, but you can also buy a new pair of pants or shoes (or underwear or socks) whenever you need them. For someone who is mending, doing without, or buying clothes at a thrift store, that "shopping spree" might also simply be a lot of pent-up need being satisfied in what could be perceived as a "frivolous" way. There comes a certain point where you're wearing visibly worn, mended, stained, or ill-fitting clothes because you have to. I have to say that were $700 to fall into my lap right now, after not having been able to buy myself new clothes for more than a year (I just used shoe-goo to glue the soles back on my work shoes) I'd be sorely tempted to spend quite a bit of it on some new clothes that didn't have holes, stains, and were at least slightly closer to the current fashion.
posted by anastasiav at 10:59 AM on November 15, 2009 [18 favorites]

Also, comparing the costs of the luxuries to the kind of investment required to actually improve one's life may not be appropriate. You cannot really improve your earning potential much or move into a better home with just the cost of a TV and a satellite dish. The TV is a single (though expensive) cost, while the education or especially improved housing are longer term expensive commitments.

Many disenfranchised persons spend enough on a hotel room to live in for one week to rent an apartment for the month if they could get one. If you are too poor to have a kitchen food is more expensive than it would have been if you could cook for yourself.

When you are struggling severely enough, fast food and movie tickets and drinks at a bar etc. are not just luxuries, they are also relatively inexpensive coping mechanisms, the alternative may be doing without and saving money, or it may be debilitating depression or a mental breakdown etc.

Another factor to consider is that lacking money is a cause of severe stress, and stress tends to prevent clear thinking; people tend to make poor decisions when they are desperate, financially and in general. Even the kindest most levelheaded person can be an irrational self destructive sociopath under the right(?) level of stress.
posted by idiopath at 11:03 AM on November 15, 2009 [5 favorites]

Civil_Disobedient: "I presume because two days out of thirty filled with hotel rooms and cheap hookers gives you more to live for than 30 days of slightly-less begging-but-still-in-abject poverty."

That rings true from my experiences working day labor. I was never one for inebriation or paying for sex, but this was definitely the lifestyle for most of us. Sometimes that excess and waste of resources seems to be what people need in order to have the willpower not to give up on life altogether.
posted by idiopath at 11:09 AM on November 15, 2009

The other thing to keep in mind, at least for the poor in the US, is that they frequently have trouble keeping the things that they do have. For instance, I owned the same TV for over ten years. During that time I worked with many people in pretty abject poverty who had to keep re-buying TVs because they would get put out by a boyfriend or girlfriend, get evicted, have to move precipitously. My TV purchase was a one time deal, and I got to amortize it over all the years of owning the TV so that it came out to ~$30/year. Many of my clients spent ~$200/year on TVs.
posted by OmieWise at 11:32 AM on November 15, 2009 [1 favorite]

More anecdotal evidence...

I was on welfare and food stamps; I now make more than the median income for my area. When I was on welfare, I was very present-minded. If I have enough money to buy food and pay my rent today, I'm good -- next week, let alone next month, is just some other time. On welfare, at least fifteen years ago, you may not save money -- if you do, if your bank accounts ever contain more than one month's expenses, that amount is deducted from your next check. The welfare worker looks at your bank accounts each month; she does not look at your purchases. Buying consumer goods with any windfall is just good sense, under those circumstances. And I can tell you, it is a hard habit to unlearn.
posted by Methylviolet at 11:40 AM on November 15, 2009 [11 favorites]

Expanding on what idopath said: if you are poor, there is likely to be more than one thing standing between you and the "good life". With a bit more money, you might be able to get a better apartment, say, but you'd still not have job security or a degree or health insurance or... So your situation isn't much changed unless you can solve all the problems, all at once, which is unlikely.

i'm paraphrasing from an article I read which uses the analogy of a dented car. If your car has one dent in it, fixing that dent will get you back to an unblemished car, so it's probably worth doing. If your car has 30 dents, fixing one dent will simply leave you with a car that has 29 dents -- not much of a change, so probably not worth your money.

Those of us who are better off are more likely to be in the one-dent situation, and we'll (wisely) use our money in 'responsible' ways. The point is that the poor, who are in the thirty-dent situation, may in fact get little relative benefit from spending their money in 'responsible' fashion, and so could actually be correctly maximizing the utility of their money by spending on small luxuries.
posted by wyzewoman at 11:55 AM on November 15, 2009 [6 favorites]

An article in either the Washingtonian or the Post in the last few years followed D.C. sanitation workers on their daily duties. The workers concurred that they consistently saw more discarded packaging from consumer goods in poorer neighborhoods than in wealthier neighborhoods. I regret that I do not have a citation for this.
posted by jgirl at 12:08 PM on November 15, 2009

Ruby Payne addresses this phenomenon in A Framework for Understanding Poverty. She compares the mindsets and motivations of people in poverty, the middle class, and wealth.
posted by SamanthaK at 12:28 PM on November 15, 2009

In Ireland we talk about someone having a "fur coat and no knickers".
Money may not buy happiness, but it's a lot more bearable to be dirt poor with nice stuff than dirt poor without nice stuff.

I work with people on welfare. As stated further up, you have nothing to gain by having money left over. This is a problem also where people are underemployed. If you earn some money, it gets taken from the next cheque. That said, where I am, this type of conspicuous consumption is usually debt financed.

For people who have a longtime welfare habit (here, different countries will have different rules) debt isn't too much of a deterrent. If you are in debt, your payment is deferred if you are on welfare. If you are no longer on welfare, but instead earning, the debt-enforcement-agency will garnish you to their established minimum-living-level. This level is however somewhat below the line that welfare draws, meaning you end up actually making a loss on doing a days work. Very hard to motivate people towards employment when it is actually a losing game. Unfortunately it is possible to get unsecured, extremely aggressive small loans here by just sending a text message. This is especially devastating for the young people I work with.
posted by Iteki at 12:36 PM on November 15, 2009 [2 favorites]

I don't know if it's true or not, but be careful about looking at international examples through a western lens. Your example of India's satellites may not be how it looks. In Egypt, if you can find a cheap/used TV you can by a satellite and converter for about $30 and there-after it is free for basic service. It's not so much a luxury as a small price to pay for a significant reward (assuming you want to watch TV). Whereas buying a better house or an education is a pretty impossible goal for economic and cultural reasons. And there is no debt financing system other than borrowing from your neighbours so it is unlikely that they've gotten it on credit, and can't get land, a house, or education that way either.

It is an interesting question though. I work with a number of low income folks and if you've come to the conclusion that it is inevitably the way your life is going to be, why not make that life a little better and not save up for some goal you don't think you'll ever reach.

World over, money is not the only barrier to education and a better life.
posted by scrute at 12:49 PM on November 15, 2009 [1 favorite]

More anecdata:

I've been poor (in the first world sense) and the thing is you get so damn sick of doing without all the time. Especially for the little things* that everyone else seems to take for granted. When your life seems like an endless grind and you don't see it getting better anytime soon, why wouldn't you take comfort where you can?

*Seasonally appropriate clothing, convenient transportation, quick food choices, entertainment
posted by Space Kitty at 2:03 PM on November 15, 2009 [8 favorites]

Relevant: Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs^.

You also need to think in context. To a middle-class person, a TV is usually one more TV -- an alternate piece of consumer technology in a house jammed with them. To a person in poverty, a TV is a powerful connector to the world outside. For the former, buying a TV might improve their life, oh, 5%, but for the latter, the same television from the same store might improve their life by 25% or 50% (hand-wavey numbers for illustration). The same with a cell phone -- remember the homeless (?) guy whom Michelle Obama served? There are a lot of reasons someone at a soup kitchen might need a cell phone, starting with being able to accept calls from employers. That cell phone isn't a luxury, it's their one empowering tool, short of owning a car.

Indian slums and Brazillian favelas

There are other reasons people are trapped in these environments, including caste and class as well as restrictive property systems that create obstacles to equitable land ownership. Also, the Western concept of home ownership is somewhat skewed. Given the housing bubble, it's not at all clear that the average (or certainly average low-income) American benefited from the push towards expanded home ownership. There may be ways to pursue it that would be more certain in terms of outcomes, but the existing system is all but set up to bleed money from someone until they lose their job, at which point the property reverts to the investors (bank) and is resold. The same person may well have saved money by renting. In other words, unless you have many other benefits of a middle class lifestyle and career, chasing equity can involve unacceptable risk.

Just trying to challenge some of your assumptions.
posted by dhartung at 2:44 PM on November 15, 2009 [1 favorite]

One of my friends who grew up poor says that the phenomenon that poorer people will, for instance, buy a TV with a windfall instead of getting teeth or a car fixed is that the TV is not only an investment in entertainment but a durable good: it sits there in your living room. Otherwise the money disappears without making any appreciable dent in debt, or stretching far enough to fix everybody's teeth; or fixes one thing on an old car, which responds by breaking down in a different way. Viewed through a certain lens, it's a rational choice.

I don't know how that tracks to the third world, though, which you mentioned in your question, and I don't have a citation.
posted by not that girl at 2:57 PM on November 15, 2009 [2 favorites]

wyzewoman, have we met? You phrased that very well.
posted by not that girl at 2:58 PM on November 15, 2009

In Ireland we talk about someone having a "fur coat and no knickers".

In the South where I live, you sometimes hear the reprehensible term "nigger rich" used to describe a poor person going on a spending spree on luxuries with funds that would more wisely be saved. I hate that phrase.
posted by jayder at 3:15 PM on November 15, 2009

Also, describing a TV as a "luxury" is a little orthogonal to the experience of really poor people, in my opinion. In Brazilian favelas, at least, TV is the most affordable source of news, information, and entertainment, and people generally watch together in groups in a really sociable way. It's not like they have newspapers/magazines/books/Internet access/tickets to movies/PlayStations/musical instruments/stereos.
posted by Sidhedevil at 3:17 PM on November 15, 2009

To add to what others have said regarding poor people spending more on luxuries: wealthier people can afford better quality items, which don't wear out as quickly, whereas when you're poor and buying the cheapest tv, clothing, etc you are not getting the best value for your money, and end up having to buy more of these things sooner.

Sam Vines Boot Theory of Economic Injustice
posted by weesha at 4:02 PM on November 15, 2009 [3 favorites]

Anecdotally, this is definitely true of a close family member of mine. She never saves anything and uses money she doesn't have on things like TVs and clothes and furniture.
posted by Nattie at 5:59 PM on November 15, 2009

Paying to imagine for a few hours or days that you have a future is a big deal. A small example of a "foolish" expense: Rich people mock poor folks who buy lottery tickets knowing they have a better chance of being struck by lightning. But they're not buying the chance to win. They're buying the chance to hope they can win.
posted by shetterly at 7:29 PM on November 15, 2009

Like Methylviolet, I was on food stamps and rental assistance for a while. I was also working for most of that time, too. It was a careful balance to work and not lose the assistance in a non-proportional way. They look at your bank balance and your pay stubs and that's it.

(This turned out very long, and I apologize, but I lived month to month like this for several years. I don't have any cites, just an anecdotal tale. I understand if the mods choose to delete it.)

I wanted to be present for my children as much as possible, so I worked part-time once they were in school. Child care would take a pretty big bite out of my take-home pay, even if I was paying another single mom for a couple hours a day, which I did for a while.

In my state, you tend to get the renewal paperwork on a Tuesday, and the deadline printed on the forms is the immediate next Sunday. There's no mail drop at the office, so no way to leave it with them over the weekend. My work schedule is Monday through Thursday as a direct result of this. Gave me a few days to gather the paperwork from my bank, print out my pay stubs, go by the courthouse to prove I was still not getting child support, and then take the forms directly to the office on Friday, where I would have to insist that they put the Date Received stamp on every page, for fear I would have the budget for food delayed a month. (Didn't get one page stamped on one occasion, and that's exactly what happened.) At one point, I would have to take the hour-long bus ride each way, pay a friend to drive me, or if desperate, get a taxi to the DHHS office. DHHS offices are not known for being in easily reachable places.

The reason I mention all of this is to show that the process isn't super easy. And I have a college education. It terrifies me to think how hard it must be for people with little to no education. I realize they have advocates, and I'm glad. But, to them, the idea of getting off of the assistance must seem huge.

So, I can see how it would be very tempting to spend any windfall on luxury items that people who aren't in that position might not understand. I know people personally who do this, and although it isn't how I handled it for my household, I can almost see why they do it. Any bit of joy. Anything not day to day. Anything.

These are the same sort of people who use food stamps for foods that are pre-prepared. I understand that, too. I've always tried my best to buy food that I had to make from scratch. Admittedly, it was mostly because that's the sort of food I prefer, and I enjoy cooking. It was nice, even after working that day, to come home and make a good, healthy meal. It also tends to be less expensive, if you are a careful shopper. So, it was both practical and selfish. A lot of people just aren't wired that way. They want food to be easy and fast. They don't realize how much of your food budget you can save, and maybe they never learned the necessary skill of cooking. It happens. I'm lucky and my parents taught me well.

When it came to luxuries, luckily, I have family and friends who love us and could help some. They didn't pay my bills and let me slack, but when I didn't have a TV seven years ago, my parents bought us a TV and a VCR as my combination Xmas/birthday gift that year (They were on heavy duty sale, along with a Schoolhouse Rock tape. All of these are still in use.). I've always had friends who could cobble together a computer out of old parts, and the places I worked provided a free dial-up connection. My needs are modest, and I like it that way, even now. No debt and our savings continues to grow. We get the occasional $5 rotisserie chicken because it's easy, but then we boil down the carcass and have homemade broth in the freezer, because that's easy, too. We also have a fancier internet connection, but it's not the super high-speed one.

We've had family and friends give me a lot of second-hand, but nice things. Clothes, cookware, you name it. They bring it to me, because I happen to have a helluva lot of storage space, and they know I'll redistribute what we don't need or want. Pans too small to be practical for my house, they go to my single friends starting their first place. Clothes not our size or to our preference, they go to friends or the local women and children's shelter.

It's difficult to get out of the grind of it all. The whole "I could work more, but then I'd have to pay more to see my kids less." thing. And worrying about how paycheck numbers affected assistance dollars. People who are thinking ahead about eventually getting out of the system might be best served by keeping a lockbox with any spare cash in it, because if you keep anything you can save in a bank account, it's going to hamstring you. You'll end up using those savings for thing like food and rent, and then be out of luck when things like school supplies are needed and emergencies happen.
posted by lilywing13 at 9:50 PM on November 15, 2009 [4 favorites]

More anecdotal ...

I lived for a short time in New Orleans with a couple of friends, all of us working shit jobs and barely paying rent on our apartment. We weren't on welfare, and for me this was the poorest I have ever been.
I was much more frivolous in my spending during that time than I've been in almost every other time in my life. I was making almost nothing yet still going to Starbuck's with my co-workers on a daily basis and dropping $5 on expensive shitty coffee because, what good was saving that $5? It wasn't going to get me anywhere to save it, because what I managed to save would have been a pittance, maybe enough for a tankful of gas when I rolled out of town. So I could either allow myself that indulgence of an expensive beverage and a trip outside to drink it and chat with my co-workers, or sit in the stockroom and read or wander around looking at expensive things that I couldn't buy with a month's salary. Occasionally I'd reflect on the fact that I was drinking an hour's worth of shitty work, and that I was creating an ugly self-perpetuating cycle, but the effort to get out of it didn't seem worthwhile.
We couldn't travel, we couldn't buy anything of real value, were living with rented furniture and had to bargain for a bunch of things or just went without/didn't pay bills. But we ate a lot of prepared and organic food from the newly-built Whole Foods, went out to the Moonlight Cafe cafe regularly, and I kept drinking those $5 peppermint lattes with my co-workers, who were all in a similar boat. These were the only luxuries we could afford, and kept us from feeling completely destitute.

Now, I'm working with the Peace Corps in Romania. My monthly living allowance leaves me with not much to live on once bills are paid and the basics are covered (and there's always the possibility that the electric company will get around to reading the meters and "readjust" one month and my electric bill will be eight times normal). I can save a bit of money by local standards if I think about every. single. thing. I buy, but often it seems similar to those days in New Orleans--why bother? I'd never save a substantial enough amount to make it worth it once I converted the currency (100 euro=about 430 lei, more than half my living allowance), and while I'll occasionally act the miser to save up for a trip, I generally look at the little that's sometimes left over at the end of a month as "free money"--to be spent on a meal out, or a book, or a trip to visit someone. When I travel or do anything significant, I use savings I set aside before I came here for that purpose.

These behaviours aren't the norm for me; when I was living in the States and working a more regular job I was much better about saving, would bring my own coffee and teabags to work, pack lunches, and generally be much more mindful of my expenses and what I was spending my money on, because just as was said earlier, there was more of a reason when I was already living at a certain level. But when you feel that there isn't any value to saving your money, and you're not that content with your circumstances (or you know they're a finite anomaly), it's much more difficult to resist the urge to indulge.
posted by the luke parker fiasco at 11:42 PM on November 15, 2009

One wonders if this is a cause or an effect of poverty. Are people poor partly because they and their parents and grandparents always lived this way, and they simply don't have any experience with saving and going without? Or is it simply a defense mechanism, buying a little joy occasionally in a joyless existence? It's probably a little of both.
posted by gjc at 6:09 AM on November 16, 2009

A related article from a few years ago about a woman with working class roots shifting from indignation to understanding about this issue: The Price of Parsimony.

"Lolli's stepfather received a $70,000 check after winning a lawsuit and burned through the money in a matter of months. By then, however, this sort of abandon made perfect sense. Holding onto the money placed him in physical danger; he'd also have to field an endless litany of heartbreaking requests from family and friends. Putting it in the bank wasn't practical, because he might lose his disability benefits if the government knew of his assets; for the same reason, he couldn't invest the money legally, which left him especially vulnerable to scams. The smartest thing was to treat it like the windfall that it was -- like hitting the lottery."
posted by susanvance at 6:58 AM on November 16, 2009 [1 favorite]

It's not a new observation:

"O reason no the need! Our basest beggars / Are in the poorest thing superfluous." -- King Lear

'Lear sees that our humanity depends on superfluity; even a beggar, who owns and can afford little, will wear or carry something "superfluous," a thing he or she does not "need." Lear goes on to suggest that not acknowledging this fact leads one to view "[M]an's life as cheap as beast's."' from the Modestly Yours blog
posted by timepiece at 2:52 PM on November 16, 2009

Heh, I also came in to share the boots theory, although I couldn't quite remember where it came from. Here's the actual quote:

The reason the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.
Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in the city on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
This was the Captain Samuel Vimes "Boots" theory of socioeconomic unfairness.
posted by naoko at 6:01 PM on November 17, 2009

Gentlemen of Bacongo

Data point?
posted by girlpublisher at 1:12 PM on December 4, 2009

Another data point might be changing attitudes toward homeownership, following the popping of the bubble. Or leading into it. There was a perception that began to infect everyone that a home should be more than a house, it should be an investment, and thus it was imperative that we all become part of an "ownership society". But in practical terms, renting may be economically superior for many families, particularly when the burden of debt is considered. To people invested in the idea of ownership, that seems frivolous and wasteful: at the end of the day, what do they have? 30 days guarantee of a roof? But harking back to Maslow, again, the time horizon of economic utility for the poor tends to be much shorter.
posted by dhartung at 4:49 PM on December 4, 2009