Monday, July 21, 2025

"The Case for Open Borders": Exploiting workers on both sides

US-Mexico border. Image source: By User Larsinio on en.wikipedia - Originally from en.wikipedia; description page is (was) here19:00, 11 April 2006 Larsinio 1152x862 (189,587 bytes) (from http://www.fmcsa.dot.gov/print.asp?URL=/cross-border/nafta-rules/new-mexrule.htm), Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=791553

Here's another quote from "The Case for Open Borders". From page 208:

Simultaneously, 50,000 midwestern auto workers, mostly in the midwest, lost their jobs. Many of those jobs went to Mexico, where, Akers Chacón reports, productivity rates increased over 66 percent between 1990 and 1999. During the same period, however, real wages fell by about 20 percent. Unionization rates also dropped over the same period. In other words, the open-borders-for-capital and closed-borders-for-people schema is a lose-lose for both American and Mexican workers. Closed borders is a win only for the corporations, which use the border as a wedge to lower wages, undercut worker protections, and keep the assembly line zipping.

Opening borders would immediately strip corporations of a key tool of exploitation, offering workers easier access to decent wages and facilitating collaboration and collective organization.



Friday, July 18, 2025

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. Sting in the Tail: Life’s No Fairy Tale for Mermaid Dancers (July 11) "To make matters worse, to save on costs, many aquariums refuse to assign professional safety personnel to guard performers, and lack proper emergency response protocols. 'In scuba diving, we follow the buddy system — no one goes in the water alone,' Lin says. 'Why is such a critical safety rule suddenly ignored when the dive is a performance?'"

Also from Sixth Tone: The Promise and Pitfalls of China’s AI Sign Language Interpreters (July 9) "Deaf people reported having difficulty accurately understanding the signing regardless of whether they watched the video directly or read the transcribed records. On closer inspection, the movements of the avatars differed considerably from everyday sign language in terms of hand shape, position, direction, and movement."

2. Scientists find Uranus is surprisingly warm, heating up the case for a new planetary mission (July 14, via) Cool!

3. The Best 4x4 Sudoku Ever Made. (June 9) 1-hour-11-minute sudoku solve video. This sudoku is based on that genre of logic puzzles where one person says "I don't know the answer" and then another person says "I don't know the answer" and then the first person says "well now I know the entire answer." Love this.

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Links related to the antichrist:

1. ‘Perversion of Justice’ revisited (July 14) For those of us (like me) who haven't been following all the details about this Epstein thing since 2018, the Slacktivist has a timeline with links.

And: Trump doesn’t realize why MAGA needs the Epstein files (July 15) "For Trump, this has to be bewildering. His supporters do not treat sexual violence like it’s a bad thing. So why do they care about Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes, or the identities of his alleged co-conspirators?"

2. Will the Government Ever Do Right by Mahmoud Khalil? (July 15) "In a just country, Khalil would be entitled to legal recourse and monetary recompense for his unlawful arrest and imprisonment."

Monday, July 14, 2025

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. How China Built the Most Extreme Metro Ever (June 18, 14-minute video) This is really cool! It's about the subway system in Chongqing, China. I've been to Chongqing before- very mountainy.

2. You and translator microbes (June 19, via) "Serious multilingual nuances and complexities, which the real world offers in abundance, are cordoned off into a one-line tech explanation and forgotten. Category mismatches, unaligned conventions surrounding conversational maxims, and the fact that different languages have different approaches as to which grammatical features to encode explicitly and which ones to leave unspoken (unspoken, yes, but still very much mutually understood amongst a speaker population) are all things that will inevitably arise occasionally in multilingual communications, even with maximally competent interpreters present." !!!!! This! All of this!

3. The Fungus behind King Tut’s Curse is a LIE (July 10) "As best I can tell, some microbiologists thought they were being cute with 'the pharaoh hypothesis' and the general public just saw the title and said, 'Aha! It’s real and the cause is fungus.' No!"

4. How this long-lost Chinese typewriter from the 1940s changed modern computing (July 5) Cool!

5. ‘Biblical grounds’ for white Texan divorce (July 10) "That’s how divorce works in white evangelicaldom — it’s completely unacceptable unless you can demonize your former spouse and put 100% of the blame on them for sinning like a sinful sinner."

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Links related to the antichrist:

1. Save Our Signs (via) "Join our effort to build a community archive of the signs, exhibits, and texts that could soon disappear from our national parks."

2. This Is What Trump Paid El Salvador To Do To Kilmar Abrego Garcia (July 4) I shared a link about this last time, but there are more details here. 

3. Judge blocks Trump's order restricting birthright citizenship (July 10) "'Every court to have looked at this cruel order agrees that it is unconstitutional,' Wofsy, the deputy director of the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, said in a statement announcing the lawsuit in late June. 'The Supreme Court’s decision did not remotely suggest otherwise, and we are fighting to make sure President Trump cannot trample on the citizenship rights of a single child.'"

And related to that: It must be amazing to be a Supreme Court justice (June 30) "Leaving parents hanging on the question of whether their newborn children have citizenship here, or somewhere, or nowhere; issuing abstract rulings opining that while presidents should of course strive to not do plainly criminal things, they can do plainly criminal things so long as they do it from behind the right desk; hurling grenades that blow up centuries of established law on the last day of the term and than getting the hell out of Dodge before the ink is dry, booking it at top speed to go off salmon-fishing or island-hopping."

4. Federal judge orders stop to indiscriminate immigration raids in Los Angeles (July 11) "In her order, Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong, of the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, said there is "a mountain of evidence" to support the claim that agents are arresting people solely based on their race, accents, or the work they're engaged in, in violation of the Fourth Amendment's protection against unreasonable government seizure."

5. Freed from ICE detention, Mahmoud Khalil files $20 million claim against Trump administration (July 11) "'My beliefs are not wanting my tax money or tuition going toward investments in weapons manufacturers for a genocide,' Khalil said. 'It’s as simple as that.'"

Sunday, July 13, 2025

"The Case for Open Borders": Not a rush

World map. Image source.

Here's another quote from "The Case for Open Borders". This section is talking about the worry that opening the border will cause a huge dramatic rush of migrants to come. From page 194:

7. Open Borders Doesn't Mean a Rush to Migrate

Across the globe, about 14 percent of the global population-- around seven hundred million people-- would, according to recent Gallup polls, like to migrate. Financial burdens, family ties, and fear of the unknown, however, keep a lot of them at home. Plus, many of those potential migrants wouldn't migrate in the same direction. Despite the lure of the Hollywood-baked American dream and economic and political pressures in "sending countries," most people want to stay at home.

Puerto Ricans have enjoyed the unimpeded right to migrate to the far wealthier mainland United States since 1904, but they haven't left the island empty. Similarly, Eastern European countries added to the EU free-migration zone did not swarm Western European countries with their citizens. Absent lethal climactic or political threats, most people tend to want to stay where they are.




Wednesday, July 9, 2025

On Skipping My Daily $5 Starbucks

Starbucks cup. Image source.

I recently published my review of the book "Portfolios of the Poor." Here's the follow-up post.

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I want to talk about the different ways that people think about the math involved in a household's budget. I have some possible models here; none of these models can account for everything. Some are useful in some situations, others are useful in other situations. It all depends on whether the factors that are omitted from a particular model are a big deal or not in your own situation.

I have here 6 different models for how to mathematically conceptualize the way people make choices about spending their money. This isn't "here's 6 different ways to plan your budget- pick which one works for you" because they're not all aimed at addressing the question of how to plan one's budget. They're not all about the same thing. But they're all related to how to think mathematically about the choices people make with their money.

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Model 1: Skipping your daily $5 Starbucks

Here's some financial advice I've heard many times: "It's not hard to save for retirement! Just stop spending $5 every day buying Starbucks! If you save $5 a day, multiplied by x number of years, [insert some math here], then you'll have a million dollars!"

This has always struck me as a bit ridiculous, because why on earth are they assuming everyone spends $5 at Starbucks every day? Hey, actually I already never go to Starbucks- oh my goodness, that means I am therefore a millionaire? You know, before Starbucks was founded, everyone was a millionaire.

This financial advice assumes a budget model like this: You have a certain income each month, and certain expenses, and they are very precisely calibrated to match exactly. When you make this one little change- you quit going to Starbucks- nothing else in your life will change. Therefore, the result will be that the $5 each day accumulates in your bank account, eventually adding up to thousands of dollars.

The big problem here is the assumption that nothing else will change. If you don't spend the 5 bucks at Starbucks, maybe you'll end up spending it somewhere else. This won't *feel* like a conscious choice- you won't feel like "well I didn't spend $5 on Starbucks today, therefore I will spend $5 on something else"- but who knows how the chaotic pile of experiences and thoughts you have every day will shift when you stop going to Starbucks? Who knows how that is going to shake out and the effect it will have on the amount of money you spend that day? 

Honestly, I don't think people have a fixed plan of what they spend money on, where if they change 1 thing, nothing else will change. I think people don't really have a plan, but they have a vague awareness of how much money is in their bank account, and a belief about what sort of lifestyle is a match to that, and which things are "too expensive." (This model I am calling "vibes", see below.) If you stop spending money on Starbucks, and the money starts accumulating in your account, you'll end up thinking "oh yeah, sure, we can go out for a fancy dinner, I have enough money" and you won't even be thinking about "no, I can't spend that, that is the I-don't-go-to-Starbucks-anymore money."

There's so much variation in a person's spending, from one day to the next, one week to the next- it's hard to say how to even measure the difference that $5 here and there would make. (I'm really interested to know if anyone has done a randomized controlled trial of some kind.)

No, to make this "skip your daily $5 Starbucks" advice useful, you have to say it like this: "Stop spending $5 at Starbucks every day, and instead, put that money in a separate bank account that you don't touch." Or, why do we even need to mention Starbucks, why not just say to regularly transfer small amounts of money into a separate account? Or, hey, this would work too: "You can spend $5 at Starbucks every day, and also put another $5 in a separate account every day."

Why even mention the Starbucks? The Starbucks is a red herring! The actual key here is to have that money saved in a separate account, an account that is explicitly dedicated to long-term savings, and you're not going to spend it on everyday stuff just because you have a vague feeling that you can afford to do so.

(And, okay, actually, some variations of the Starbucks advice go like this: "If you stop spending $5 at Starbucks every day, and you put that in a retirement account which earns 10% interest per year, then [insert math here] and you'll be a millionaire." So yes, sometimes it does mention the idea of putting it in a separate account- but it's framed like the reason to put it in a separate account is to earn interest on it. Rather than to keep it separate from the money you spend on everyday stuff.)

I guess it would make sense if the logic is like this:

"You should transfer $5 a day into a savings account."

"$5 a day? No way, that's too much, I can't spare $5 a day."

"Well, stop going to Starbucks every day and put that money in a savings account instead."

But this still doesn't make sense. If someone genuinely believes they can't come up with $5 a day, then would that person really be going to Starbucks every single day? 

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Model 2: Vibes

I mentioned the "vibes" model above, so I want to elaborate on it here. 

I'm really curious about this, actually. Do people make decisions about spending money based on a general feeling about how much money is in their account and what sort of price range feels right for them? I think they do. Realistically, I don't think people make their purchasing decisions by consulting a carefully-planned-out budget. I mean, I think about math all the time, and I don't even base my everyday spending choices on an explicitly-planned budget. I just go on vibes. Like, yeah I can spend x amount of money on something, because it's basically in the range of what I usually spend. And when I look at my bank account, it's never a dangerously low number, so that means I'm doing fine.

To be a little more mathematical in how we define the "vibes" budgeting model, it's like this: For each type of thing you might buy, you have a *feeling* about what a normal price should be, and a *feeling* about how frequently you should buy it. When faced with a choice about buying something, you check if the price matches your feeling about what a good price would be for that thing, and you search your memory for the last time you bought it. (For example, when thinking about buying a new computer, you think "I've had my old computer for 5 years already, so it makes sense to buy a new one." When thinking about going out to eat, you think "we've already gone out to restaurants 3 times this week, we can't go again.") That's all. And every now and then, you look at your bank account balance. If it's reasonably high, then no need to do anything. If it's way lower than you expected, then you temporarily change your behavior and put off buying stuff as much as you can, until the next time you get paid and your bank account is normal again.

I feel like, this is basically what my parents did when I was growing up. There wasn't a big overarching household budget, but if I asked my mom for fruit roll-ups at the grocery store, they were "too expensive." Like, it wasn't precisely defined anywhere, but we just had a sense of what's a reasonable amount of money to pay for things, and what's "too expensive." I don't mean we literally didn't have money to afford fruit roll-ups. I mean that we had a strongly-held belief that it's just not right to pay x amount of dollars and all you get is fruit roll-ups. That is- in some absolute, objective way- not worth the money, and therefore it just feels wrong.

And sometimes something is "too expensive" but then you come up with a reason to buy it anyway, like "we're on vacation."

(My parents also had savings accounts for various long-term things, and followed all the standard good financial advice- it wasn't all "vibes." But the day-to-day stuff, the feeling of things being "too expensive" but never defining what that means- that's vibes.)

And honestly, if you aren't going to do the work of planning an actual budget, a general aversion to spending money on things that are "too expensive" probably will serve you well. Yeah, I feel like this is the strategy I internalized about money, and overall it has been a positive thing for me, though there are things I don't like about it.

But also, for some people, vibes-based budgeting is more like, "I feel like it's fine to spend money on this thing because I have more money than that in my bank account." I don't think this is good- just because you have money available to you doesn't mean it's a good idea to spend it. You should do some long-term planning and then reach a conclusion about how much money it's okay to spend on stuff you don't exactly need. Or, if you don't want to do that much work, set up an automatic transfer to move 10% of your income to a separate account every month. That's a good start.

And for my husband and I, our current strategy for the big picture is based on the envelope method (described below), but for day-to-day stuff, I just use vibes. I feel like, it's fine to spend x amount of money on dinner, because I often spend x amount of money on dinner, that's just the lifestyle I have, and it's working fine for me.

There are a few problems with "vibes" though: First of all, it doesn't apply to long-term savings goals. It's just about your feelings about your current situation, your current bank account balance, and the potential purchase that's right in front of you. People don't really have a feeling about the fact that, in order to be on track for their kid's college savings account, they need to have some certain amount saved when the kid is 5, or when the kid is 10, and so on- that's not a feeling, that's something you actually have to do the math on.

Also, the vibes model has no mechanism to match your income to your expenses. It's just about what "feels" like the right amount of money to spend on things- but in reality, there is no "absolute truth" about the right amount of money to spend on things. It should be based on how much income you have. If you're using vibes and your feelings are miscalibrated and you're always spending too much and then panicking when you look at your bank account, well that's not good- that could be avoided if you planned things out better. And if you're using vibes and you're very frugal, you won't need to panic about your bank account being low, but you're missing out on things that your extra money could be used for (investment, charity, buying nice stuff that makes you happy), if you had a more clear plan about it.

Another problem: The "vibes" strategy is extremely vulnerable to lifestyle creep. You say "oh I can't buy that, it's too expensive" and then at some point later you say "well just this one time it's fine" and gradually your feelings about what's "too expensive" completely change.

Another problem with vibes is you're not able to figure out which things give you better value for your money. For example, let's say you often spend $20 for dinner, and you often spend $20 to buy a bunch of snacks at the grocery store, and you often spend $20 for whatever other things. In the vibes model, all of those feel about the same, because all of them are within the normal range of what you spend money on. But there may be a huge difference in how much benefit you're getting out of them. Maybe the $20 is just 1 dinner, but if you spend the $20 on snacks from the grocery store instead, you can get a huge amount, and that will last you for weeks- a way better use of money than just 1 meal at a restaurant.

I think it would be really useful to have a budgeting strategy which could help you pinpoint which things you're spending money on but aren't really giving you much value- and then you can eliminate those and it will make a big difference. I don't know of any budgeting strategy that does a good job at this- you would have to assign some kind of score to every single thing you buy, it would be an incredible amount of work, and I can't even imagine how one would come up with a standardized scale for that- but surely the vibes model is the worst one if that's your goal.

And another thing about vibes: Have you ever heard "people spend less when they pay for things with cash instead of a credit card"? There are some financial advice people really walking around saying "you should NEVER use a credit card, you should pay cash for EVERYTHING" because of this supposed "fact." I have my doubts about this- I haven't tracked down whatever scientific study this supposedly comes from, but I feel like it would depend on a lot of things, and it just doesn't make sense to claim that this is true about *everyone*. 

But anyway, this idea that people spend more when they are using a credit card than with cash, this makes sense in a "vibes" model. Having access to as much money as you want, via your credit card, is a different "vibe" than having access to only the limited amount of cash in your wallet.

If someone follows a "monthly limits" or "envelope" model (both described below), and they do just fine with planning their budget in that way, then the "use cash instead of a credit card" tactic won't make any difference to them. It only really makes sense in a "vibes" model.

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Model 3: Monthly limits

In the "monthly limits" model, you have a bunch of categories of things to spend money on, and for each one, you set a limit of how much you can spend on it each month.

This is similar to the "skip your daily $5 Starbucks" model. The difference is, "skip your daily $5 Starbucks" assumes everyone has this kind of "monthly limits" model going on subconsciously in the background, whereas the "monthly limits" model as I'm describing it here means you actually made a detailed plan about how each category is defined and how much money you can spend per month.

For example, each month you can spend up to w dollars on rent, x dollars on car insurance, y dollars on clothes, z dollars on groceries, etc. When you add up all the limits, it must be less than or equal to your income. You make a plan which sets these limits for yourself. Every month, ideally you should be under the limit in each category. If you go over the limit in some categories, that means you're not sticking to your budget. That's bad.

Note that this is a different thing than if you asked someone to describe their monthly budget and they said "I spend w dollars on rent, x dollars on car insurance" and so on. They're just telling you what the averages are. That's different from the "monthly limits" budgeting strategy, because in the "monthly limits" budgeting strategy, it's not about averages, it's about making rules for yourself, and if you break those rules sometimes, this model doesn't really have any way to deal with that.

This is what I always thought it meant, when people said "you should have a budget." And at various times in my life, I tried this, but I find it really doesn't work well for me, for the following reasons:

First of all, every month I'm all over the place in terms of which categories I was under the limit, and which categories I was over the limit. And then the next month, I'm again all over the place, but in a different way. So how do I judge whether I'm doing okay or not? Obviously if you're always under the limit in every single category, then you're not in danger of running out of money (at least in the short term). But if you're over the limit in some categories, and under the limit in others, well, that seems like it should also be fine, right? But how do you quantify that? Well you could just add them all up and see if it's a positive or negative number. But then what was the point of breaking things down into separate categories?

(I mean, one possible benefit of breaking things down into categories is that you will realize if you spend more than you expected to in some categories. Like "oh crap, every month I'm spending xyz dollars on taxis? Wow, I don't think it makes sense to spend that much, let's stop doing that." Maybe when you figure out in which categories the reality is very different from the plan, that can help you know how to change your behavior to spend money on the things you actually feel are worth it.)

A second drawback of the "monthly limits" strategy is that it doesn't have a mechanism for long-term planning. In a given month, you spend however much you spend, and then the slate is wiped clean for the next month. But you could modify this strategy to add long-term planning in this way: Maybe one of your budget categories is something you're saving up for, like your kid's college education, and you set some "monthly limit" for it, and every month you "spend" that money (equal to the monthly limit) by transferring it to a dedicated account for your kid's college education. (This would then be a hybrid between the "monthly limit" model and "envelope" model, which I describe below.)

And a third issue is, let's say you're really good at sticking to your plan, and every month you are under the limit in every category. So, as a result, your bank account is always accumulating more and more money (equal to the difference between the limit and how much you actually spent). And then, what? How much savings do you have, and what are you doing with it? This budgeting model can't address those questions at all.

Really, it doesn't make sense to say that you're always supposed to be under the limit in every single category. Then you'll always be accumulating the extra, and not doing anything with it. Wouldn't it make more sense to have a plan for what to do with that extra? Rather than just wiping the slate clean every month. That money still exists in your bank account, but your budget strategy is not keeping track of it anywhere.

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Model 4: Envelope

The envelope model might, at first, look the same as the monthly limits model. In both models, you have a bunch of categories, and you decide how much money should be spent for each category every month. 

The difference is this: In the "monthly limits" model, the number for each category represents the maximum that you feel you should spend for that category. It's sort of a goal, a hypothetical. In reality, your spending might end up being less than that number, or more, but this result isn't really used for anything, except making yourself feel worried if it goes over the limit. 

But in the "envelope" model, you decide how much money goes to each category, and then the money *is* in that category. In your bank account, every dollar is allocated to one of the categories. "Every dollar has a job," is how I've heard the envelope budgeting method described. And then when the next month begins, whatever unspent money remains in each category simply rolls over to the next month. 

This is the budgeting strategy that I have set up for me and my husband. We have a few big categories, and I've calculated the expected cost per year for each one, and divided it by 12 to get the average for each month, and then every month we allocate our salary money to the categories. 

The great thing about this is it doesn't make any kind of distinction between short-term and long-term budgeting. You have short-term stuff, like "how much do we pay for daycare every month?" and longer-term stuff like "how much do we spend on Christmas gifts every year, divide that by 12" and really long-term stuff like "let's save up for both of our kids to go to college." It doesn't matter at what frequency you will actually *spend* the money from each category- they're all treated the same. For each one, calculate how much it works out to on average per month. (For example, for the kids' college savings, it's like "if we want to save x dollars before the kid is 18, how much do we need to save every month?")

When I first heard about the envelope model, and how "every dollar has a job", I thought it meant you have to spend every dollar, every month. I thought "wow that sounds like a bad idea, what about savings?" But it's not about spending, it's about allocating. And then when it comes time to spend, whenever that may be, whether it's now or 18 years in the future, you withdraw from the applicable category.

(See also: Here's How We Do Our Budget, where I wrote about the monthly limits model and the envelope model.)

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Model 5: Priority list

In the "priority list" model, you always have a list of urgent expenses, and when you get paid, you use the money to pay for the items on the list, sorted by which is the most urgent. The sorting is necessary because this model would be used by people whose income is not really high enough to actually pay for everything they need. So there will always be things that they have to say no to, because they just don't have the money for it.

(Disclaimer, I don't have any experience with this myself, so I may be missing some key factors about what it's really like.)

A long time ago I read an article about being poor, which mentioned something like this- "There are sitcoms about families that are supposedly poor, but they're not realistic at all. In one episode, someone made a huge scratch in their wall, and in the next episode, it was gone. It was fixed. That's so not what it's like when you grow up in a poor household. That scratch would have stayed there forever, because you never have the money available to fix it." This fits with the idea of the "priority list"- you never have enough money for all the things you want/need, so you might have things which languish on the list forever, never a high enough priority to actually get paid for.

Similarly, people talk about how, when you're poor, smaller problems can snowball into bigger problems because you don't have the money to fix them right away. For example, maybe something is wrong with your car, and you should get it fixed, so this is on your list but there are always other things which have a higher priority. Until the car problem gets worse, and the car is so bad you can't even drive it any more, and so it moves way up to the top of the list, but it costs a huge amount of money to fix it, much more than if you had just gotten it fixed at the beginning. Same thing for health problems- spending a little money on preventative health care can save a huge amount of money in the long run, but there are always other things which are more urgent, so you keep putting off the health care.

Another example: If you loan someone money, as a friend, it's likely that they'll be more slow to pay you back, compared to how fast they pay back their loans from a bank. Because you're their friend, it feels less urgent. And so if they don't have enough money for everything on their priority list, it's likely they will put off repaying you. Actually, in "Portfolios of the Poor," it said some people actually prefer to take loans which require them to pay interest, because this pushes them to pay it back faster. Yeah, under the "priority list" model, it might actually make sense to artificially increase the urgency of a potential expense, in order to force it to actually get done.

I once read something on the internet about buying paper towels in bulk, and now it lives in my head rent-free, as the kids are saying. It was about how it's so difficult to save money by buying in bulk if your income is low. And maybe you get a group of friends to all pitch in on the bulk paper towels purchase- that could work! But the risk is, what if your friends flake out, and you have paid for the whole huge package of paper towels yourself?

I read that and it didn't make any sense to me, because I was imagining a "monthly limits" model. I imagined that this internet person had a line item in their budget for how much they spend on paper towels every month, and even though their friends didn't come through and pay their share, it's okay because then this buyer gets to keep all the paper towels, so then next month they will continue to use them, and save the money that was in the "paper towels" budget category. And every month thereafter, they can accumulate the money budgeted for paper towels, and then buy in bulk again when they need more- they're off to a great start in getting their whole financial situation turned around, through their bulk paper towel savings. I couldn't understand why this person on the internet was saying it's a problem to buy the whole bulk package.

But, no, how about this: It's a priority list. If they are out of paper towels, then paper towels are on the list. If they have a good supply of paper towels, then they're not even thinking about that at all, because they have much more urgent money problems to deal with. There is no budget line item for paper towels. There is no "wow I'm spending so much less than expected on paper towels." It's nice that they don't have to worry about buying more paper towels, but they have so many other things that they're worried about because they can't afford them- they don't really have the bandwidth to realize "wow it's so nice that I don't need to buy more paper towels."

For people whose incomes are too low to afford all the things that they need to have a decent lifestyle, they're pretty much forced to use the priority list budgeting method. You can't judge them for that.

And then, every once in a while, they get paid and they don't really have an extremely urgent thing on their priority list. So finally, FINALLY, they can buy something nice for themself.

There will definitely be people who would judge them for that, and say "you're always struggling because you don't have enough money, and now you finally have some- you should put it in a savings account, to be ready for the next emergency. It's irresponsible to use it to buy something you don't need." But... when you're forced to live with this priority list model, I can imagine that when you happen to have money and don't have anything urgent you need to use it for, it probably feels like "the future will be full of financial emergencies, regardless of whether I put this money in a savings account or not. But right now, I finally have a chance to take a break from that, and just buy something nice that I can enjoy." We shouldn't judge them for that.

However, there are people who use a "priority list" model when they really shouldn't- their income is high enough that if they planned it better, they *would* be able to afford everything needed to have a decent lifestyle. But they get paid and they feel that their priority list doesn't have anything urgent (you can also view this as using the vibes model), so they decide "let's go out and party" and then a week later when the rent is due, it comes as a TOTAL SHOCK, and they're like "where did my money go?" Yeah, not cool to think you can just spend your money on whatever, just because you don't have any bills due at that exact moment. Maybe plan better!

(Or maybe we could say, this hypothetical bad planner can still use the priority list model, but the first priority on the list should be putting aside the money they will need for rent/ bills/ normal expenses that month.)

It's not good to be using a priority list budget model, because it means you're not really making intentional choices about what you're spending money on- you just spend money on whatever's most urgent, until you run out of money, and for the remaining things, however urgent they may be, well, too bad. It's not good, and you should avoid it if you can, but if your income isn't enough to realistically live on, then you're forced into this.

Here's another example: Let's say that you're giving money to someone (maybe a family member) for some expense coming up in the future. You give them the money, tell them to use it for this specific thing in the future, and then time passes, and then it's time for them to pay for that thing, and they tell you they don't have money. So you're like "What? I gave you money for this. You spent it? How could you be so irresponsible?" You're imagining it like an envelope model, where it's clearly stated that this money is for this thing, and so obviously it doesn't get spent on anything else. But maybe they are using a priority list model, and they feel like you are being really unrealistic for expecting a big sum of money to just sit there untouched for a few months. So really the ideal thing to do here would be give them the money at the point in time they need it to pay for the thing- at that specific point in time, that thing is the most urgent on the priority list.

And there are other variations that you could conceptualize as a priority list, though they're a little different than what I've been describing so far. For example, I've heard of Christians saying "when you get paid, the first thing you should do is set aside 10% to give to the church. And then live on the rest. Our responsibility to tithe should be our first priority, not something we do at the end if we have money left over." This advice seems to assume a "priority list" model- because in the "monthly limits" and "envelope" budgeting strategies, it's not really meaningful to say which category is "first"- you make a plan that includes all the categories, and tweak all of them until the plan fits your income. (Or you could say that this advice falls under the vibes model; one of the inputs to the vibes model is the amount of money you have in your bank account, so you remove that money from your bank account immediately, so your "vibes" don't make you feel like it's okay to spend it.)

Or, you could even conceptualize the envelope model as a priority list model, like "when I get paid, first I allocate x dollars to this category, then I allocate y dollars to this category..." But since the order doesn't change, and you have enough money that you don't run out partway down the list, I feel the "priority list" model is not the ideal way to view it.

See, that's the thing with models- the same situation can be described using several different models. No model is going to be ideal for every situation. Each model emphasizes certain things, and has certain assumptions about your income and about human behavior. It's not that a model is "true" or "not true" of a particular situation, it's that a model may be more or less helpful in understanding someone's choices in a given situation.

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Model 6: Giving your neighbors a feast

I read this blog post a while ago, Collections: Bread, How Did They Make It? Part I: Farmers! (by Bret Devereaux). It's about subsistence farmers throughout history, and the strategies they used to not starve to death if they occasionally had a bad harvest or other problems which affected their ability to farm. Check out this part:

The answer was often to invest in relationships rather than in money. ...

The most immediate of these are the horizontal relationships: friends, family, marriage ties and neighbors. While some high-risk disasters are likely to strike an entire village at once (like a large raid or a general drought), most of the disasters that might befall one farming family (an essential worker being conscripted, harvest failure, robbery and so on) would just strike that one household. So farmers tended to build these reciprocal relationships with each other: I help you when things are bad for you, so you help me when things are bad for me. But those relationships don’t stop merely when there is a disaster, because – for the relationship to work – both parties need to spend the good times signalling their commitment to the relationship, so that they can trust that the social safety net will be there when they need it.

So what do our farmers do during a good harvest to prepare for a bad one? They banquet their neighbors, contribute to village festivals, marry off their sons and daughters with the best dowry they can manage, and try to pay back any favors they called in from friends recently. I stress these not merely because they are survival strategies (though they are) but because these sorts of activities end up (along with market days and the seasonal cycles) defining a great deal of life in these villages. But these events also built that social capital which can be ‘cashed out’ in an emergency. And they are a good survival strategy. Grain rots and money can be stolen, but your neighbor is far likelier to still be your neighbor in a year, especially because these relationships are (if maintained) almost always heritable and apply to entire households rather than individuals, making them able to endure deaths and the cycles of generations.

The farmers described here used this kind of strategy: When you have a good harvest, you should have a feast and invite your neighbors. This way, you are investing in relationships with your neighbors, and if you have hard times later, they will help you.

I think there are likely people today who are in a similar kind of situation- where the best way to protect yourself from financial hardship is not necessarily to save your money in an individual savings account, but to spend it on social connections, with people you can rely on to come through if you ever need help.

Related to this, here's what Jesus said in Luke 14:12-14,

Then Jesus said to his host, “When you give a luncheon or dinner, do not invite your friends, your brothers or sisters, your relatives, or your rich neighbors; if you do, they may invite you back and so you will be repaid. But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed. Although they cannot repay you, you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.”

As an American, I had always read this passage and found it confusing- what does Jesus mean about being "repaid"? When I invite people to go somewhere, it just means I'm inviting them to go somewhere- there's not really more to it than that. I don't really think about being "repaid."

But now that I've read Bret Devereaux's article about giving a banquet to one's neighbors, I'm thinking maybe Jesus was speaking to a culture that had this sort of perspective: When you invite people to a feast, that creates very real social obligations. One of the key reasons to hold such a feast is so that your guests will be obligated to help you in the future. But Jesus is saying here, you should invite "the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind" because they aren't able to repay you in that way. You invite them solely as a way to be kind to them.

And even in Chinese culture, we have this to some extent. If someone gives you a hongbao (a red envelope full of cash) as a gift, you're obligated to give them an equivalent hongbao at some point in the future. Chinese people really keep track of these things. I've heard people say, "We didn't want to have a big wedding, but my parents said we needed to, so they could get back all the hongbaos they've given to people over the years- we invited all my parents' friends, and my parents kept all the hongbaos that people gave us at the wedding."

My husband (who is Chinese) finds it very uncomfortable to have that kind of obligation to people- he tries to avoid it as much as possible. When our first child was 100 days old, and traditionally you would have a party to celebrate, he only invited a couple relatives, and took them out to eat dinner. He didn't want to invite a ton of people, because then they would all give us hongbaos, and we would have to keep track of it, and find some occasion in the future to give them equivalent hongbaos, like maybe for their kid's birthday. Sounds exhausting.

Related to this, it's common that if people come from a poor background and then get a good education and well-paying job, they will be obligated to send some of their money to help their family members. Especially family members who made sacrifices in order to help them pay for their education. The financial advice I always heard assumes you're just an individual, and you're able to freely make choices about what to spend your money on- but that's not true for everyone. For some people, it would be wrong to not send money to help their poorer family members who need it, because those family members helped them get to where they are.

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In this post, I've described 6 different models for how people decide what to spend their money on. Each model is incomplete, and is based on certain background assumptions- therefore this can't be a "one size fits all" thing- it depends on your own specific circumstances. I grew up around a lot of Republicans who had the opinion that "you should be responsible, save your money, have a 6-month emergency fund, if you're not doing all of that, then it's your own fault that you're poor (and you should stop going to Starbucks so much)." But actually, it's more complicated than that. 

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Related:

Here's How We Do Our Budget

Tuesday, July 8, 2025

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. How Classic Star Trek Actually Missed the Point About Racism (June 25, 43-minute video) "Captain Kirk never felt it was necessary to pull McCoy aside and say, 'Hey, man, next time you disagree with Spock, maybe try not to mention what color his blood is.'"

2. Israel kills over 300 Palestinians in 48 hours as Gaza runs out of graves (July 3, via)

Also from Gaza: Knives, bullets and thieves: the quest for food in Gaza (July 6) "At the distribution site, I pushed people aside and grabbed whatever food I found tossed on the ground under torn cardboard boxes: cooking oil, biscuits, a bag of rice that had been torn open and was mixed with sand from the ground. I didn't care. It's food. I can wash it."

The destruction of Palestine is breaking the world (July 6, via) "This collapse began with the liberal world’s lack of resolve to rein in Israel’s war in Gaza. It escalated when no one lifted a finger to stop hospitals being bombed. It expanded when mass starvation became a weapon of war. And it is peaking at a time when total war is no longer viewed as a human abhorrence but is instead the deliberate policy of the state of Israel."

3. AI chatbots oversimplify scientific studies and gloss over critical details — the newest models are especially guilty (July 5, via

I've started using Deepseek at work, asking it for help with programming tasks. There are some things it's good at, but also, sometimes it just has no idea what it's talking about, and it's not immediately obvious when those times are. Its output reads as equally authoritative and confident regardless. One trick I've figured out is, if I read Deepseek's output and I feel like "I didn't quite understand this, let me read it again more carefully"- that's a red flag, it's likely that reading more carefully is just going to be a waste of time.

See, normally when you encounter text that sounds like it knows what it's talking about, but you can't quite understand it, it DOES help to spend more time reading it carefully. Because a person wrote it, and they had an idea of what they wanted to say, and they made decisions about what details to include. If it turns out their answer is not useful for you, that might be because they were working on a different thing than what you are doing, or they were wrong about it, or they made typos when writing. But for an AI-generated text, the concepts of having an idea it's trying to communicate, and being right or wrong about it- these concepts don't have any meaning when we're talking about AI-generated text. The LLM simply generates something that comes across as the sort of thing that would be an answer to your question. That's it. 

I've found that it's especially misleading when you're trying to write code to do something, which could be done in several different ways, with different groups of functions applying to each way (and some of them are deprecated, and some of them only work with certain versions of certain software packages, etc)- the LLM will sort of combine these seamlessly so you don't *at all* get the understanding that, if you use *this* function, you need to also be using *this other* function, but not *that other* one.

Like this one time Deepseek gave me some code to use that had 2 different functions in it, and then later as I continued to debug, Deepseek brought up the point that if I'm using this one approach, I shouldn't use this other approach, and I'm like "you literally gave me code that said to do it that way" and Deepseek is all like "you're right to point that out!" and then I got mad at it, but there's nothing to be gained from arguing with Deepseek, so don't do that. It's never going to actually understand what it did wrong and do better.

Anyway, sometimes it's really helpful. But when it's not helpful, it's very deceptive, because the output text is so friendly and easy to read and makes you feel like you're just 1 step away from solving your problem. This is the sort of thing that I think we as a society need to spend more time really thinking through what the use-case is, and what strategies we should use so it's actually effective and useful. Education about best practices.

Because right now, people are treating LLMs like the output they give you is the answer to your question, and oh yikes, no, that's not what it is. The output is the sort of thing that we might imagine someone might say in response to your question, but that has an tenuous connection to what's actually true and/or makes sense.

4. The ultra-selfish gene (2024) Really interesting article about how gene editing can be used to wipe out the subspecies of mosquito which carries malaria- which could potentially save hundreds of thousands of people's lives every year. But, releasing an edited gene into the wild, to wipe out a whole subspecies- uh, better think carefully about if you really want to do that. A lot of unexpected things could go wrong. This article takes those risks seriously and talks about strategies to reduce the risk. There is a lot of potential for this technology to be used for good.

5. A Rough Ride: ‘Dirty’ Workers Stand Up to Subway Stares (July 4) "This leaves manual workers who need to commute in dusty clothes in a bind: they can either take a seat and potentially face the ire of fellow passengers, sit on the floor and risk injury, or stay on their weary feet throughout the journey."

6. I released my game (July 5) This is a cool game if you like math~

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Links related to the antichrist:

1. 4 things to know about the vaccine ingredient thimerosal (July 6) "Fiscus, from the Association of Immunization Managers, says the committee's decision to only recommend single-dose flu shots without thimerosal shows that it is willing to make a decision without following protocol and considering the scientific evidence. 'Is this now going to be the standard?' she says. 'That's very concerning if that's where this is heading.'"

2. Arlington woman detained by ICE after her honeymoon speaks publicly for the first time (July 3) "'I did lose five months of my life because I was criminalized for being stateless,' she said. 'Something that I absolutely have no control over. I didn't choose to be stateless, I didn't do a crime that made me stateless. I had no choice.'"

3. Abrego Garcia says he was severely beaten in Salvadoran prison (July 3)

4. UPenn updates swimming records to settle with feds on transgender athletes case (July 2) "The University of Pennsylvania on Tuesday modified a trio of school records set by transgender swimmer Lia Thomas and said it would apologize to female athletes "disadvantaged" by her participation on the women's swimming team, part of a resolution of a federal civil rights case." They're really going to a lot of effort just to be mean to Lia Thomas specifically. 

5. All the children of the world (July 7) "That committee also organized our annual Missions Conference, which began each year with young people from our church parading through the sanctuary carrying the flags of every nation our missionaries served. “World Missions” was an integral part of that church’s identity and the faith taught, learned, and lived there."

6. Projected Mortality Impacts of the Budget Reconciliation Bill (June 3, via) "Including that impact, the researchers project that these changes will result in over 51,000 preventable deaths."

7. Bombshell report alleges El Salvador disclaimed responsibility for those U.S. sent to CECOT (July 8) "El Salvador, per the U.N. working group’s report attached to the filing, acknowledged that it had 'facilitated the use of the Salvadoran prison infrastructure' by the U.S. — but also stated that, '[i]n this context, the jurisdiction and legal responsibility for these persons lie exclusively with the' U.S."

Sunday, July 6, 2025

"Portfolios of the Poor" (book review)

Book cover for "Portfolios of the Poor"

I read the book Portfolios of the Poor: How the World's Poor Live on $2 a Day by Daryl Collins, Jonathan Morduch, Stuart Rutherford, and Orlanda Ruthven. I enjoyed this book! Here's my review of it.

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Overview of the book

This book is about research into the financial lives of people whose income is somewhere around $2/day. The researchers tracked several hundred households in Bangladesh, India, and South Africa, asking them very detailed questions, in order to get a clear picture of every single inflow and outflow of money in their household. This even includes really informal stuff like if you owe a shopkeeper $3 because you bought groceries on credit. The kind of stuff that people wouldn't really think to mention normally, and/or that researchers usually wouldn't think to ask about. (The authors reported that they needed several conversations with the participating households in order to really get all the details, because at the beginning they didn't have a good enough understanding of all the things they should ask about.) The book refers to the data collected as "financial diaries" because the goal is to track all the small day-to-day transactions.

(This research took place around 1999-2005 and the book was published in 2009.)

Usually, when you see statistics on global poverty, it's about people's annual income or average income per day. But if you only measure those things, you're missing a lot of what's actually happening. These researchers found that the turnover that these poor households had was very big, compared to their total income. They were constantly lending or borrowing money, in various types of formal or informal arrangements, they had all kinds of different strategies for saving, etc. 

The actual reality of what it means to live on $2/day is much more sophisticated than you'd expect.

The book says that for the households that participated in these studies, the problem isn't just that their income is low. There are actually 3 problems that make their financial lives difficult:

  1. Low incomes
  2. Irregular, unpredictable incomes. Most of the people in the study didn't have regular, salaried jobs. (Some of them did, and that was definitely a huge benefit to them.) Their income often came in irregular amounts, at unpredictable frequencies. Also, farmers often get most of their income during certain seasons of the year, and hardly anything during other seasons.
  3. Lack of financial tools. Poor people don't have access to the same financial tools (savings accounts, credit cards, etc) that I am familiar with. The fact is, though, that poor households need these tools even more than rich households do. One of the big messages of this book is that it would make a big difference if a wider variety of financial services was available to poor people.
So it's not just about "they live on less than 2 dollars a day." It's actually worse than that.

The book says that there are 3 main areas that should be considered when we look at how people manage their money. 

  1. Normal, day-to-day expenses
  2. Saving up for big expenses. For example, capital for a business, weddings, paying for children's education.
  3. Emergencies. When you suddenly need to borrow money because of medical expenses, a funeral, replacing an asset that was damaged or stolen, etc.

For each of these, there is a chapter in the book that talks about the strategies that the diary households used.

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Making it relatable and human

There's something that has bothered me for a long time about the way that people talk about global poverty. It's like... when I hear statistics about how many millions of people don't have access to clean water, or how many millions of people are living on less than $2 a day, etc, I feel like, I can't even imagine what that's like. It sounds so terrible, I can't even picture how a person can live under those circumstances. It's the sort of thing that makes one want to just throw money at a charity so then one can stop thinking about it. 

Hearing statistics about millions or billions of people living on $2 a day- it doesn't feel like they're real people, like me or anybody I know. It comes across like they are caricatures who don't really do anything or have any thoughts besides just sitting around being sad and desperate (and they need YOU to swoop in and donate money so they can get out of that state).

I once saw an article about a photographer in Africa who would take 2 different photos of each person- one photo that portrayed that kind of one-dimensional, people-in-Africa-are-just-sad-and-poor message, and another photo that showed some personality, showed the person in a setting that communicates something about who they are as a unique person. (I can't find a link to this- but if you have also heard of this and you happen to have a link, please leave it in the comment section.) I'm really interested in the way this photographer explored the stereotypes that western people have about Africa, and how that feeds into the sorts of images that are shared, and the way we talk about people.

And the ads that a lot of global poverty charities use- like, they find the saddest picture of a poor child they can find. It comes across like the child is not a whole person- that the only thing that matters about them is they don't have food/water/etc, and they don't really have a personality or feelings or dreams beyond that.

So I like this book because it takes these big scary statistics about "$2 a day" and shows you what that really looks like, how humans whose lives are just as complex as mine or yours or anybody else's keep their lives moving forward in those circumstances. 

The authors point out that none of the households in the study lived "hand to mouth", ie, spending all of their money immediately after getting it. All of them had some kind of savings strategy.

And also, you can see in all the examples throughout the book, which described the circumstances of specific households in the study, that there's a whole range of personality types here. Some people talked about how they didn't like to ask others for money, and preferred to be independent as much as they could, while other people were constantly getting into financial arrangements with everybody. Some people chose not to take microfinance loans because it felt like too much of a risk, others were happy to have access to such loans. Some people were very skeptical the first time they heard about microfinance institutions offering savings accounts, and weren't willing to open one until their friends tried it and told them how it went. All of this feels very real and human to me. It feels very different from just hearing a statistic about global poverty and thinking it's so terrible that I can't even imagine it.

The thing is, though, for some reason learning about the practical human details makes it feel like... less urgent that we take action to help? Charity appeals are like "oh noooo this is so bad, these people are so desperate, if you don't donate money then what are they going to do?????" (The book isn't about charity at all, but this is something I think about.) But the reality is more like, they have ways to scrape by. They are able to plan ahead, and ask family members or neighbors for loans, and so on. Does that make global poverty seem less bad? 

It *is* bad; we shouldn't lose sight of that. The world has enough resources that nobody should live in poverty like that, where they don't know if they'll be able to get their basic needs met. The people described in this book... yeah, the book is about how they're able to manage, and take care of themselves even on such low incomes, but the reality is that it just doesn't work as well when you're living on so little money. People die from medical issues which are no big deal to those of us who have access to good medical care. They have to deal with constant annoyances- unreliable housing, low-quality food, chronic health issues, physically demanding jobs- which could be avoided if only they had more money.

They get by, but not as well as people who aren't impoverished. They get by, but with a much lower life expectancy than people in "developed" countries.

When a potential donor hears "oh nooo these people are so desperate, they need you to send money, or what are they going to do????" that comes across differently than "these people are really in need and you should help by donating money. If they can't raise enough money, their back-up plan is xyz." Like, realistically, usually there is a back-up plan. But you don't *mention* the back-up plan, or else that will make the donors suddenly decide "oh, never mind then."

Or, I guess you can mention the back-up plan if it sounds really terrible, like maybe on a gofundme someone might write "if they're not able to raise enough money, they will be forced to sell their home!"

Has anyone studied the psychology of this- the way potential donors feel like they're off the hook if the potential recipients are portrayed in a realistic human way, taking charge of their lives and making choices about how to move forward even in a bad situation? 

People living on $2/day truly are impoverished and it would make a big difference if we donated money to help them. *But* they're not just sitting around hoping that will happen. They manage their own lives. They make plans related to their finances. Why does that make me *feel* like I don't have an obligation to help them? It's something about being unable to realistically weigh other people's needs and my own needs, I think.

But anyway, the book isn't about charity at all. It wasn't anything about "we should donate money to help them." Its message about how to help them was more like "their government and/or private businesses should invest in infrastructure that can provide them with savings accounts and loans." People manage their own financial lives- but it really helps a lot if they have access to tools that enable them to do that, just like rich people have access to such tools.

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Some financial tools that poor people use

The book described some financial tools that the diary participants used, which I wasn't familiar with. For example:

Savings clubs. This is an informal arrangement where a group of people get together at regular intervals, and each time, they all contribute a certain amount of money, and they take turns taking home the whole pot. For example, you get together with 4 friends (5 people total) once a week, you each put in 6 dollars, and then once every 5 weeks you get to take home the whole $30.

What's the point of this? Well, for some people, depending on their situation, they find it doable to put in small amounts of money at frequent intervals, as a way to save up a usefully large amount of money. Yeah, but why do they need the savings club? Why not just save up the money on their own? Well, they may find it helpful having the social pressure to stick to their plan. And they might not have a good way to keep money safe in their home- there is a risk that it could be stolen, or spent by family members, or just spent by themself when they're not really paying attention to whatever their savings target is supposed to be for that week.

A similar example: Some poor households in South Africa received grants from the government every month. But, receiving the money at a frequency of 1 time per month did not work well for managing their day-to-day cash flow. So some people would pair up and make an arrangement where 1 person receives their money at the beginning of the month, and gives part of it to the other. And when the other person receives their money in the middle of the month, they give part of it to the first person. In this way, the government grant money is split up so they receive it twice a month instead of once a month- which was much more convenient.

Funeral insurance. In South Africa, funerals are expensive, and people have come up with various ways to insure themselves in case a family member dies and they need to pay for a funeral. There are formal arrangements with insurance companies, and there are informal arrangements with "burial societies." For example, there are burial societies where, if a member dies, all the other members need to contribute a certain amount for the funeral. Or, there are also burial societies where everyone contributes money on a regular basis, and it is kept in some kind of savings account, and then if someone dies, their family receives a payout.

Many of the South African diary households had multiple forms of funeral insurance, because none of them paid out enough to cover the full cost.

Moneyguards. Sometimes people deposit money with the moneyguard, for safekeeping. This is helpful if you are concerned about money being stolen or being spent by your family members. But there's a risk- what if you want your money back, but the moneyguard doesn't have it at that moment?

Also, sometimes the researchers had trouble understanding what exactly was going on when the diary participants said they put some money with the neighbor. Does this mean you gave the neighbor a loan? Does it mean you deposited money with them for safekeeping? The tools that poor people use to manage their money don't always easily match up with the categories of financial tools we are familiar with.

The financial tools varied a lot in terms of how convenient they were, and how reliable they were. There were examples in the book of people who joined a savings club, and the savings club fell apart and they ended up losing money. You always have to consider the risk that comes with any of these options.

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It's about how to add up small sums to make big sums

The book emphasized that for the people in this study, they don't have big sums of money laying around to pay for big expenses, but they *do* have small incomes which can be used to save small sums on a regular basis- so they need financial tools which can help them turn these small amounts saved up over time into big amounts.

For example, various kinds of savings accounts or savings clubs, where people are required to frequently pay in small amounts of money, and then at some point they can withdraw a big amount. Or loans- they get a big lump sum of money and then pay it back in small frequent payments. From the perspective of the poor people in this study, savings accounts and loans were pretty much the same thing. Both of them allow you to make small, regular payments, and then withdraw a big amount of money when you need it. This was surprising to me because I always heard that saving money is good and taking out loans is bad- in my mind, savings accounts and loans are complete opposites.

This concept of "these people *can't* pay for big things, but they *can* put aside small amounts of money frequently, and pay for big things that way, so they need access to financial tools that do that" is hard for me to get my head around. If you can't pay $30 one time, but you can pay $3 every week for 10 weeks, well, what? Isn't that the exact same thing? Why can they do one but not the other? Why do they need tools to help them?

I feel like I'm missing something about how to understand the psychology of this. Or rather, I feel like the way the people's budgets actually work in the real world (not just the poor people in this book, but basically everyone) is like this: It's not about "we planned out the correct amount for each category in our budget, which is more or less the minimum we feel we need to have a good life, and all the rest goes to savings." It's more like, you have a vague sense of how much money is available to you, and your lifestyle sort of naturally expands to match.

I think that "personal responsibility" Republicans might frame it as being "self-disciplined" and view it as a moral failure if you can't manage to save up money because you lack good financial tools. But the truth is, it really does take work. Let's say you want to save up $3 a week for 10 weeks. So, every week, you need to have an awareness of what your savings amount is supposed to be, and you need to make sure that you don't accidentally spend it as you pay for your normal life expenses. Remembering what the number is supposed to be, remembering to update the number in your head every week, communicating this number and its importance to your family members so they don't spend it (and/or just hiding the cash from them, maybe that's easier), always knowing how much you have left every time you make a purchase- this is work. And what if you're saving up for multiple things, with different timelines... 

If it was me, I would make a Excel sheet to keep track of this. (Actually, many of the study participants were illiterate, and were just mentally keeping track of their informal loans with their neighbors. Interesting.)

It truly is work to continually make sure you're saving the right amount of money for future expenses. So of course it's helpful for poor people to have access to financial tools which will do that work for them. Even though sometimes those financial tools will charge fees. Here's a quote from pages 148-149:

An example from India shows us just how important these elements [reliability, flexibility, structure that works with a household's cash-flow timing] are to the poor saver. Jyothi works in the southern city of Vijaywada and was described in an earlier book by one of our authors. Jyothi is a middle-aged woman living in the slums she served, and her service consisted simply of walking round the slum each day collecting small deposits from her customers, most of them housewives. She gave them a crude passbook, just a card divided into 220 cells made up of 20 columns and 11 rows, so that savers could keep track of their progress. When all 220 cells were ticked off, Jyothi returned the savings to the value of 200 of the 220 cells, holding back the remaining 20 cells' worth as her fee for her service. Thus someone depositing a total of $44 with her, as 20 cents a day, would get back $40. If we consider this 20-cell fee as interest, and we assume a growing balance as 220 deposits are made over 220 days, then Jyothi is effectively paying her customers a negative rate on the savings-- minus 30 percent a year. Put this fact to the savers and they will tell you to forget your fancy calculations: the fact is that they needed their $40 to ensure that they could pay school fees to keep their children in class for another year. With husbands earning irregularly, the only sure way to build up this sum was to take pennies from the housekeeping money each day and hand it over to Jyothi. It costs them only $4 to form the $40, and Jyothi did all the work. Taken within this context, this is a reasonable price to pay to build badly needed savings.

I don't think we should view this as "poor people are not self-disciplined enough." I think there are plenty of examples in our lives where people choose to put pressure or restrictions on themselves, to force themselves to follow through with good habits they are trying to maintain. You might know someone who paid money to join a gym, even though they could just exercise at home by following workout videos on youtube for free. Why pay the money for the gym? Because they know that if their plan is just to exercise with youtube videos at home, in reality they're not going to do it. But if they're paying money for the gym, they will feel obligated to actually go and exercise. There really is value in these strategies to make yourself do something you know you should do.

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Microloans

The diary households in this book used a wide range of loans, from informal, semiformal, and formal sources. Some examples:

  • Buying groceries on credit
  • Getting an advance on one's salary
  • Interest-free loan from a neighbor
  • Loan from a local moneylender
  • Loan from a microfinance organization

Let's talk about the microfinance organizations.

When I was in college, sometime around 2010, I heard a lot about Kiva, a charity that provided microloans to people in developing countries. The story that was presented went like this: These people have such low incomes, and they can't get loans from normal financial institutions because those institutions don't think it's worth the trouble of doing business with such small amounts of money. If they need a loan, they have to go to a shady moneylender- and the moneylenders charge something like 300% annual interest, oh my goodness, that's terrible. But if they had access to loans with reasonable interest rates, wow, that could really turn their lives around. That could lift them out of poverty. The microloan recipients will be able to start their own businesses- whereas, without the microloan, they never would have been able to save up enough money for the initial capital investment to start their business. And having a business would totally change their life.

"Portfolios of the Poor" shows us that the reality is not really like that.

The reality is more like: 

Okay, so those predatory moneylenders you've heard about? It doesn't really make sense to talk about their annual interest rate, since the loans are often paid back very quickly. It makes sense to think of this cost as more of a fee, rather than interest. Also, people often renegotiate with the moneylenders about their interest payments and the term of the loan. It's very common for part or all of the interest to be forgiven. So if you see a moneylender loan presented as "it's x dollars, for y period of time" and then you use those numbers and calculate the annual interest rate, and your jaw hits the floor, well, no, that's not really an accurate way to look at it. When all is said and done, the total interest might be much lower, and the repayment schedule might be much longer. And there may be benefits in using a moneylender- like convenience, and how the moneylender may be someone who's been a member of your community for a long time, so you know they are reliable, and will probably be understanding if you need extra time to pay back the loan.

And the formal microloan organizations: Yes, it is good that those exist. It is an extremely useful resource to have. But the loans are not all used for entrepreneurial purposes. There was one example in the book of a household that used part of the money from a microloan to buy a cabinet to store their rice in. Something like that, which I would never think of as something one would need a loan for. I would take it for granted that you already have that. Something that doesn't really make for a good story about how these microloans are so amazing and they're rescuing people from poverty. No, it's not really like that.

There weren't any examples in the book where having microloans allowed someone to get to a standard of living that *in my opinion* can be described as "rising out of poverty." These people all had very hard lives- but having financial tools like microloans allowed them to get by, more or less, rather than having a financial emergency cascade into a disaster that affects every part of their life.

The book emphasized how extremely important it is that options such as microloans from formal providers are available to poor people. This is something that helps them a lot. But it doesn't look like the glamorous stories that charities tell, about how everyone is going to be an entrepreneur and escape from poverty. (The book emphasized that it would be most helpful if the loans could be used for any purpose at all- rather than requiring them to only be used for entrepreneurial reasons.)

The microloan organizations are a good thing. Don't misunderstand me. It is a very helpful resource to have. It's good that such organizations exist. But the reality doesn't match the romanticized story that we in the US have heard about microloans.

---

The point is that poor people need a variety of financial tools

The book is all about how, when people's incomes are so low and irregular, it's even more important that they have access to financial tools to help them manage their money. The financial lives of these diary households were very complex. They had various methods of saving money, and chose to take different kinds of loans in different circumstances.

They use so many different financial tools, and it would benefit them even more if they had better ones. If they had reliable savings accounts. If they had access to loans with flexible repayment schedules. And so forth.

(And this was published in 2009, based on research from 1999-2005. So probably the situation has changed since then.)

I found this book extremely interesting and I'm glad I read it, because it paints a picture of what life is like for people in extreme poverty, in a way that actually feels *real* to me. I've always felt that, when I read statistics about global poverty, or see ads for charities, it doesn't make them look like real people. It makes them look like, their lives are so terrible I can't even imagine, so I should feel bad, until I give money to a charity, then I can stop feeling bad. Not so with this book. This actually shows poverty in human terms. People making plans, making choices based on their own preferences related to risk and so on. 

"Portfolios of the Poor" was not about charity at all (it was about how governments and private businesses should invest in building the kind of financial infrastructure that would help poor people), but I have some thoughts. It makes me think, maybe charity should actually be really boring. It shouldn't be about me swooping in and making a big payment that feels like a very dramatic, emotional sacrifice. It shouldn't be about how I'm gonna make a big difference and save people so easily. Instead, maybe we should think of it like, people who have high enough incomes should have a habit of regularly giving money to charities. Like, just really really boring stuff, just regular automatic donations that you don't really think much about, but you'll notice them if you look at your bank statements. It's not okay that poor people don't have good options for savings accounts, but at the same time, it doesn't make for an exciting story that people will rally around. (Though the issue about access to bank accounts should really be addressed by governments and businesses, rather than charities, so maybe this is not a good example for talking about charity.) So I think, it shouldn't be a big emotional thing, like it's super meaningful and you're saving people's lives and you have all kinds of feelings about it. It should be that, when you think about it morally, rich people *should* have the habit of giving money to charity. And those boring regular payments do make a difference- but it's sort of in terms of what's going on in the background, rather than being a really dramatic "wow I saved a child's life just now."

---

Follow-up post: On Skipping My Daily $5 Starbucks

Related:

My Weird Hangups About Charity

"Winners Take All": Businesspeople Only Want To "Change The World" If It Makes Money

Friday, July 4, 2025

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. Dehumidifier (June 30) From xkcd.

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Links related to the antichrist:

1. ICEBlock, an app for anonymously reporting ICE sightings, goes viral overnight after Bondi criticism (July 1, via) "With ICEBlock, users can lawfully share information about where they have seen ICE within a 5-mile radius of their location."

2. RFK is Going to Murder a Million Babies (July 1) "As Edward Nirenberg commented on BlueSky, 'if I were HHS Secretary and my goal were to kill as many children as possible, it would be difficult to distinguish the actions I would take from those that Kennedy has taken.'"

I don't *get* this. It seems to be a common thing that when you try to pin anti-vaxxers down, they say they're not anti-vax, they just want to be more careful and informed about things. (This is what RFK was saying in his confirmation hearings.) But then the actions they take are like... like they don't believe these vaccine-preventable diseases are real and deadly. 

3. New insight into Texas family detention reveals adults fighting kids for clean water (June 22) "One family with a young boy with cancer said he missed his doctor’s appointment after the family was arrested following their attendance to an immigration court hearing. He is now experiencing relapse symptoms, according to the motion. Another family said their 9-month old lost over 8 pounds (3.6 kilograms) while in detention for a month."

4. Federal judge strikes down Trump's order suspending asylum access at the southern border (July 2) "Asylum has been part of U.S. law since 1980, allowing those who fear for their safety to seek refuge in the U.S. as long as they can show a credible fear of persecution in their home country."

5. CBS is the latest news giant to bend to Trump's power (July 2) "Last year, as he campaigned for the White House, Trump promised to protect free speech and end censorship." He was lying.

6. Trump Admin Begins Processing Some Trans Passport Updates, Though It Will Maintain Data On Requests (July 2) "As of Wednesday morning, multiple transgender individuals have reported successfully obtaining updated passports at in-person passport offices."

Thursday, July 3, 2025

"The Case for Open Borders": Get in line

Clipart of people waiting in line. Image source.

Here's another quote from the book "The Case for Open Borders". From pages 153-154:

Another easy step is to keep unauthorized-entry statutes in place, but to allow all immigration through ports of entry. This might be the most broadly palatable of open-border visions, as migrants would still have to present at official ports of entry, submit documentation, and register before they were granted entry-- but all would be granted entry. People who tried to gain access between ports of entry could be turned around or sent back to come through an official port of entry. Once they arrive, a nonenforcement agency, such as USCIS, would be charged with getting their paperwork in order, but nobody would be forced to live off the books or under the threat of banishment. With such a system, the anti-immigrant quip to "get in line" would actually make sense. (Currently, for most people, except the well heeled and well connected, there is no line.) This approach would target the manner in which people come, not the people themselves.




Wednesday, July 2, 2025

"Give Birth Like a Feminist" (book review)

Book cover for "Give Birth Like a Feminist"

I recently read the book Give Birth Like a Feminist by Milli Hill. It's about the rights of pregnant people to make choices during the process of laboring and giving birth to their babies, rather than just being pushed along by doctors telling them what's going to happen. You may recall I've written before about how I'm interested in what consent should look like in a medical context- so obviously I'm interested in this book. Also I've given birth twice so yes I have some opinions on that.

---

People say "A healthy baby is all that matters"

This is something I've heard many times- when a woman tells the story of how she gave birth, and there are always some things that went wrong or didn't go the way she would have preferred, and then someone says it's okay, all that matters is that the mom and baby are alive and healthy.

I don't like when people say that. Very much disagree. The writer of this book, Milli Hill, also very much disagrees.

I guess when people say all that matters is that the baby's healthy, there are 2 different ways you could understand that:

  1. Some things didn't go the way the pregnant person expected/wanted- for example, medical issues meant that the baby had to be born early, so you're rushing around in a panic, texting your manager on the way to the hospital to tell them you have to start maternity leave right now, you didn't even have time to buy things for the baby yet, all you have is a bunch of newborn clothes somebody gave you, and you thought they looked kinda old and ugly and didn't want to use them, but now that's all you have for your baby to wear. And whenever you look at your kid's newborn photos, the kid is wearing those ugly clothes. 
    The sorts of things that are like, at the time, they're really stressful, but later you look back on them and you can kinda laugh because they're not really a big deal in the grand scheme of things, and everything turned out fine.
  2. You feel you were pressured or coerced into doing things that you didn't want. (For example, getting an epidural or not getting an epidural, getting induced, C-section, not having skin-to-skin time right after the baby is born, etc.) You wanted your birth experience to go a certain way, but other people disregarded what you wanted and pushed you into things that you didn't want- and you were vulnerable and in pain and weren't able to stand up for yourself. You feel violated. You have trauma from that. The birth of your child is a very important moment in your life, and it could have gone so much better, but that was taken from you.
    And then you hear people say "all that matters is that the baby is healthy" like they think you should just ignore your trauma and pretend it doesn't exist.

And maybe in between these 2 things, there's a whole range of experiences that a pregnant person may have had, where they didn't get the kind of birth experience they wanted, and for some cases it's best to just conclude that it's not a big deal and move on, and for some cases, there is real trauma there, and it can only heal when you acknowledge it and believe that you did deserve better.

(And there can also be trauma from genuine medical issues, but that's kind of a different thing than what we're talking about here.)

The point of this book is, it's NOT true that as long as the mom and baby are healthy, everything is fine. Pregnant people deserve better than that- we deserve to be listened to and respected. We deserve to have choices. If doctors do things to you which feel traumatic and violating, and then people say it's fine because at least no one died, well, that's NOT COOL.

(Also, I've often heard moms talking about what they wish had gone differently with giving birth, from a sort of "mommy wars" perspective- ie, if you're a good mom, you should give birth without an epidural, etc. The idea that your birth experience is supposed to go a certain way, or else society will judge you and say you're a failure as a mom/ as a woman. And it can be good and healthy to just ignore society's judgment, and say "just because my experience didn't fit this 'ideal' image, doesn't mean it was bad." Yes, I agree with this advice. But this aspect of it wasn't really what was discussed in the book. It wasn't about judging one's birth experience from a "mommy wars" perspective. It was about being able to make your own choices. It was about consent.)

---

Is your doctor actually working in your best interest?

In an ideal world, of course the doctors and medical staff are working in the patients' best interest. But, here in reality, sometimes patients have concerns, and doctors don't listen to them, and this leads to worse problems. Or sometimes doctors perform various medical interventions during the process of labor and giving birth (induction, C-section, forceps delivery, episiotomy, etc), and these interventions actually do more harm than good. Because of problems like this, maternal mortality rates are higher than they should be- especially for certain marginalized groups like Black women.

Why do doctors do these kinds of interventions, if the patient doesn't need it? Why not just let the patient labor by themself and give birth vaginally, and only intervene if you run into serious problems? Well, I can think of a few reasons:

  • Interventions mean the doctor is the one in control. If you're trying to have a natural delivery, who knows how long you'll be in labor? Could be hours and hours. The doctor has to wait around that whole time- this is very inconvenient for the doctor. But if you get a C-section, well, the doctor knows exactly what to do and when and exactly how long it will take. This is much better for the doctor's schedule. Rather than having a timetable that's out of their control.
  • Sometimes patients feel like nothing is happening, and it would make them feel better if the doctor would just *do something*. I think the issue there is when pregnant people are not well-informed about what labor and birth actually look like. If you have only seen it on tv, you probably expect that it all happens very fast and exciting- but actually, the reality is you'll probably be experiencing contractions for 24 hours or so, before the baby is finally born. When you're all excited and you get to the hospital and get changed into your hospital gown and they hook you up to the fetal monitoring and it's all very exciting, and then, okay, and then pretty much nothing happens. You have to just wait around, experiencing contractions for hours and hours. It's kinda boring. Sometimes patients will be unhappy with this, and will want to know, isn't there anything the doctor can do to make this faster??? And, yes, there are things the doctor can do to make it faster. But it's not a good idea to do that, if there's no actual medical reason for it. But if you're there in that situation, and you expected it to go a certain way, because you aren't well-informed about what labor actually looks like, it might make you feel better for the doctor to do things (that aren't actually necessary and might do more harm than good).
  • Doctors are afraid of getting sued. It's much more likely that they'll get sued for "you should have done something, but you did nothing"' than for doing something that maybe was not necessary and resulted in additional complications. So it's not really about what's in the patient's best interest, it's about what the doctor is more likely to get sued for.

I'm in China, and I've heard that Chinese hospitals serve such a huge number of patients, so they don't want you taking up a spot in the labor room if you're taking forever and nothing seems to be happening. After a certain amount of time, they would want to do a C-section. I gave birth at an international hospital in China so I wasn't in that kind of environment though.

And another thing that happens is, doctors tell you that there's some serious problem, and they have to do some medical procedure on you right away, or else there is a risk that your baby might die. They act like it's very urgent, and there's no time to actually understand the situation or what your options are, DO YOU WANT YOUR BABY TO DIE???? This is a very difficult situation to be in, as a patient, because you're not an expert in pregnancy complications- how do you know if it's really as serious as what the doctor is saying? Or is it just a small risk that they are blowing out of proportion? Or do they have other reasons, not related to your health or the baby's health, that they want to push you into some medical intervention? It can be really coercive.

It can help a lot, in this situation, to have a midwife or doula who is "on your side." The midwife or doula will be knowledgeable enough to know if the risk is really as great as what the doctor is saying.

Honestly, though, my opinion is, you should talk to the doctor during the pregnancy, and make sure you find a doctor you can trust. During your prenatal appointments, talk to them about what kind of birth you want to have, and see what their perspective is. Find information about what percentage of births at their hospital are vaginal vs C-section, and other statistics like that. You find a doctor you can trust, who supports the kind of birth experience you want to have, and then if they tell you there's some kind of urgent reason they need to do something that wasn't in the plan, you can trust that it's because there really is a medical reason, not because they just don't care about your plan. You don't have to be in a situation where you're second-guessing them and have no idea if your baby is actually at risk or not. (And then afterward, you always wonder if you should be grateful to the doctor for saving your baby's life, or if everything would have been fine if they had just done nothing, and they violated you and disregarded your wishes for no good reason.)

For example: When my second child was born, we had discussed with the doctor beforehand that my husband was going to cut the umbilical cord. This is apparently a thing that a lot of dads find meaningful. I don't think my husband really had a strong opinion about it though. But then, my baby came out, and the doctor was immediately saying "cut it" in Chinese, and the doctor and nurses cut the cord right away. Turns out this was because the cord was around the baby's neck, and she wasn't breathing. The doctor cut the cord and immediately handed the baby over to the other medical staff there who know how to get the baby to start breathing. (Don't worry, they got the baby to breathe.) So, the doctor didn't follow the plan, but there was a good reason for it- you don't want to be in the middle of a situation like that, and be arguing with the doctor because you don't trust that they actually cared about your plan.

It is a privilege, though, to be able to have access to a doctor you can trust like that. In some places, there are not any good options, or they are too expensive. This is so wrong- everyone should have a doctor who listens to them and is supportive.

This book talked about how women are often told they are "not allowed" to do something. That it's the hospital policy. They're "not allowed" to do skin-to-skin with the baby immediately after birth. They're "not allowed" to do delayed cord clamping. They're "not allowed" to continue laboring after a certain number of hours. They're "not allowed" to continue being pregnant past 41 weeks, they have to get induced. 

How can you be "not allowed" to do these very simple things? It's your body!

Why do we have this concept that hospitals are in charge, and they tell you what you are or aren't allowed to do with your own body? It should be that the hospital's services are a resource that pregnant people choose to use, as they make their own health care decisions.

The book makes the connection between birth trauma and sexual assault and the #metoo movement. Between the concepts of consent as it relates to sex, and consent as it relates to giving birth. Here is a quote from page 177:

Just as women were once told, 'sex is for procreation and nothing more,' they are now told, 'childbirth is for procreation and nothing more'. In either act, what matters is the production of a healthy baby, and the woman is merely a means to that end. The experience of childbirth is dismissed as meaningless and unimportant to a woman's body, heart or soul, just as the experience of sex used to be.

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Birth plans

The book said that society mocks women who make detailed birth plans- saying they are too high-maintenance, too controlling, need to be more realistic, need to learn to "go with the flow," their expectations are not reasonable, etc.

What is a birth plan? It's a document that the pregnant person writes, to communicate their preferences for how they want labor and birth to go. When I was pregnant, I read online that I should write one, so I did, and I brought it to a prenatal appointment to show the doctor. He read it and basically said yeah all of it is fine, it's all consistent with hospital policy. Then we didn't really discuss the birth plan again, and then during the actual birth, a bunch of things did not go according to plan, but I was okay with that because I did trust the doctors and nurses to respect me and my choices.

You should do this if you are pregnant. You should write a birth plan and discuss it with your doctor, well before the actual birth. Milli Hill also thinks so, and says it is not cool how women get mocked for expecting doctors to care about their birth plans. There's this caricature of a pregnant woman being really unrealistic about her birth plan- don't you know that sometimes things go wrong? Don't you know that birth isn't really something that can be planned down to the last detail?

Okay, people who mock birth plans are really misrepresenting the whole thing. Making a birth plan doesn't mean you're in denial of the fact that things don't always go according to plan. It's about communicating what you want. There are plenty of things that are extremely reasonable, that it's best to communicate with the hospital beforehand. Who do you want to be with you when you give birth? Do you want to bounce on a yoga ball during labor? Ask the hospital whether they provide a yoga ball. 

Making a birth plan isn't like, you actually believe it's going to happen that way, just because you wrote it down. It's about communicating with the medical staff about your preferences and your choices. Yes, you absolutely should have a birth plan.

Here's a quote from page 53 about women feeling bad for "getting their hopes up":

Interestingly, and also in common with other forms of violence against women, it is often the woman who is left carrying the blame and shame in the aftermath. Just as the woman who has been attacked may feel that the clothes she wore or the route she took home at the end of the night may have contributed to her violation, women traumatised by birth will spend the days, weeks or even years afterwards going over the events in fine detail and asking, 'What could I have done differently?' And, just as men are rarely asked to reflect on what they could do to reduce violence against women there is similarly considerably less postnatal analysis - and often none at all - done by the individuals, institutions and systems that inflict birth trauma. Women are left with the shameful reflection that they 'should not have got their hopes up', 'should not have made a birth plan', or 'should have just gone with the flow' and those messages are consistently reinforced in popular culture. Those who try to take control of their births, and antenatal courses and teachers who encourage them to believe they can do so, are consistently derided and mocked. 'Yes,' the woman thinks to herself, 'I was totally unrealistic to think I could have a positive experience of birth, and that is why I now feel so awful. It is my fault I feel this way.' This is victim-blaming, pure and simple.

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She is more of a "hippie" than me

It's very clear that the author, Hill, personally believes home birth is better than hospital birth. There are statistics in the book about how only a very low percentage of women are having home births, and this is presented as a bad thing. Also, the book talks about how many medical professionals have only experienced birth in a hospital setting, isn't it sad that they don't even know what their patients are missing out on.

Also, there's a lot of language in here about pregnant women being naked and roaring and powerful. I'm not really... that's not really my thing. I'm not into the idea of feeling powerful and "trusting my body" while giving birth. I already grew the whole baby during the pregnancy, that's already impressive and "powerful" enough, I don't also need the birth to be like that. I want to be with doctors and nurses who know what they're doing. Make it easy for me.

I mean, if I was stranded at a truck stop and had to give birth there, I would encourage myself with talk of my powerful feminine energy, but thank goodness I never had to do that. Let's avoid that if possible.

My opinion is, I don't really believe in this talk about "trust your body" and "women's bodies are made to do this" (the book uses language like, hospital birth is based on the belief that "women's bodies don't really work"). Because, yes, sure, giving birth is natural and the body has processes that handle it- but from an evolutionary perspective, that only has to "work" at a rate high enough so humanity as a species can continue. It's not something that I as an individual woman can rely on. Giving birth is natural, but dying in childbirth is also natural. I don't want to take my chances on that; I want a doctor who knows what they're doing.

Note, though, that actually studies have shown that home birth is just as safe as hospital birth- if there is a midwife present at the home birth who knows how to recognize when you need professional help, and you have a backup plan about how to get to the hospital if necessary. So, sure, okay, I guess it makes sense that some pregnant people would want to do it that way, but I very much do not.

Even though the author clearly has a preference for home birth (and being naked and roaring, etc), the book repeatedly emphasizes that this is about supporting all women's choices in childbirth. It's NOT about saying one type of birth is "better." The book says we should support women along the whole entire spectrum of options- from home birth to elective C-section.

Here's a quote from page 13:

We also need to talk about those women who don't want or cannot have straightforward vaginal births. There is literally not one single birth scenario in which increasing empathy for the woman, listening to her voice, respecting her decisions, and honouring that this is an extraordinary day in her life will not be valid. There is literally not one single type of birth that we cannot improve upon. The best way to find out more about this is again to listen to women. I learned so much about what women want in birth from talking to those those have experienced caesarean, and in particular, caesarean under general anesthetic - often the most difficult birth experience to process and recover from. From them I learned that the smallest of gestures can make the biggest and most life-changing differences. Taking a few moments to photograph the newborn on their mother's chest, for example, even if she is still unconscious, will create something she will treasure for a lifetime, a tangible antidote to her trauma. Women repeat again and again how much it means to them to know that their hands were among the first to touch their baby, even if they were not 'there' to experience it. Every small gesture matters, and we can always do better.

Yes! Totally agree with this! It is absolutely NOT true that if some kind of emergency comes up and you can't have a birth according to your birth plan, then you have no choices or consent at all and the doctors take over everything. This example of the C-section under general anesthesia- this would happen only in very rare cases, when there's such an extreme emergency and the baby has to be born right away, and there's not even time to do an epidural; the only way to give the pregnant person anesthesia fast enough is to use general anesthesia. Being asleep while your baby is born, yeah, that would be traumatic. I definitely see how it can help, to take a photo of the baby on the mother's chest, and other little gestures like that.

Don't view it like the "home birth" end of the spectrum is the "respecting women's choices and consent" end, and the "hospitalized birth" end of the spectrum is less so. No, at every point along the spectrum, no matter what kind of birth you end up having, even if legitimate medical problems mean it ends up having more interventions than you originally wanted- every birth can be improved by doctors respecting the pregnant person and caring about their choices.

So yes, the book says sometimes there are circumstances where you really do need a doctor. Doctors are experts in medical interventions for pregnancy complications- which are sometimes necessary to save lives- and midwives are experts in how pregnant people's bodies are meant to naturally give birth, and how to support them in that. Doctors and midwives both have important expertise, and they should learn from each other.

Yeah, throughout human history, the midwife role has been very important. And women knew about how childbirth worked because they were there to support the other women in their family who gave birth. But that knowledge is not really being passed down any more. It's really common for women to not really have any idea about the reality of what childbirth looks like, until they're actually pregnant themselves. It's very common to feel like it's unbelievable that a whole entire baby can come out of a vagina- how on earth would that even work? Doesn't feel realistic, does it?

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What about doctors not being comfortable with participating in scenarios they feel are too risky?

The idea that pregnant people should have doctors or midwives supporting them in whatever choice they make for the birth- I'm wondering about the details for how that would work. 

For example, suppose an unborn baby is in the breech position (ie, the baby's head is not pointing down). Now, this would make vaginal birth more risky- and as far as I know, most doctors would be unwilling to try for a vaginal birth in this case. They would say you have to have a C-section. But if the pregnant person wants to have a vaginal birth- well, what should happen? Doctors refuse to try for a vaginal birth not because they are being mean and not supporting women, but because they know that vaginal breech birth is more difficult and risky, and they feel that they don't have enough experience and knowledge about this specific situation to be confident that they would do a good job. Seriously, if you're pregnant and your baby is breech and you want to have a vaginal birth, I don't think you should try to talk *your* doctor into it, I think you should *find* a doctor who is experienced and confident with vaginal breech births.

I wonder about this... and the book didn't talk about it, so I don't really know whether my speculation matches reality or not, but, don't you think it would be traumatic for a doctor, if the patient insists on something the doctor believes is a serious risk to the baby's life- how can you force the doctor to participate in that? I mean, I guess to some extent that *is* their job, they can give recommendations but at the end of the day they provide the medical service that the patient chooses, not necessarily the one that the doctor thinks is best. But for something like vaginal breech birth, I wonder if doctors feel they don't have the training to do a good job with it- and the pregnant person and baby deserve to have a doctor who is trained enough to do a good job.

So it can't be like, you force doctors to participate in something they think is a bad idea. It should be like, even if most doctors don't want to be involved, there at least exists *somebody* who says "yes, I will support the patient in this" and society should allow pregnant people to use their services. (The book had examples of midwife organizations being shut down for shaky reasons- so, don't do that, allow the midwives to continue doing their work.)

But wait, what if that "somebody"- who says yes to whatever choice a pregnant person makes- is a quack? Shouldn't society require some kind of certification for these people? You can't let quacks and "influencers" give pregnant people misinformation about how this or that serious pregnancy complication is not actually a problem and you just have to trust in your feminine energy or whatever.

I agree with the idea that pregnant people should be supported along the whole entire spectrum of choices- but how can you make sure it's really an informed choice? Like, yes, if you want to have a home birth, or other things I personally think are a bad idea, because you are well-informed about it and you know what you're doing, I totally support that. But if you want to have a home birth because somebody in a facebook group said that pregnancy and childbirth carry no risks at all, well, yikes.

Like, how would this 'making sure all pregnant people's choices are supported' work? Who do you give midwife certification to? There has to be some kind of vetting. And I think the answer is, the standards for midwife certification should be created by experienced midwives who know what's what. So it's not that 'it's impossible to draw a line, so don't even try'- it should be that a line is drawn by people who know what they're doing.

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This is a feminist issue- but it's difficult

The book emphasizes that this is a feminist issue. Yes! I agree! Birth trauma is a feminist issue, and we should talk about it more. On pages 88-89, Hill speculates that maybe this is difficult to talk about because people who have bad experiences during birth tell themselves that there were reasons that it had to be that way- and to find out that actually it didn't have to be that way, and they deserved better, can be traumatic:

To say that we are not powerless in birth can be extremely triggering for those women who feel that they absolutely were, and this alone could explain the lack of feminist attention to the birth experience. Such a large percentage of women have had utterly dreadful birth experiences in the past few decades, and they're been given these experiences in a well-rehearsed cultural package bound up neatly with the ribbon of unwavering faith in medical science to rescue them from their inadequate bodies. And the bow on top is the repeated mantra that a healthy baby is all that matters, setting them up for a lifetime of reluctance to question whether their experience could have been less traumatic, could have been different, could even have been glorious.

Anyone who talks about birth in positive terms, therefore, can face a huge backlash, which often seems to me to come from a very hurt place, a wound in women that is often both personal and cultural. I felt the pain of it myself, when, after my first hospital forceps birth, a friend, who had been pregnant at the same time, had the easy home birth that I had been hoping for. I can still remember where I was when I heard the news, and it floored me. I felt gutted - and yes I know that some people will try to tell me that this was simply because I had been set up to view one kind of birth as somehow 'better' than the other, that I felt I had failed the test somehow, and my home birth friend had passed it. But I was not gutted because I had had my silly head filled with unrealistic ideas of the perfect birth - far from it. I was gutted because I was traumatised. I hated to think about her birth because it brought up so many 'what if' questions about mine. I was so deeply wounded by my own birth that it was almost unbearable to think that it could have been different for me.

But also, to me it feels sort of more difficult and complicated than other issues. Because, doesn't it feel like there is an argument to be made that pregnant people *shouldn't* be allowed to do things which put their unborn baby in serious danger?

Or, to put it another way, as far as reasons go for restricting women's choices/ telling them what they're "allowed" to do with their own bodies, saving a baby's life seems like a really good reason. Childbirth truly is risky. Before the era of modern medicine, people were dying in childbirth all the time.

But, maybe every feminist issue used to feel complicated. Maybe people used to feel like "well there are plenty of good reasons for not letting women [vote/ have a bank account/ get divorced/ etc]," and now that feminists have been talking about these issues for so long, they no longer feel "complicated." They feel obvious.

The book said that there's a big connection between "pro-life" ideology and controlling women's choices during childbirth. I feel like, superficially this seems surprising- isn't "pro-life" about wanting to have a baby, and "pro-choice" is about wanting to kill one's unborn baby- and so women who are giving birth are on the "wanting to have a baby" side of that, ie, the "pro-life" side. That's how I would have thought about it, years ago when I was evangelical and "pro-life."

But the way I see it now is more like this: "Pro-choice" is about supporting people's choices related to their own health and their own bodies. If they want to be pregnant, we support that, and if they want to have an abortion, we support that. But "pro-life" is based on the idea that women can't be trusted to make their own choices, so we need the government to make laws to force them.

Page 36 says:

Some may feel that a pregnant woman should not have the right to make a decision that puts her baby 'at risk', but, unfortunately, as unpleasant as it may sound, the unborn child can never and should never be considered to have any rights - and as soon as we put so much as a toe in this water, we begin to stray into a place in which a woman can be taken from her house by the police and compelled to undergo major surgery against her wishes. [Earlier in this chapter, there was an account of a Brazilian woman who was taken by police and given a C-section because of a court order.] There is a creeping nature to such a mindset - once we begin to make provision for the occasions when doctors or the state may overrule a pregnant woman with full mental capacity, we are on a very slippery slope indeed. Instead, the point needs to be made clear, often over and over again, that we have to trust women to be the ultimate decision maker in birth, no matter what.

I think... I think it's difficult, and this is something you should really think through rather than just agreeing with it because it's the "pro-choice" or "feminist" opinion on it. But basically yeah I do agree with what the book is saying there. It has to be the pregnant person who is making the decisions. 

Even though pregnant people might sometimes do a bad job of making decisions, there's nobody else you could pick who would do better. Sure, we can think of hypotheticals where a pregnant person decides to do something which is a really bad idea, and they or their baby might die as a result- but there are also plenty of cases where the government makes bad decisions for pregnant people- and that would happen far more frequently.

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It's such a scam that they've got us believing women are weaker

Can I just say, it's such a scam that society has us believing that women are weaker than men. Seriously! Women/ people with a uterus are the ones who make new people. We create life! And we have to deal with menstruation, pregnancy, and childbirth. Even a healthy pregnancy is extremely difficult, very hard to go through. Cis men don't have any kind of equivalent difficulty that their bodies go through. If cis men are healthy, their reproductive organs never give them any trouble. IMAGINE. Blew my mind when I realized that. Can you believe patriarchy has really tricked us into thinking women are weaker than men?

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It's hard for me to get my head around the idea that these unpleasant but normal medical procedures violate patients' rights

When you are in labor, you might have all manner of people sticking their fingers in your vagina to check how dilated your cervix is. (This is called a vaginal exam.) *I* personally did not have "all manner of people", just 1 doctor, but yeah it is common that women report having all manner of people sticking their fingers in the woman's vagina.

Here's the purpose of the vaginal exam: During the process of labor, the cervix opens in order to let the baby come out. This could take hours and hours. Doctors feel that it's useful to do a vaginal exam to check how far the cervix has opened- this gives you a sense of how far along you are in the process. But it's not *necessary* to do it. You could just labor without knowing how dilated your cervix is, and then when you have a feeling like you want to push the baby out, that's how you know it's time to push the baby out. (Note that when the pregnant person has an epidural, they might not be able to feel this feeling of knowing it's time to push.)

So the vaginal exams are not medically necessary. But patients often like to know their progress, so they want to do them. But some patients do not want to do vaginal exams- and they should absolutely be allowed to say no. It's your vagina! You're not *required* to let people stick their fingers in there, wtf.

Page 38-39 says:

The interesting thing about VEs is that they are completely optional - but not a lot of people know this. You would think it would be obvious - of course nobody can put their fingers inside your vagina if you don't want them to, right? But the majority of women are unaware that they are perfectly entitled to decline. Furthermore, some women report a nagging sense that they are entitled to decline, but are unable to voice their refusal, whereas others do manage to decline but are then either directly or indirectly coerced, for example by being told they cannot be admitted to the ward or use the birth pool unless they comply, or by simply being told they 'have to' - which is of course incorrect, as you don't 'have to' allow anything to happen to your body against your wishes. Still others consent to the VE but are told afterwards that their midwife or doctor gave them a 'sweep' or broke their waters 'while they were in there'. Women to whom this happens report finding it extremely violating and yet rarely complain formally about it, perhaps because there is a widespread and unspoken acceptance that maternity care requires you to 'leave your dignity at the door' and can at times be violating by its very nature.

And I also want to put a few quotes here about doctors respecting patients and how that can come across as unusual. From page 276-277:

What is also at risk of happening is women who, for whatever reason, can no longer have the straightforward birth they really wanted, feeling like they no longer have any rights or choices. As some put it, 'the birth plan went out the window'. On the contrary, when those situations that truly do require medical help arise, respectful care means continuing to keep women and their feelings at the heart of every action. Nothing illustrates this better than the many examples of clinicians trying to raise levels of empathy in highly medicalised settings. In Nottingham, obstetrician Andy Sim has been one of the pioneers of 'woman-centered caesarean,' which shifts the focus of surgical birth away from clinicians 'doing their job' and towards the woman as the pivotal character in the drama. ... One of Andy's 'small' changes - which of course any woman may ask to be part of her caesarean - is that, while the catheter is being inserted, theatre staff who are not needed for that procedure go and stand at the woman's head. When I've told people about this option, many will look a bit baffled and ask - why? Perhaps their first assumption is that there is a complex medical reason for the doctor's actions, but in fact the answer is simple - it's entirely about the woman's dignity. This seemingly small act of kindness says: 'We, the medical team, are thinking about what this is like for you, the person giving birth.' It's a sudden flash of empathy for how a woman, on the threshold of becoming a mother, may feel at that moment as an area of her body that is usually kept private is exposed. And it's an acknowledgement that in birth, everything is remembered, and everything 'matters'. Perhaps people are initially baffled by this because we're simply not used to the concept of building the activity in the birth room around the needs of the woman.

And this one from page 267:

As Hermine Hayes-Klein put it to me: 'How much would it change in the birth room if everybody in that room really understood that the woman could not be touched without her permission - this would be transformative. And the fact that it would be transformative tells you everything you need to know about how informed consent is routinely ignored in current maternity care systems.'

Yeah... I feel like, for me, it's hard to get my head around the idea that... like... it is right to limit how much medical staff look at patients' "private parts" and/or touch patients in intimate, invasive ways. Because, isn't that how it always is with doctors? Like, of course I don't want strangers looking at me or touching me like that- but if it's a doctor, then you have to, that's just how it is with doctors. 

I don't really know how to put my thoughts into words on this... I really like what these sections of the book were saying, but I just can't see how to fit in into my understanding of what medical care even is.

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I pay the big bucks for the international hospital

In China, I always go to international hospitals for my medical care, because they have standards for bedside manner, patient privacy, etc, which match what I'm used to from the US. I have had bad experiences in Chinese hospitals. Chinese hospitals are very good at giving you the medical treatment you need, but don't do anything about caring for your emotions surrounding it.

This was especially important to me when I was pregnant, because I've heard things about Chinese hospitals- like they will push you into having a C-section if they think you're taking too long, male partners aren't allowed in the labor rooms, you get treated as just an object in a system instead of a person- that kind of stuff. (In some cases, the reason they don't allow your partner to come to the labor room is that it's not just you- there will be other women also laboring in the same room. You don't want *other people's* male partners in the labor room with you. In some cases, though, it's a private room, and I have no idea what the justification is there.) 

These things won't be true of all Chinese hospitals- there is a huge range. (And there are public hospitals, private hospitals, international hospitals, VIP departments in public hospitals- all of which will give you a different kind of experience.) And sure, plenty of people report having good experiences at Chinese public hospitals too. 

Anyway MY POINT IS, I pay the big bucks to go to the international hospital. 

Yes, it is much more expensive. Not everyone has access to that kind of medical care. And that's the problem.

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This book is not trans-inclusive

I have to put a warning here, for readers who are trans/nonbinary/queer, that the language used in this book is not inclusive of trans people. The book constantly refers to people who give birth as women, constantly talks about how this is a women's issue, etc- and yes, that is true, this is a women's issue- but *not* all people who give birth are women. Trans and nonbinary people exist. I think it's better to use language like "women and/or people who give birth" but this book doesn't do that, it's always just "women."

... Oh, oh dear, I just did a little googling and found the author's substack and it's, ahem, not really trans-friendly. Oh wow, I'm actually really shocked to see that- because trans rights are all about trans people being allowed to make their own decisions about their medical care, rather than having the government/ gatekeepers/ conservative politicians/ etc decide what kind of medical care they're "allowed" to have. And isn't that the exact same thing that "Give Birth Like a Feminist" is about?

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Conclusion

The topic of what consent should look like in a medical context is extremely important to me. And giving birth is one area where a lot of people have trauma due to disrespect and lack of consent. The message of "Give Birth Like a Feminist" is that women deserve better than that. Yes! You have choices! It's your body! But society and the medical system treat women like they are being unreasonable for "getting their hopes up" and expecting that their choices will be respected during childbirth. This definitely is a feminist issue that we should be talking about.

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Related:

A Comprehensive Pro-Choice Ethic

"Expecting Better": Asking the Right Questions About Pregnancy 

I Had Pre-Eclampsia

"Queer Conception" (book review) 

So I Got the Epidural

"Afraid of the Doctor" (I read this book because I have medical trauma)

I Don't Want My Baby To Be "Brave"

Doctors (part 3 of Autism & Teaching Kids to Protect Themselves)


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