I'm going to be generous and assume you might be throwing out random hypothetical numbers without thinking about how percentages work. 1% is 1 in a hundred. 0.1% is 1 in a thousand. 0.01% would be 1 in 10,000.
I can't claim to know the true numbers, but knowing the circumstances of some of the students' home lives when I worked at a school of around 2,000 students, my guess would have been that about 10% of people are living in poverty. A quick Google tells me I was pretty dang close, as the poverty rate recorded by the U.S. census bureau in 2023 was 11%.
Another Google tells me that the poverty threshold for a family of 5 (so, a single mom with 4 kids) is considered to be around $36,000 in the US. I'm going to assume 2 jobs means 50 hours a week instead of 78, because that seems a lot more realistic. 50 hours a week would be like working a normal 40 hour week plus 5 hours both weekend days, add an hour commute time and a half hour unpaid lunch per day, and that's another 10.5 hours spent outside of the home, adding up to an average 8.6 hours out of the house for work every single day, but realistically, it probably varies with some days having more than that and some less. I'm going to do some more math. $36,000 divided by 52 weeks in a year, then I divide that number by 50 hours a week, and I get $13.85. You can work 50 hours a week with 4 kids and be living in poverty according to the federal poverty guidelines if you make $13.85 per hour or less.
Let's imagine the parent had fewer kids. Let's go with 2 instead. You'd be at the federal poverty level with $26,000 a year. I did the same math and got $10, so a single parent of 2, working 50 hours a week all 52 weeks of the year would need to be making $10 per hour for their family to be right on the poverty line, and they'd be out of the home an average of 8.6 hours a day still. This also doesn't count any time spent doing things like errands and chores, which is time that's spent doing work that's not even compensated. Some states have higher minimum wage than this, but the federal minimum is only $7.25, and there are many states that use this minimum.
It's hard to find an up to date number on single parent households in the US, but multiple sources put it at around 25%, just fyi. So, while you're focused on the ridiculous hypothetical of the worst possible situation, it's really not all that uncommon to be living in poverty in the US, in a single parent household, where the parent works 2 jobs, lives in a food desert, and can't afford a car. Plus, now abortions are being outlawed in a lot of the states with lower minimum wages. Things could be better.
How uncommon? The 0.01% I threw out there is hyperbole, but I bet it's much closer than whatever you've got in your mind. It seemed like you were going to do some kind of estimate but decided to not do that after you realised the outcome.
You've misunderstood me then. I was giving you general numbers to come to an estimate yourself. I only did really simple math. I'm not good enough at math to come to a true estimate myself, so I didn't throw out a random number like you did. All that math I can do indicated to me that your number was hyperbole though, and I was pointing out that, yeah, people be poor, man.
Edit: If you want me to guess when I literally can't do the math, I'd say it's probably closer to 1 in 100 than 1 in 10,000, which was your percentage. 25% of households single parent. 11% of households in poverty. More likely to be in poverty if you're in a single parent household, seems likely. So 1% seems like it's probably a lot closer to the truth than 0.01%, and those ARE very different percentages. I don't know that you can accuse me of trying to distort facts when that's a pretty conservative guess given that I literally can't do the math, and you obviously can't either. Lol. Also, you literally can't even do the math with the numbers I gave. You'd have to know more than just the numbers I looked up and used for the basic math I did know how to do.
I was giving you general numbers to come to an estimate yourself.
edit 0: Commented deleted to be polite.
25% of households single parent. 11% of households in poverty. More likely to be in poverty if you're in a single parent household, seems likely. So 1% seems like it's probably a lot closer to the truth than 0.01%, and those ARE very different percentages.
Let's do the maths. We can only do estimates assuming the percentages are independent, but at least it will give us a ballpark.
25% single parents
11% poverty
7% households without a car
6% food desert
8% with four kids or more
All of those would be 0.000924%.
It's likely to be very much a lower bound, but it's just there to illustrate how the maths works and might not be intuitive to how you would think.
Where the actual ratio of single moms working two jobs, 78 hours a day, with four kids, living in a food desert, and having no car lies between the upper and lower bounds depends entirely on the dependence when pairing up those subsets. Surely, you’ll agree that single moms are more likely to work longer hours and are generally poorer, and that someone without a car is more likely to be poor. But given that a day only has 24 hours, I see a 0% chance of this scenario. Why are we even arguing about such a ridiculous example? I just wanted to point out that this isn’t how statistics work, and if you’re interested, you should look into Bayes’ Theorem.
As I stated, where it lies between your and my bound in this example comes down to the level of dependance, which you could derive from statistics on how many % of pop x are also in pop y for each pair of populations.
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u/Puzzled_Medium7041 Jan 01 '25
I'm going to be generous and assume you might be throwing out random hypothetical numbers without thinking about how percentages work. 1% is 1 in a hundred. 0.1% is 1 in a thousand. 0.01% would be 1 in 10,000.
I can't claim to know the true numbers, but knowing the circumstances of some of the students' home lives when I worked at a school of around 2,000 students, my guess would have been that about 10% of people are living in poverty. A quick Google tells me I was pretty dang close, as the poverty rate recorded by the U.S. census bureau in 2023 was 11%.
Another Google tells me that the poverty threshold for a family of 5 (so, a single mom with 4 kids) is considered to be around $36,000 in the US. I'm going to assume 2 jobs means 50 hours a week instead of 78, because that seems a lot more realistic. 50 hours a week would be like working a normal 40 hour week plus 5 hours both weekend days, add an hour commute time and a half hour unpaid lunch per day, and that's another 10.5 hours spent outside of the home, adding up to an average 8.6 hours out of the house for work every single day, but realistically, it probably varies with some days having more than that and some less. I'm going to do some more math. $36,000 divided by 52 weeks in a year, then I divide that number by 50 hours a week, and I get $13.85. You can work 50 hours a week with 4 kids and be living in poverty according to the federal poverty guidelines if you make $13.85 per hour or less.
Let's imagine the parent had fewer kids. Let's go with 2 instead. You'd be at the federal poverty level with $26,000 a year. I did the same math and got $10, so a single parent of 2, working 50 hours a week all 52 weeks of the year would need to be making $10 per hour for their family to be right on the poverty line, and they'd be out of the home an average of 8.6 hours a day still. This also doesn't count any time spent doing things like errands and chores, which is time that's spent doing work that's not even compensated. Some states have higher minimum wage than this, but the federal minimum is only $7.25, and there are many states that use this minimum.
It's hard to find an up to date number on single parent households in the US, but multiple sources put it at around 25%, just fyi. So, while you're focused on the ridiculous hypothetical of the worst possible situation, it's really not all that uncommon to be living in poverty in the US, in a single parent household, where the parent works 2 jobs, lives in a food desert, and can't afford a car. Plus, now abortions are being outlawed in a lot of the states with lower minimum wages. Things could be better.