Time spent on home chores increases inequality among American households - Sensationalist Headlines

https://www.minneapolisfed.org/publications/the-region/us-inequality-its-worse-than-we-thought I used the subtitle as the main title is a bit vague, but this is pretty interesting. As a tl;dr, one assumption that can be made is that poor people will do things like home-cooking meals, DIY repairs, and whatnot to save money and that this alleviates inequality to a degree. Although it actually seems to be the opposite, and this exacerbates inequality if taken into account.

Makes a lot of sense. Low wage jobs have awful work hours, you won't be able to have a lot of spare time to do home production to offset the disatvantages of your poverty. I find the very idea of "eh heh well you see the poor can just grow a salade therefore its not even noticeable to them that their life is shit" to be borderline comedy.

So let me parse this. Are they saying that home production is lost time, and thus lost money? Because it would make sense that higher weekly incomes due to working longer hours coupled with out-sourced services could beat standard hours and home production, because the time spent during home production is likely two or three times a service. So, a trip to a restaurant might take an hour with a cost of $20, whereas home production could be an hour each of grocery shopping, cooking, and eating each while spending money for groceries on top of that.

why do people spend so much money on being poor? just stop doing it and be rich its not that hard /s

In some cases, it can be a loss. But usually doing stuff on your own is pretty good value. For example if your car is due for a timing belt replacement, doing it yourself would be great value financially depending on how much your time is worth. A mechanic can charge about 500-1k to do it, but you can buy a raw belt for about $100 if I remember right and it shouldn't take you more than a day. The article has more to do with the fact that low-income people do not manage to do particularly much home production. This goes against assumptions some people have that poor people spend more time doing things like wrenching on their cars, to save money (which is also advice people give to people strapped for cash.) And when this is taken into account, it makes income inequality look even worse, because the income gap isn't being made up by DIY work. As for why, this article doesn't really talk about it. But it probably has to do with what people have posted in this thread, people who don't have much money also often don't have much free time either.

Or perhaps we can really only devote our spare time to one of those things. I am in this very income bracket and, honestly, if it wasn't for my ability to fix the family cars we'd be screwed. We can't afford to have shops fix these things.

It's Brule's Rules, with Doctor Steve Brules! For your health.

It's almost like society is overbearingly pointed toward paying other people for goods and services, to the point that people incapable of paying for those goods and services are at disadvantage compared to the wealthy who can. :thinking:

well, it is true that the less resources you have, the more disadvantaged you are