i grew up poor, and it was frustrating to see the stupid mistakes my family and people around me would make over, and over, and over. then people like the researchers in this article say infuriating things like 'their bad decisions are just because they are cognitively tired, and actually many of them could be even considered shrewd!"
being cognitively tired does play a role, but more so because they are cognitively lazy. their bad / lazy decisions are confounded by the fact they are trying to solve problems caused by making bad decisions in the first place. on top of that, most dont value education.
i typed a long story but deleted it. in short, 4/6 of us siblings dropped out of school, those same 4 had a large life insurance policy from the airforce which they blew almost immediately.
we have so many opportunities in this country, but it still does require that we go to school, work, and use our head. i am aghast on how so many people simply refuse to THINK. so many people with money problems have no idea how much money annually they spend on ANYTHING. how can you even begin to talk to someone about getting out of poverty, if they wont even calculate how much they are spending on that 5$ starbucks and 600$ phone.
Also grew up poor, and seen people of all income levels be cognitively lazy. I felt like I really started to get the way success works when I saw successful people waste money. I saw individuals make flippant decisions to throw away 50,000$ on software that their organization will never use. MSDN licenses for 100 people that can't and never will code. I've seen a salary man whose job it was to install software on tablets one day a year, the rest of the year he watched Netflix.
I'm aghast when I see well off people just burn money. There is an entire population of people who find success via a different road than intelligence or intrinsic value.
But there's a difference. That company wasting $50k is the equivalent of a poor person buying the brand name bread instead of store brand. Not a life altering decision. Make that a $5m purchase and the higher ups in the company will probably spend a great deal of time weighing the pros and cons.
I have seen people in fire situations get a one time windfall of $8,000 dollars and spend all of it for a down payment on an expensive car. That's the kind of decision making that keeps you poor.
As income inequality increases, relative percentage comparisons like this become more infuriating than comforting.
The more money you have, the dumber you can be with it and still be guaranteed survival. At a certain level of poverty, you have to operate at peak financial efficiency to live a mean lifespan.
50,000$ properly spent could change the course of human history. It could supply the nearby treatment center for children with behavioral/emotional problems for years!
I could buy a few mig welders, some angle grinders, associated PPE, several hundred pounds of scrap metal, and still have enough left over to pay two unemployed people in rural Missouri to make tiny metal sculptures for model towns for 6-12 months.
The above is my goofballs, no thought business plan for 50k. I'm not even trying and the ROI on that hairbrained stupid plan is better than atleast 10 different decisions I've seen made over 50k.
I'm not even being creative or thoughtful. For someone like me to see someone be told "We don't need this." and them respond "eh fuck it, it's just 50k" is...
It's astounding. It's mind altering. It's the name brand bread vs. human lives metaphor in your face and on fire.
You act like spending $50k on something you don't need is the equivalent of lighting the cash on fire. That money goes back into the economy. It provides jobs, it increases money velocity. For the economy as a whole, it's really good that the wealthy or large companies aren't super frugal with their money. After all, someone has a business employing people to make custom leather interiors for private jets, when the standard interior (or first class commercial) will do just fine.
I have very often thought what would happen if I was to suddenly come into a substantial amount of wealth and this is what I would do with a no holds barred method of paying skilled people to do cool things that they do not have the money to do otherwise. There are incredibly talented people that if given 20k to make their Magnus opus they would make the most breathtaking and increadible stuff imagined.
On HN a few weeks back, I read someone's comment that some poor people are poor because they own cheap cars that cost a fortune in repairs because they're always breaking down, preventing them from saving up for a better one that won't need repaired so often, which would allow them to save and get ahead.
Maybe that's not always the kind of decision-making that keeps you poor after all.
I don't buy that argument outright. I have a six figure savings account and six fig investments going on in my mid 30s earned on my lonesome in the low-wage midwest, and I've always been taken advantage of here on top of it (low paid even for here). Frugality is my game because I care not about materialism.
I believe one has to have a brain the size of a pea, to be impressed by someone's possessions. I coudln't care less about someone having a Mercedes. The Europeans have the right idea, being a big spender is actually extremely tacky and anti-social in my view.
One of my cars is terrible (2000 Mazda). I waste, but not much. I'm repairing it quite often. A single $500 repair is one (very cheap) car payment on a new one. I'm way ahead keeping the old beast going. I can replace the whole car 3 to 6 times over before I get to the price of a new one.
What I do pay with is inconvenience and my time to drag it into the shop. That's value too, but purely financial costs I'm winning.
Overall in the end, I'm going to pickup a cheap (15K), affordable car to replace it with. Toyota Corolla, Honda Civic, Hyundai Elantra range of vehicles. At those prices, the financial gain is outweighed by convenience for me. So we all "have a price". At least until more of those Tesla Model 3's have been out a while, I'll spend more than I normally would on one of those beauties. :)
A lot of people say it's not worth fixing a car that's worth less than the repair. I disagree, it's money in vs money out. Same concept as calories in calories out. Obviously, the comment you quoted would be correct when you start dealing with outliers/extremes. There's money pits, then there's real money pits.
I don't knnow how accurate it is, but it does make sense for some things, such as shoes, and thinking about it, train tickets (season tickets are better value for money but very expensive), and essentially anything where bulk/long term is better value, but only being affordable to some people, and I think the space to store things comes into play as well...
I don't think the problem is that they cost a fortune. Overall the money spent is probably the same.
The problem is that an unreliable car is far more likely to cause sudden "emergency" events that require a lot of liquid money upfront and if you don't have that money this might cause a chain reaction so you lose your job and then your home.
Simply isn't true-if that were the case companies that make millions would never go bankrupt-yet they do. Why? According to you, they'd spend a great deal of time weighing pros and cons...
The fact is you can't always weigh pros and cons and always get a positive outcome. There are many poor people that will always be poor-but entire industries have spent decades making decisions weighing pros and cons and completely collapsed because of things outside of their control. Why can this principle not apply to a portion of the poor?
I'm sure it does apply to a great deal of the poor. My comment was simply that some people make terrible financial decisions. Are you implying that no one is poor due to their own decisions? It's all just things outside their control?
I resonate the feeling and agree that people need to also take responsibility, however I see people all the time making poor choices, and it isn't just poor people. If you're down on your luck, that $6 coffee ritual may be not sound so bad at the moment. Someone who is exhausted, and probably malnourished (surprisingly common in America), will say to themselves... I'm craving a delicious coffee and hopefully it'll give me enough energy to keep going, and sometimes it does work temporarily.
That's why I try to maintain the same lifestyle no matter how much I do or don't have. Once you adjust your spending habits, it's very difficult to change them. I just think out what makes sense, how far I have to be happy, then build a routine around sensible choices. Half of the time, the sensible choices are the healthiest anyway (like taking lunch to work vs fattening fast food).
Nailed it on the head that rational thinking under stress is hard, so people should get their affairs in order when they get a lull in life where they can step back and setup a healthy (financially & otherwise) routine.
I agree with all you said - I could have written it myself.
But I do suspect that, like myself, you are well-educated and probably from a stable home with parents that were good role models.
Someone whose home life was chaos probably wasn't lucky enough to been demonstrated those life skills.
It's sad, but I don't want to pay for people making totally avoidable bad decisions. I don't know the solution but whatever we can do to avoid kids being raised in chaotic home situations would help in the future.
Yes and no on my background. My immediate family can only be defined as white trash, which from a parental point of view I'd define as- simply do not care what happens to their kids. It was an oppressive patriarchy for sure, my dad was concerned with himself and not my mom or his kids. He came first, and that was the end of it. Very ignored, and tormented daily in my house physically and verbally by a sibling. Even facing violent confrontations into my 20s. I had to punch my brother to the floor at 25, who for essentially no reason started swinging at me, in front of our mom. It never ended, till I cut them all off in just the past couple years. Enough is enough once the same patterns continue into middle age, they're incapable of having any semblance of a normal relationship with me. I have repercussions and issues from that, someday I'll have to deal with. Till then I just carry the frustration and anger that I have inside for no easily identifiable reason.
My extended family, grandparents, cousins, etc, are mostly doctors, holding PHDs or otherwise very wealthy from successful businesses. I was motivated out of a sense of feeling unworthy, thanks to my narcissistic dad. For education I was marked as a genius in junior high, that fell apart at 13 though, just no guidance at all. College, I loaded up my stuff myself into a borrowed pickup truck, carried it into the dorm myself, organized my loans myself, organized classes and how to graduate myself. Worked 30 hours a week throughout to pay my bills. I never had help for anything. For someone my age to be raised in cloth diapers as I was, and growing up in a house with no air conditioning, gives you an idea on how it was. I'm a product of the 1930s, not 80s. Had they not had a Commodore they initially bought for taxes in the house, I would've been screwed like these other kids. I've also worked nonstop since 12 years of age. I'm tired, and not even that old today. I'm not complaining, others have it worse, just explaining that no, I'm not one of the well-connected, pampered white boys. It sounds odd, but I barely identify with being white as a social class. The way I see life is that we're born alone, and we die alone. It's just the way it really is, the rest is someone who loves you blowing smoke up your ass.
So for me, good genes, bad immediate family. Most of these poor folks have bad genes and a bad family. So I may have escaped, but I know what you mean with your comment. I will say I'm probably more sympathetic than you are, I will pay for others' mistakes. Due to my experiences, I probably have more legit, heartfelt sympathy for the underclass than these fly-by-night liberal types that do lots of virtue signaling on social media. It may be why I married a Mexican woman, she's very smart and being how I view life, she's my reason I don't just say ciao and put a bullet in my head. She brings some emotion out of me, I love her, and we were both tossed out. It's all good and easy when half your needs are handled for you by someone else. I'd settle to just have someone to talk to that cared about me (my wife fills that void, but I mean in my family otherwise). When times get tough and they're truly on their own, a lot of these people, who are weak, will be goosestepping or whatever is the next easiest grease they can walk on. We're seeing the rise of that already, for another class, who thinks they're forgotten.
To fix the home solution that you mention, I have a bit of experience there. I think the turn key easy fix is making parents criminally liable for their children until 21 or 25 years of age. They'll either pay attention like good parents and raise them right, or at least turn them in to mental health when they're building bombs or amassing an arsenal. It's what I came to, given my experiences and what I hear from my wife, who is a public school teacher.
Of course, that's not a real, holistic fix for a failed society like mine (USA). Most people are interested in quick solutions to problems (take the guns etc), and more parental responsibility should solve a lot of problems at once for a society that clearly isn't civilized and has a smorgasbord of issues to address. If you read this far, congrats.
Do you have any data, studies, or real references as to why this is, or do you simply call them lazy to feel better about yourself?
You've clearly outlined a trend-are we really to believe that the poor are simply more cognitively lazy than every other population? That is why they are poor? Quite the claim.
It seemed that he was talking about himself or his own family. So I took that as an anecdote. I doubt he relishes bashing his own family but called it like he believes he sees it.
My stance is close to what you're getting at. I don't think they're purposefully lazy most of the time. Though I agree with the OP that some have to be, there's no way. I'm intellectually lazy oftentimes, why wouldn't a discouraged, down on their luck poor person be? Makes zero sense that they wouldn't.
Being paid less and less in my life, while others around me make more, has been extremely demotivating. I can't imagine how the life gets sucked out of people with lesser will-power than others have.
I think it's not a claim that some people simply can't be bothered to go to school and better themselves. They just don't care. It's either stemming from their psychological profile, childhood abuse, or other factors that took down their motivation and self-esteem. They're giving themselves what they deserve, in their mind, accepted their social status.
Many of us do it. I accepted that I'm "working class" long ago and strongly identify with it. Even forgoing clothing that is outside of my class status. I'm a sturdy rural guy that even though I live in one of the largest cities in the US, prefer my blue jeans and work shirts (old fashioned Scottish plaid button ups for a country boy like myself) with work boots (think a black pair of Doc Martens). So I can completely see how others adopt their possibly lower socio-economic status as well. I like mine, it's part of my identity and I'm comfortable in my own skin that way. Maybe they are too, even if it doesn't benefit them.
being cognitively tired does play a role, but more so because they are cognitively lazy. their bad / lazy decisions are confounded by the fact they are trying to solve problems caused by making bad decisions in the first place. on top of that, most dont value education.
i typed a long story but deleted it. in short, 4/6 of us siblings dropped out of school, those same 4 had a large life insurance policy from the airforce which they blew almost immediately.
we have so many opportunities in this country, but it still does require that we go to school, work, and use our head. i am aghast on how so many people simply refuse to THINK. so many people with money problems have no idea how much money annually they spend on ANYTHING. how can you even begin to talk to someone about getting out of poverty, if they wont even calculate how much they are spending on that 5$ starbucks and 600$ phone.