
This is what happens when you lend money to poor people - dpapathanasiou
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601039&sid=a5lhZkEauCu8&refer=home
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pg
So far this thread is setting the record for deleted comments, as people who
responded angrily realize it was a parody.

Perhaps the reason people reacted so violently is that they can imagine some
reasonable arguments that sound like these. I.e. this is a case of people
being made maddest by statements they worry might be true.

~~~
nandan
To be honest, I somehow missed the possibility that it was a parody, as well.
Which brings me to something a little 'meta' as far as this goes: What are
some good heuristics / algorithms to determine if something is a parody? :)

~~~
gojomo
It's more satire than parody. Some helpful heuristics:

(1) Is the author saying "things you can't say" in a place where normally the
rules apply? (Bloomberg isn't an especially politically-incorrect news/opinion
outlet.)

(2) Is the author out of character? This could have been written under a
haughty pseudonym ("Edgar Charles Hyannisport, III") -- but was under the name
of author Michael Lewis instead, who's written popular books about finance,
business, technology, and sports. If a professional writer offends, you can
figure they calculated to offend in service of their real
persuasive/entertainment goals.

(3) Does the presentation match the implied mindset? Even people with similar
views don't present them in this way, if they want to be effective.

(4) Gradual progression of implausibility. Lewis starts merely speaking more
crudely than typical of "the poor", but then goes to the absurd (the poor
should have teams of lawyers) and proceeds to talk of debtor's prisons and
requiring menial labor of the indebted. A slow build keeps readers guessing,
for at least a little while, while eventually causing most/all to realize the
author is being facetious.

~~~
oditogre
Your last clue should've been the biggest. If you read the article through to
the part about dressing poor people up as clowns and seeing how many you could
shove into a Maybach as entertainment at rich kids' birthday parties and still
thought the author was being serious, your satire detector really, really
needs a tune-up.

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yters
I like what they do with microfinancing in india. Give someone a little bit of
money to start a simple street business, i.e. food vendor, and only give him a
bit more if needed to help his business run. The real problem is throwing
money at problems without much thought. We westerners have done this way too
much.

~~~
gwenhwyfaer
Credit unions are useful too, for similar reasons. There's a difference
between borrowing a little money to lever yourself out of poverty, and
borrowing an obscene amount of money so you can buy that dream house your
salary won't stretch to half of because You're Worth It.

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gojomo
Frickin' hilarious. Through thought #1, it's just a bit wry and tongue-in-
cheek, but by the middle of thought #2 -- "I trusted these people to get their
teams of lawyers to vet anything before they signed it" -- it's high satire. I
laughed out loud at its continuation: "Turns out, if you're poor, you don't
need to pay lawyers. You don't like the deal you just wave your hands in the
air and moan about how poor you are. Then you default."

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trekker7
I really hope this is a joke... even then it isn't funny.

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mynameishere
Weak satire.

Really, though. If a credit-unworthy person can't pay back a loan, and a
lender takes a bath on it, well I'm fine with that. Let the one declare
bankruptcy. Let the other write it off his taxes. Fine.

There's just one thing I don't want to do: Have money stolen out of my pocket
to ensure that either or both of the above idiots are protected from their own
bad wagers.

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sethg
The comments here by people who don't recognize TFA as satire are funnier than
TFA itself.

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Agathos
The irony is that "the rich," or at least those who own mortgage-backed bonds,
probably do want a bailout for "the poor." They get the money in the end, and
a lot more of it than they can recover from foreclosures.

If somebody owed me a lot of money and had no prospect of paying it, I'd love
to see a third party step in and pay with no strings attached.

------
brlewis
In college sometimes my housemates would buy this tabloid called the "Weekly
World News" that always had ridiculous stories. One of the regular features
was editorials by "Ed Anger" that were obviously trolling for angry letters to
the editor. This looks just like an Ed Anger piece.

------
jey
> By poor, I mean anyone who the SEC wouldn't allow to invest in my hedge fund

This dipshit classifies everyone who doesn't qualify to be an Accredited
investor as poor? Wow.

He also thinks its the poor people's fault for taking sweet deals that were
offered to them? If you look at it from an economic perspective, all they had
to lose was the property on which they took out the loan and a bad credit
rating, but their credit rating sucked already anyway. (Granted, this may have
emotional consequences as they foreclose and have to move out, but that
doesn't really impact the economics of it.) In contrast, the lenders are
losing their investment! Isn't it the responsibility of the lenders to invest
in, uhm, sensible investments?

OK, I should stop bitching about this troll's obvious flamebait.

[EDIT: after reading the rest of the piece, I see that this is satire. he sure
got my blood boiling as I read it.]

~~~
cellis
You _do_ know who the writer is, dont you?

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jsnx
It is precisely because there is risk involved in giving a loan that there is
any profit to be made. If the legal system actively enforced repayment through
debtors' prison and the like, there would be no basis for interest.

~~~
neilc
Well, there would still be a basis for _some_ interest, because the lender
could make more money on their capital by using it for another purpose, such
as buying T-bills or some other security with essentially zero risk.
Intuitively I'd think that part of the interest charged on a loan is literally
just to "rent the money", preventing it from being used for another purpose;
the rest is to account for the possibility that the loan might not be repaid.

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cmars232
Regarding the subprime fiasco, it should read "This is what happens when you
build an entire industry based on tricking people into borrowing more than
they can afford!"

~~~
gwenhwyfaer
Or "this is what happens when you lend money to people who can't persuade
anyone to lend them money"...

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rms
...no.

What about kiva.org?

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henning
Us poor people aren't too dumb or disorganized to burn the Hamptons to the
ground if pushed too far.

Note: this is the same guy who wrote Moneyball, which is an interesting book
about applying a bit of reason to an insane market (baseball recruiting).

------
rokhayakebe
Clearly this guy is outside his mind. You might have a bad experience with a
few white, black, poor, or rich people, but this certainly does not mean they
are all the same. I have experienced similar situations several where people
ask me stupid fucking questions or make ignorant comments just because of
where I am from. I usually do not respond to such low level of maturity and
knowledge and the few times I do I make sure they leave the room felling way
less intellectual than I am (although I am not so smart, maybe a little bit).
Sorry you got screwed by poor people, but not all poor people are the same.
There are several stories we can tell about rich people screwing other rich
people, in fct I am sure there are more of those cases than his.

~~~
Alex3917
If you had read more than the first two paragraphs you would have realized it
was satire.

~~~
andreyf
I read the entire thing and I had no idea. I've a habit of leading people on
to see how absurd of a thing I can get them to agree to. Like go to
"conservative" club meetings (in college) and see how many people you can
convince that Arabs shouldn't be considered human. Or why people that can't
afford health care obviously don't deserve it, or how they ought to be
forbidden to reproduce, etc.

It's scary.

~~~
davidw
The key piece of evidence that it's satire:

"Michael Lewis in Berkeley, California"

They would crucify him there if he really meant what he wrote;-)

I didn't find it particularly entertaining, though.

