Rich people do have trouble understanding what it's like to be poor

It's kind of the "American dream" that if you're responsible and work hard, then anybody can achieve a reasonable level of success. There's an appeal to believing being wealthy is a choice, then you can believe the people at the "top tiers" of society earned their positions and deserve all that power and influence.

If that's not true, then it implies that live in a class-based system. Wealthy people are the ones making the decisions at the national level, they own the media by just about any objective measurement, and even though the billionaires "earned" their billions, they were still born into wealthy, well-connected families who have direct control over the systems in which they "earned" their billions.

99.9% of the population has no chance of every achieving the level of success that a small portion of the population was born into. We live in an aristocracy, and yet both the wealthy and the poor are in denial. You can believe the system is moral though the "choice mindset", then it's not a class-based society. Then there's still freedom, equality, a representative government and a healthy American dream. Especially with the conservatives, it's blasphemous and "un-American" to suggest otherwise, to say that we're ruled by aristocrats who were born into their positions and don't represent us.

It odd, because I feel like I'm the one who's being the most American, the most patriotic, and yet I hate to brag about it because I think Nationalism is a kind of poison. I believe in American ideals though, let me remind you of them. You're entitled to a respect, dignity and success regardless of your social status, race, sex, the nationality you were born into, and your profession, chosen and otherwise. You're entitled to a government that represents you, and if it doesn't then it damn well better. It's up to "the people" to enforce a representative government (the opposite of an aristocracy) by any means necessary, including violent overthrow*. These are American ideals, ideals the country was founded upon. These are the beautiful American dreams, and we Americans call them dreams because we're still working towards them. They hide some truly ugly nightmares of things like slavery and how we got the land we live upon.

*Disclaimer: I seemingly called for violence, but violence is an evil thing and a last resort, something I don't encourage. When "the people" truly reject their government, even the police and military are on the side of "the people" because they're people too. Easy way to distinguish terrorism for a truly populist movement.

Presumably restrictive zoning policies that make it incredibly difficult to build the amount of additional housing that is needed in many areas.

My understanding is that it's a reference to being easy to give advice on building wealth since it's all the same story about saving and getting a return on your savings. This is in contrast to being poor, which can involve lots of things, like bad decisions, bad luck, bad birth...

> the harm potential by a "not-understanding rich of the poor" is much greater than a "not-understanding poor of the rich"

This seems superficially true, conjuring up a group of callous rich people using their power to make decisions that disproportionally harm poorer people. Obviously this does actually happen.

However, it’s equally true that not understand the nature of wealth causes the poor to make less than optimal decisions, both on a micro scale, and a macro scale.

I don’t mean there is some simple path out of being poor by making better decisions, but I do mean that not understanding wealth means that poor people often can’t tell the difference between a good opportunity and a bad one or how much work it takes to find one.

It also means that poor people end up supporting political ideas that don’t make lasting a difference.

I say this as someone who grew up poor, is no longer poor, and can see now that I have had access to more people with money how much better I’d have done if I had known more about how wealth works earlier in life.

Totally agree with all of this. If you actually have the opportunity to make good money and you still wreck your finances through excessive spending, well, that is on you (barring something like a legit mental illness). Big difference between that and starting off with few skills or opportunities.