Rich people do have trouble understanding what it's like to be poor • Hacker News Board

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

#271

Post by throw0101a » Sat, May 22, 2021, 4:54 PM UTC

FriedrichN wrote: post #3

A more distant but very wealthy family member once said that people wouldn't be so poor if they just saved up money. That perfectly illustrated the difficulty rich people have understanding poor people to me. I was really young, but that really stuck with me.

> […] wouldn't be so poor if they just saved up money.

See Nick Maggiulli's "The Biggest Lie in Personal Finance":

> All the expense tracking and goal setting in the world cannot make up for an insufficient balance.

* https://ofdollarsanddata.com/the-biggest-lie-in-personal-fin...

In the US, per BLS, the bottom 20% of earners spend more than they earn on basic necessities: housing, feed, healthcare, transportation. The next 20% barely managed to cover them, without much left over.

This is why I liked Thomas Piketty's definition of the "middle class" being income earners in the 50th to 90th percentiles: enough to pay for life's necessities, with some left over for niceties (but not so much as get into the situation of having piles of money earning interest on interest).

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_in_the_Twenty-First_Ce...

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

#272

Post by cryptica » Sat, May 22, 2021, 4:57 PM UTC

okareaman wrote: post #216

I grew up working poor, then struck it rich in the software biz and became a millionaire, then got sick and became homeless. My take on it is the rich and poor both struggle with money anxieties. A significant difference between being rich and being poor is the way other people treat you. When I was rich everyone wanted to be my friend and help me out. When I was poor I suffered judgements of all types from people; s…

This is so true. Even if you're not rich, many people treat you differently just based on whether they think you might become rich. The minute they think you're no longer in the running, they stop answering texts and emails as if you never existed. It's scary what percentage of people are like this. You never know who is who until you actually lose your money or position. These people are ridiculously good actors.

In the higher ranks of society, it seems like 99.999% of people are like this; it seems to be basically impossible to meet someone who is not a psychopathic opportunist. TBH I wonder why billionaires bother to get married at all. They're probably as likely to meet a good (genuine) person as I am to meet a billionaire...

Out of probably hundreds of thousands of people I met in my life, I only met 1 billionaire and that was before they were a billionaire. Aside from that, I only ever saw 1 billionaire (which I recognized) in real life but I didn't meet them (only saw them).

Humans seem to be incapable to comprehend how many other people there are in the world and how good humans are are deceiving themselves and others to get access to resources.

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

#273

Post by Jiro » Sat, May 22, 2021, 4:58 PM UTC

allenrb wrote: post #136

A couple of weeks ago, I found myself on a ladder in a basement, doing a bit of plumbing. And I thought, “Isn’t this odd? Here I am, rather well-off, cleaning out the drain for an elderly black gentleman.” And it was more satisfying than most of what I’ve done at a keyboard. To elaborate, for quite a few years I’ve owned rental property in poor-to-working class parts of town, first houses and then apartments. If you’…

That's an example of seen versus unseen bias. The drain was directly in front of you, and you talked to the person who owned it, so it's easy to understand that someone benefits from it. If you do a job that indirectly makes things 1% better for ten million people, it's hard to have an example you can look at. You may be improving the world more, yet feel like you're improving it less, because humans don't really understand indirect effects except intellectually, and that isn't very satisfying.

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

#274

Post by zpeti » Sat, May 22, 2021, 5:06 PM UTC

throw0101a wrote: post #267

nanis wrote: post #36

Wealth is a stock measure, income is flow. You accumulate wealth out of what you can set aside out of the flow. Some of us immigrants do not come to this country with an existing stock of wealth either back home or here. We are also not in the favored group of immigrants. We have human capital which we are trying to convert to financial capital for the next generation. Then, when we sort of "make it" here, people who…

> Some of us immigrants do not come to this country with an existing stock of wealth either back home or here. We are also not in the favored group of immigrants. We have human capital which we are trying to convert to financial capital for the next generation. And this is where the idea (now myth?) of the American Dream came from. When America was young, no one really had much capital. Also true for periods of large…

See my comment above, but there could have been equalization events.

The governments had three financial crises, in 99, 2008, and 2020 where it could have chosen not to intervene and save the rich. Yes it would have been hard on everyone, but it would have equalized wealth. A lot of companies would have gone bankrupt, but they could have been bought by new manaments, or employees, or could have been replaced by new startups.

But the government, and society really, chose to keep the status quo and not create a true crises. The result of this is the world we live in now, where basically it’s normal to rescue any large business and not let it go bankrupt.

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

#275

Post by mschuster91 » Sat, May 22, 2021, 5:07 PM UTC

an_opabinia wrote: post #269

mschuster91 wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If there's one thing about unsophisticated people and investments, they always cash out when it's too late. There is no such thing as "too late" in urban housing. Rural areas are so far "left behind" that it will take about ten times the investment that Biden wants to put up to bring it to civilized level, and he's already getting massive resistance... no way that the rural flight trend will be reversed.

> no such thing as too late Go ahead and buy some homes for investment! Go buy some Dogecoin! Some GME! What a low information take, to say something about rural homes and Biden or whatever. In the service of curiosity: maybe if you sold your $185,000 home from 1986 for $1.5m today, you’ll walk away a millionaire. A lot of people are looking at that arithmetic in San Francisco. And yet they do not sell! The index for…

> They will watch the market fall

The market won't fall, that is the entire point. It reasonably cannot fall, since the only politics that could make it fall (buildout of rural infrastructure, overriding NIMBY shit) won't ever pass. Inertia is massive.

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

#276

Post by danaris » Sat, May 22, 2021, 5:08 PM UTC

lotsofpulp wrote: post #38

danaris wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even this shows a basic lack of understanding of what "tough" means for someone who is actually poor . As soon as you put "saving for retirement" as something that's even possible , you're no longer in the realm of what's genuinely "tough". "Oh, those people making three times what I do a month have it so tough! After paying way more than the minimum on their student loans and putting aside a large chunk of money for…

And a poor person in Sudan will say poor person in US will not know what tough is. The comment I responded to was about a politician complaining about a certain payrate. To which I wanted to show that it is possible to have to have to be stretched thin (mentally), and the politician is not thinking about having to cancel their third overseas vacation. Yes, they’re not on the very last rung of the ladder, but slipping…

But you continue to prove the article's point: that the feeling of "slipping off your rung" and having to downsize from 3 yachts to 2 or (shock!) 1, however frustrating, upsetting, and stressful it may be to the person losing both money and status, does not remotely compare to the feeling of not knowing whether you will still have a home or even be alive next year, next quarter, or next month because you don't have enough money to pay for heat, food, and rent.

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

#277

Post by dsr_ » Sat, May 22, 2021, 5:09 PM UTC

BeetleB wrote: post #210

dsr_ wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> The only wrong thing you've said here is "I'm not a leftie". > Why do you reject that generally accurate label? Because most of what he wrote aligns with libertarianism, which is generally not considered left.

A sibling comment contends that this is a conservative position, not libertarian. One of you might be wrong.

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

#278

Post by dsr_ » Sat, May 22, 2021, 5:10 PM UTC

mindslight wrote: post #201

dsr_ wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

The comment you're responding to is actually a conservative perspective, one which I agree with - make big business and banksters suffer the preexisting rules, rather than changing the rules for some larger overall goal after they run into trouble. The desire to narrow the scope of government comes from a place of wanting to help all people, believe it or not. The big picture is that both professional political parti…

A sibling comment says that this is actually a libertarian perspective. One of you might be wrong.

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

#279

Post by orthoxerox » Sat, May 22, 2021, 5:10 PM UTC

You don't even have to be rich to have trouble understanding the poor. I am middle to upper-middle class, and I once found myself in a delicate situation: my desktop's PSU had given up the ghost and I urgently needed a new one. My savings were illiquid at the moment and I had to pay a building contractor a few days before, almost emptying out my checking account, so I had to literally calculate how much I could spend on a PSU to afford groceries until my next paycheck without dipping into any form of credit.

That was a completely alien feeling, and I still can't imagine how taxing it must be to budget everything, to juggle expenses and loans, to knowingly miss due payments, to be one speeding ticket away from literally not having enough money to feed your family and to be in that state not just for one week or one month, but for years and years.

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

#280

Post by mindslight » Sat, May 22, 2021, 5:12 PM UTC

dsr_ wrote: post #278

mindslight wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The comment you're responding to is actually a conservative perspective, one which I agree with - make big business and banksters suffer the preexisting rules, rather than changing the rules for some larger overall goal after they run into trouble. The desire to narrow the scope of government comes from a place of wanting to help all people, believe it or not. The big picture is that both professional political parti…

A sibling comment says that this is actually a libertarian perspective. One of you might be wrong.

I was using "conservative" as a synonym for rightist, as it is commonly (ab)used. The perspective is both rightist and libertarian. It's a product of rightist thinking - applying prescriptive rules to their logical conclusion. I consider myself a libertarian and think applying right-paradigm thinking is the most freedom-appropriate for this subject.