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Price shocks in formative years scar consumption for life

knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu

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Re: Price shocks in formative years scar consumption for life

#21

Post by ChuckNorris89 »

throwaway98797 wrote: post #18
ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #2

Being poor in general, during your childhood, scars you for life. It makes you penny wise and pound foolish, adverse to taking risks in your career and investments, can destroy your confidence in yourself, while always having to look over your shoulder monetarily speaking. Habits that even after you remove poverty from your live, you still feel the the anxiety and triggers in your head.

Had this problem Easy solution take a few hundred from the bank and physical set it on fire keep doing it until you don’t care it’s illegal but it works

>take a few hundred from the bank and physical set it on fire keep doing it until you don’t care

That sounds bad. Why not give it to a homeless guy or to charity or something?

>it’s illegal

Honestly, the central banks can go to hell. They can print way more money than you can ever burn, which they do, even far too much of it, bringing us to where we are today.

Re: Price shocks in formative years scar consumption for life

#22

Post by tootie »

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #2

Being poor in general, during your childhood, scars you for life. It makes you penny wise and pound foolish, adverse to taking risks in your career and investments, can destroy your confidence in yourself, while always having to look over your shoulder monetarily speaking. Habits that even after you remove poverty from your live, you still feel the the anxiety and triggers in your head.

So much of economics seems so obvious when you read about it but it runs very strongly against our lizard brain instincts.

Re: Price shocks in formative years scar consumption for life

#23

Post by junofan »

doix wrote: post #17
ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #2

Being poor in general, during your childhood, scars you for life. It makes you penny wise and pound foolish, adverse to taking risks in your career and investments, can destroy your confidence in yourself, while always having to look over your shoulder monetarily speaking. Habits that even after you remove poverty from your live, you still feel the the anxiety and triggers in your head.

> It makes you penny wise and pound foolish while always having to look over your shoulder monetarily speaking. Could you explain what you mean? I grew up pretty poor, single income PhD student/post-doc salary family with two kids. Eventually my father got a proper position at a university, but until then we were pretty poor. My parents used to sleep on the floor, we had almost no furniture(I remember playing footbal…

You grew up in the modern day priest class, not poor.

Re: Price shocks in formative years scar consumption for life

#24

Post by ChuckNorris89 »

doix wrote: post #17
ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #2

Being poor in general, during your childhood, scars you for life. It makes you penny wise and pound foolish, adverse to taking risks in your career and investments, can destroy your confidence in yourself, while always having to look over your shoulder monetarily speaking. Habits that even after you remove poverty from your live, you still feel the the anxiety and triggers in your head.

> It makes you penny wise and pound foolish while always having to look over your shoulder monetarily speaking. Could you explain what you mean? I grew up pretty poor, single income PhD student/post-doc salary family with two kids. Eventually my father got a proper position at a university, but until then we were pretty poor. My parents used to sleep on the floor, we had almost no furniture(I remember playing footbal…

>Could you explain what you mean?

Sure.

I realize I waste a lot of time in supermarkets, shops or online stores, browsing/walking around and comparing prices just to penny pinch on low value things, when the savings I would make would have no meaningful impact on my yearly net worth, but the time and mental energy wasted browsing/walking around comparing prices could have better return on investment if used on other things like learning a new skill, reading a book, etc.

I avoid any kind of subscription services (Netflix, Spotify, cloud-storage, phone contract, etc.) to the disbelief of my friends ("But it's only 10 Euros a month!, Why don't you have it?"), preffering instead to spend my time building my own self-hosted solutions for cheap, which probably explains how I got into tech in the first place.

I own a cheap old car and prefer to fix it myself if I can, rather than paying someone to do it, even though the time I spend learning how to fix it, buying the parts, then actually fixing it, is probably worth more than a professional would have cost.

I'm afraid to make investments fearing that the market could crash the second I enter it, and erase my money, leaving me vulnerable to being homeless or dependent on doing shitty jobs I hate just to stay afloat, so I just hoard cash like an idiot as that makes me feels safe and lets me sleep well at night.

I think I might not be good enough for some bold career steps, like giving up my tech job and risking everything to start my own business of a coffee cart in the city center or pivoting to something other than tech that's less well paid, like being a teacher.

I spent too much of my youth studying hard at useless subjects on the pressure from my parents that "education will get you far in life, so beat those books and get good grades", only to realize far too late in life that I could have gotten in the same spot with 20% of the effort, leaving me time to actually enjoy my youth.

Sure, I'm working my way out of these habits slowly, but the Pavlovian impulses are still in my brain. Complex things these minds of ours.

Re: Price shocks in formative years scar consumption for life

#25

Post by bilgames »

refurb wrote: post #3

"“Those who came of driving age during the oil crises of the 1970s drive less in the year 2000,” the paper found. The doubling of gasoline prices in the late 1970s saw that generation drive 3.6% to 8.7% less than those born earlier or later" I can't find the paper, but when they say "born earlier or later" are they still looking at rate of driving in the year 2000? If so, aren't they just comparing ages? People born…

No post body was provided.

Re: Price shocks in formative years scar consumption for life

#26

Post by lordnacho »

doix wrote: post #17
ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #2

Being poor in general, during your childhood, scars you for life. It makes you penny wise and pound foolish, adverse to taking risks in your career and investments, can destroy your confidence in yourself, while always having to look over your shoulder monetarily speaking. Habits that even after you remove poverty from your live, you still feel the the anxiety and triggers in your head.

> It makes you penny wise and pound foolish while always having to look over your shoulder monetarily speaking. Could you explain what you mean? I grew up pretty poor, single income PhD student/post-doc salary family with two kids. Eventually my father got a proper position at a university, but until then we were pretty poor. My parents used to sleep on the floor, we had almost no furniture(I remember playing footbal…

I remember feeling like I'd bought cheap shirts at my first job. I didn't want to spend £25-£100 on nice shirts when there were cheapass shirts you could buy for £10. Made me look cheap at a place where the bosses were driving Ferraris.

Also, not buying a holiday until well into my 20s. I still feel like it's mostly not worth it, even though I can pay for it and it's probably sensible to take a break from time to time.

Re: Price shocks in formative years scar consumption for life

#27

Post by doix »

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #24
doix wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It makes you penny wise and pound foolish while always having to look over your shoulder monetarily speaking. Could you explain what you mean? I grew up pretty poor, single income PhD student/post-doc salary family with two kids. Eventually my father got a proper position at a university, but until then we were pretty poor. My parents used to sleep on the floor, we had almost no furniture(I remember playing footbal…

>Could you explain what you mean? Sure. I realize I waste a lot of time in supermarkets, shops or online stores, browsing/walking around and comparing prices just to penny pinch on low value things, when the savings I would make would have no meaningful impact on my yearly net worth, but the time and mental energy wasted browsing/walking around comparing prices could have better return on investment if used on other…

> I realize I waste a lot of time in the supermarket comparing prices,

Interesting, I've always hated shopping for food, but I happily waste money on takeaways/restaurants. I think for me it is more about food waste and the mental energy wasted planning all my ingredients to make sure nothing goes to waste rather than saving money. I spend money now to not have to worry about it as much.

> I'm afraid to make investments fearing that the market crash or something like that would erase them leaving me vulnerable to being homeless or dependent on doing jobs I hate.

Yeah, I'm pretty risk averse when it comes to investments, which is screwing me right now with inflation as high as it is :(.

Re: Price shocks in formative years scar consumption for life

#28

Post by daniel-cussen »

cs137 wrote: post #12

I worked in a grocery store in the late '90s, and the older customers (who grew up in the Great Depression) always carried penny pouches, because they remembered a time when one had to keep track of cents to survive. This is how I know that, even if we miraculously fixed our medical system tomorrow and outlawed private health insurance by a constitutional amendment, we'll still have, thirty years from now, 60-year-ol…

Doctors say they are the only profession that saves lives. Well they're the only profession allowed to save lives. And the only profession making money saving lives.

Charging for saving lives. Price discriminating to save lives.

What happens when they make a mistake in what someone is able to pay?

EDIT (I tried replying but can't yet): The basic solution to make medicine cheaper is supply more medics.

In Chile anybody who wants to be a doctor can go to some medical school and make a pretty decent wage (but less than 20x what an American doctor makes) and help people in some role, some specialty, if that's what she really wants to do.

No quota on helping people.

And they get better results, lower infection rates than American hospitals, longer life expectancy, and medical school is shorter and much cheaper, like night and day. In particular maternity care is like the best in the world--I can't corroborate that but I've heard that.

Lowest medicine costs in the OECD, blows every other developed country out of the water. America is the most expensive and Chile is the cheapest.

Re: Price shocks in formative years scar consumption for life

#29

Post by refurb »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #19
refurb wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I’m going nuts but it looks like they used 2000 US Census data on driving, so yes, they only looked at that year. They are literally comparing people who are older and younger with the cohort in question, so confounding results with how driving changes at various ages.

> it looks like they used 2000 US Census data on driving, so yes, they only looked at that year The first major sentence under data: “The decennial census asks questions about commuting mode and time. ‘Journey to Work’ questions appear in the 1980, 1990, and 2000 censuses, and in the American Community Survey (ACS) (Ruggles et al. 2020). We use data from these three censuses, as well as the 2006/10, 2011/15, 2016, an…

It must be my years of reading shoddy economics studies that created that bias.

Re: Price shocks in formative years scar consumption for life

#30

Post by daniel-cussen »

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #24
doix wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It makes you penny wise and pound foolish while always having to look over your shoulder monetarily speaking. Could you explain what you mean? I grew up pretty poor, single income PhD student/post-doc salary family with two kids. Eventually my father got a proper position at a university, but until then we were pretty poor. My parents used to sleep on the floor, we had almost no furniture(I remember playing footbal…

>Could you explain what you mean? Sure. I realize I waste a lot of time in supermarkets, shops or online stores, browsing/walking around and comparing prices just to penny pinch on low value things, when the savings I would make would have no meaningful impact on my yearly net worth, but the time and mental energy wasted browsing/walking around comparing prices could have better return on investment if used on other…

It's an adaptation to an environment where nothing you could do or say would earn you a raise, ever. Never get more money to take home, exploitation in the workplace. In comparison comparing for pennies on flour is fun, it's entertainment.
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