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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

#31

Post by thegeomaster »

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…

Wow, this is very similar to my own behavior. I always suspected it's related to financial hardship in my teen years, but this removes all doubt.

Re: Price shocks in formative years scar consumption for life

#32

Post by daniel-cussen »

cs137 wrote: post #15
weinzierl wrote: post #7

It's more that abundance in formative years spoils you for life.

Debateable. The reason rich kids turn into such pieces of shit isn't material abundance (since, after all, anyone born before ~1990 in the middle class also experienced material abundance) but the unearned high social status and the impunity that comes with it. Deprivation and poverty, on the other hand, fuck people up severely--often, through no fault of their own--and there's tons of empirical evidence showing this…

Yeah and like rich kids have impunity, poor kids have excess punishment meted out against them. Scapegoated a lot of the time.

Re: Price shocks in formative years scar consumption for life

#34

Post by cpsns »

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'm guilty of doing everything you've mentioned as well, for the same reasons, but this especially:

>I'm afraid to make investments fearing that the market could crash the second I enter, 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 am terrified I won't have money when I need it, worried it won't be there or accessible. I've learned over time that there is no amount of money in my savings account that can alleviate this.

When I was a kid there was never enough money and disaster was one unexpected bill away. As an adult I know that's not true of my situation now, but I am incapable of getting out of that mindset.

Re: Price shocks in formative years scar consumption for life

#35

Post by manuelabeledo »

daniel-cussen wrote: post #28
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 anybod…

> Charging for saving lives. Price discriminating to save lives.

Most first world countries have a solution for this already. It is baffling that the US does not.

Re: Price shocks in formative years scar consumption for life

#36

Post by doix »

junofan wrote: post #23
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…

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

That's fair. My parents left the collapsing USSR with nothing and ended up in Australia. Materially poor with no support network or generational wealth, but well educated and with a clear path to the middle class. I still think I/we were very fortunate and didn't mean to offend anyone by saying we were poor. I am well aware there are/were many people less fortunate than us.

Re: Price shocks in formative years scar consumption for life

#37

Post by snarfy »

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.

I'll never have another credit card. Frequent flyer miles, what are those? The whole industry can go fuck themselves.

Re: Price shocks in formative years scar consumption for life

#38

Post by ponow »

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…

> the time and mental energy wasted comparing prices could have better return on investment if used on other things like learning a new skill, meeting a friend, reading a book

Maybe. Actual cost savings are observable now, with very high probability. Maybe that book or skill is useless; in other words, there's a broad distribution on possible outcomes. Who actually measures this stuff to assess ROI? It's not obvious that most people get a good ROI out of university degree, or at least at the same levels as in the past. At best I've seen some average measures, but not bottom 10 percentile measures, you know, essentially guarantees that one's time and energy and money isn't wasted. It should be of significant concern that even a CS degree isn't an effective guarantee of a job offer that requires the knowledge gained from that CS degree. It's as if a lot of the actual skill an employer requires is learned outside school, which is insane and conflicts with the broad everyone-must-graduate-college narrative in the US and Canada.

Re: Price shocks in formative years scar consumption for life

#39

Post by quantified »

cs137 wrote: post #13
quantified wrote: post #5

Yeah, we don't just burn gas driving everywhere. "Scar consumption" as a phrase assumes that consumption in the American style is a healthy activity to begin with, and this outcome is damaging or ugly. "Permanently reduce consumption" would be more worthy of an academic setting, that title is clickbaity. Perhaps some will overdo avoidance of something because of fear of expense. Better than masses overdoing from buil…

Plus, a lot of that gas consumption is spent commuting, which makes people miserable. Murdering the daily commute is a good thing Covid-19 did, although I don't expect it to last long (WFH-ers will get fewer promotions, despite working harder, and eventually RTO fetishists will rule the roost). Very few people want to "consume gas". They want to be able to live decently and have meaningful jobs. Unfortunately, in tod…

Hopefully a lot less than you spend behind the wheel getting anywhere.

Re: Price shocks in formative years scar consumption for life

#40

Post by ChuckNorris89 »

manuelabeledo wrote: post #35
daniel-cussen wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 anybod…

> Charging for saving lives. Price discriminating to save lives. Most first world countries have a solution for this already. It is baffling that the US does not.

>Most first world countries have a solution for this already.

Even second and third world countries have implemented this solution.

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