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there is a much more general thing here of 'simple theory of mind' where you assume too much similarity between self and others. we even do this to ourselves when remembering our pasts.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It depends on your liabilities and other aspects like age. 6,000 EUR per month is $7,300 USD per month is tough if you’re a new pharmacist in the US and need to repay $300k of student loans and make up for 4 to 6 years of lost income and catch up retirement savings, as an example.
I'll grant you the loan repayment, but the other things aren't expenses. "Lost income" is a psychological artefact, not anything concrete. It's a result of comparing against some hypothetical ideal financial situation. The same for "catching up" on retirement savings. The concrete part is that people with that level of income (large, but not so large as to make all problems disappear) know that to be comfortable in t…
I think this suffers from a causation direction bias. Maybe people with the choice mindset wind up in positions of wealth and power because of this mindset. I can only speak anecdotally, but the hand full of millionaires I know all grew up lower middle class, and they all have choice mindset. I think the worst kinds of people create a false dichotomy here where either everything is choice or everything is a product o…
I think that this is true. This is also true that you can't understand what it is of being powerful or rich when you're not. In a general way, it is very difficult to imagine living in other people's shoes, we live on the same planet, breathing the same air, we have 99.9% the same DNA, but our experience of life and our environment can be widely different.
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.
It is well illustrated by a quote from Terry Pratchett
> The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.
> Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
> But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
> This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness.
I think this suffers from a causation direction bias. Maybe people with the choice mindset wind up in positions of wealth and power because of this mindset. I can only speak anecdotally, but the hand full of millionaires I know all grew up lower middle class, and they all have choice mindset. I think the worst kinds of people create a false dichotomy here where either everything is choice or everything is a product o…
i expect people reading this comment will not understand your point to mean "some" and will probably read it as "all". despite the length of your comment to the contrary, they won't parse and extract the meaning but, probably without even noticing it, rely on biases and shortcuts to interpret the meaning more rapidly (and wrongly).
i'm pretty confident you are not suggesting it is responsible for 100% of the signal here, just some as a counterpoint i'd offer up those people who have been traumatised by their living conditions. they often adopt a choice mindset and it is harmful to them. so no, actually a choice mindset and taking responsibility in a horrible environment doesn't actually help.
i say this with some bias as someone who has adopted that kind of mindset and watched those not taking responsibility for themselves perform better in many areas precisely because they excessively (from my perspective) seek help from others and ignore responsiblities.
i have a number of experiences where i've ended up supporting someone extensively, because they come to me "in a difficult situation" only to realise i'm less capable of supporting them then they are of me in terms of resources and opportunities. its quite mind blowing at the time, but i try to understand how it happens - my suspicion is that their bar for 'failure' is so damned high that they will actually not use their piles of resources for psychological reasons alone.
I grew up poor, and was poor as a young adult. After working 2 jobs, going to school and trying to keep my family together on next to nothing, I was able to climb my way up and get to "middle class".
Despite being poor for a while, my kids were happy and they didn't know anything different. When we were able to finally afford cable, my oldest daughter couldn't believe she could watch cartoon network. It was the best feeling knowing that I was able to provide some level of comfort to my family without struggling every month to know how we were going to afford basic utilities and food.
We moved to an apartment near an affluent area where my kids would be able to go to a good school. There we met some very wealthy people. Casual conversations with these people regularly included topics such as going on vacation to Hawaii for a month, going to a ritzy steakhouse for dinner regularly, etc. I was surprised at how these people just expected others to be able to afford the same luxuries.
At the same time, I also met some wealthy people who didn't talk like that. After getting to know some of them, I learned that some actually earned their way there. They grew up poor, worked hard, went to school, worked harder, had some luck by being in the right place at the right time with the right set of skills, and eventually became wealthy.
What I learned during this time is that rich people are not always rich because someone handed it all to them. Some are very much in that category though. You can always tell by their conversations. Rich people who have never been poor or even middle class will converse about things casually that poor people can only dream about, while those who did not grow up rich reserve those conversation topics and are sensitive to other financial situations. This is why I think the 1% is a sliding scale to some extent. It's not a static group of people so we have to stop demonizing all rich people.
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.
I thought this for the longest time. An embarrassingly long time. Then I volunteered with a program that helps people who qualify for EITC to prepare their taxes and budget how they’ll use their tax return to “get them out of their situation”. Person after person came in, we did their taxes, and then we went over their expenses and each case was a frustrating puzzle that was impossible to solve. There just wasn’t eno…
And if the situation was some people cannot escape this hardship, and there aren't spare resources allocated to other people, then we could say OK, our basic premise must be wrong, it's just inevitable that some people will suffer this hardship.
I think it's plausible this was sometimes true in a middle ages farming community during famine. If we re-allocate food from the "wealthy" with plenty to eat to those with none, some might starve anyway, there just isn't enough food.
But in our society that's not the case, we have tremendously wealthy people and these people in hardship, therefore I argue the fact you discovered is a failure of policy and it is worthwhile to contemplate whether politicians you consider supporting are addressing this failure, or whether they instead believe (or pretend to believe) the myth or perhaps in fact they consider hardship for others a desirable outcome, ie they are despicable people.
A former coworker whose parents are rich told me once she didn't understand why young people in our country are not so eager to have kids anymore. I replied that most young people are unemployed and skint including most of my friends, which makes it difficult for obvious reasons. She replied that she did not even have €50000 (about $61000) in her bank account when she had her first kid.