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> But the reality is that the stock market has also offered a path for ordinary people to build wealth — and more so in the last generation than ever before. Yo

> But the reality is that the stock market has also offered a path for ordinary people to build wealth — and more so in the last generation than ever before. You haven’t needed to burn down the system. All you’ve had to do is take the laziest, simplest approach to stock investing imaginable, and have a little patience. > Any schlub on the street can put money to work harvesting a small share of the earnings of hundreds of leading companies, led by some of the sharpest corporate executives on earth and their millions of employees. This is leaving out a very important detail, which is that you first have to be living comfortably and holding excess savings (that you're willing to risk, or at least leave alone!) to be able to even take the safe road in the market. That's not something "any schlub" can do; it excludes something like half of Americans. The "40% don't have $400 for an emergency" statistic is tired at this point, but it's telling here. You shouldn't be investing, even in an index fund, if you don't have enough cash to cover an unexpected emergency. It's not a question of patience. The really predatory thing about Robinhood and the like isn't that they prey on "impatience", it's that they prey on desperation. A person who can't afford to put $1000 in an index fund and leave it alone for ten years can maybe scrape together $100 to bet on the small chance of striking it rich and pulling themselves out of borderline-poverty. It may still be bad advice, but when people don't have other options, the calculus starts to make sense from their perspective. Robinhood's commercials even emphasize this specific angle. This article is great advice for the shrinking middle-class, but it comes off as tone-deaf for a growing majority of Americans.

rufus_foreman 6y ago
>> The "40% don't have $400 for an emergency" statistic is tired at this point, but it's telling here The survey didn't indicate that 40% didn't have $400 for an emergency, it indicated that if they had a $400 emergency, 61% of people would use short term cash to pay for it. 27% would use some other means to pay for it - for example put it on a credit card and worry about it later. That didn't necessarily mean they didn't have $400 in cash, it just meant they would use some other way to deal with the emergency. 12% said they wouldn't be able to come up with the money. >> This article is great advice for the shrinking middle-class, but it comes off as tone-deaf for a growing majority of Americans. The majority of people leaving the shrinking middle-class are leaving it to join the upper class. Not that the lower class isn't growing also, it is, the middle class is indeed hollowing out, but more middle class people are getting richer than getting poorer. From a personal perspective, I invested money in a 401K when I was working class, with the goal of letting it compound for many decades. I'm guessing that people with that mindset are less likely to stay working class, and I have no idea where I got that mindset. Certainly not from my parents or siblings, they were all the normal get the paycheck, spend the whole paycheck type.

rufus_foreman 6y ago

>> The "40% don't have $400 for an emergency" statistic is tired at this point, but it's telling here The survey didn't indicate that 40% didn't have $400 for an emergency, it indicated that if they had a $400 emergency, 61% of people would use short term cash to pay for it. 27% would use some other means to pay for it - for example put it on a credit card and worry about it later. That didn't necessarily mean they didn't have $400 in cash, it just meant they would use some other way to deal with the emergency. 12% said they wouldn't be able to come up with the money. >> This article is great advice for the shrinking middle-class, but it comes off as tone-deaf for a growing majority of Americans. The majority of people leaving the shrinking middle-class are leaving it to join the upper class. Not that the lower class isn't growing also, it is, the middle class is indeed hollowing out, but more middle class people are getting richer than getting poorer. From a personal perspective, I invested money in a 401K when I was working class, with the goal of letting it compound for many decades. I'm guessing that people with that mindset are less likely to stay working class, and I have no idea where I got that mindset. Certainly not from my parents or siblings, they were all the normal get the paycheck, spend the whole paycheck type.