> And this wealth inequality is mostly caused by people making dumb choices. For what it's worth, people have studied this a lot. While it's true that bad cho

> And this wealth inequality is mostly caused by people making dumb choices. For what it's worth, people have studied this a lot. While it's true that bad choices can get you in financial trouble, it doesn't seem to be true that most people who are are financial difficultly got there due to poor choices. It contributes, but on the whole a) it's way more complicated than that and (b) the general narrative around this stuff has very poor SNR. In general "I did [path dependent thing] and so did my friends, so anyone should be able to" isn't a very good argument for nearly anything. It works as a solid existence proof, but has little to no value for anything else - too much selection bias and path dependence". Note that previous works regardless of the negative/positive aspects of what you are claiming. Literally none of us have a good idea of how things work in general based only on observation of our own lives and those we know. To get anywhere real on this you have to go vastly broader (i.e. study real data, but first fight the uphill battle to figure out if you can get any that isn't fatally compromised). It's hard work. Another point is that in general, unless you know someone incredibly well and intimately, your observations of them are by nature pretty weak. Drawing strong conclusions from any of it a dicey proposition.