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Price shocks in formative years scar consumption for life

• ChuckNorris89 4y ago
  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.
  • ClumsyPilot 4y ago
    I frequently encounter people and family with obvious issues arising from childhood, and 95% of the time their parents were poor as kids and thats where it all comes from. On one hand these people are a pain to deal with, but in most cases its not their fault either.
    • jjj123 4y ago
      What makes them a pain to deal with? I work with ultra-privileged people who by all accounts are “well adjusted” and I find them harder to deal with than people I grew up with from home. Many of them have no history of and don’t understand trauma, and as a result they’re unempathetic to what the literal majority of people experience. Edited for clarity
      • wolverine876 4y ago
        > I work with ultra-privileged people who by all accounts are “well adjusted” and I find them harder to deal with than people I grew up with from home. Many of them have no history of and don’t understand trauma, and as a result they’re unempathetic to what the literal majority of people experience. Financial issues aren't the only trauma in life, by a long shot. Plenty of people in that group have trauma. What makes people unempathetic is often that they don't come to grips with their own trauma; they deny it and thus deny it for others - if it's too painful to admit to yourself, think how dangerous other people's trauma could be!
        • jjj123 4y ago
          I think you’re underestimating how much trauma correlates with wealth in America. It’s not just the trauma of being poor, it’s trauma of growing up in a dangerous area, or of your parents getting divorced, or of getting sexually assaulted, or of young friends or family members dying. All of which get far more likely the poorer you are. Obviously I’m not saying that there aren’t wealthy, Ivy League educated people with trauma. But if we’re looking at the stats it’s not even close.
          • wolverine876 4y ago
            It's not a competition for who has more trauma, but I generally agree. If you look at my other posts in this thread, I am generally trying to explain what you said well here.
  • doix 4y ago
    > 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 football in our living room with my dad since it was entirely empty) with most of our stuff coming from charities. I wonder if I exhibit the behavior you talk about or not.
    • junofan 4y ago
      You grew up in the modern day priest class, not poor.
      • doix 4y ago
        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.
        • ponow 4y ago
          It's not fair.
      • ponow 4y ago
        No, poor is poor. Please don't move or re-label goal posts.
      • Mezzie 4y ago
        This is one problem with socio-economic class: When somebody's 'socio' doesn't match their 'economic', things get weird. I'm a first generation college student who has 3 great-grandparents with college degrees. It makes it easier to dig yourself out, but depending on the circumstances it can also cause its own issues. For example, my mother ran away from an abusive but well-off home, so I was regaled with tales of upper-middle and well-off hypocrisy and all their problems, which makes it really hard to want to fit in/keep my mouth shut in spaces that I share with those people.
  • tootie 4y ago
    So much of economics seems so obvious when you read about it but it runs very strongly against our lizard brain instincts.
  • throwaway98797 4y ago
    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
    • ChuckNorris89 4y ago
      >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.
      • olddustytrail 4y ago
        You are simultaneously saying that destroying money is a bad thing and that creating money is a bad thing. There is no "natural" amount of money.
      • throwaway98797 4y ago
        it needs to be a total loss there can’t be any value
    • blackoil 4y ago
      Better approach that I am trying is try to buy luxury version whenever I need something. Broke a plate, buy one from boutique ceramic shop. Need some glasses sure a high end crystal. Though on counter side, be really sure that you are rich before trying to act like one.
      • phil21 4y ago
        This is very similar to how I tried (am trying?) to evolve my spending, usually having the impulse to buy something now before it become scarce or buy the cheapest possible thing to get the task done in the moment. These days I realize I have nearly everything I need, so if I'm buying something I figure I can't really afford it unless I'm getting the "best" out there. Best for me means researching the best performing/quality/etc. item in the category. If I'm replacing a broken item I also take the opportunity to upgrade. For example I needed a carpet shampoo cleaner recently. Instead of heading to Walmart to buy whatever consumer gear was slapped on the shelf, I spent a few weeks deeply researching the ecosystem and ended up with something about 4-5x the expense - but with performance to match. The difference in quality makes it almost a pleasure to clean my carpets these days. It's easy to spend money simply on fancy and not get much out of it. But I feel pretty satisfied when I make an absurdly expensive purchase like the above but still feel great about it a year later due to the value/increased quality of life it bought me. In the moment if feels ridiculous paying many multiples more than I would have in the past, but over time these little incremental improvements add up. It's the spending that I do like a "poor person" that bothers me the most - just buying crap on impulse, or "collector" behavior. I find I need to actively mitigate both impulses or I'd end up on a hoarding TV show.
  • snarfy 4y ago
    I'll never have another credit card. Frequent flyer miles, what are those? The whole industry can go fuck themselves.
    • sokoloff 4y ago
      If you're able to live without the credit aspects of the credit card, why not take the 1-2% discount on nearly everything consumable that you buy? If you pay it off every month, credit cards have a negative cost (to you) and a fair amount of convenience (for renting cars, hotels, booking flights, etc).
      • duncan_idaho 4y ago
        That 1-2% is what they pay you for all your data. Credit cards are a key component of data brokers.
        • throwaway193948 4y ago
          compared to all the other data collected about me with no benefit to myself that seems like an ok deal
        • bombcar 4y ago
          The 1-2% is what they pay you for helping strong-arm the merchant into giving them 3%.
        • astrange 4y ago
          It's a refund on the interchange fee from not doing chargebacks and paying your bills on time. Your data is not interesting or valuable, that's your ego talking.
          • kube-system 4y ago
            Data brokering is a 200 billion dollar industry. Some individual data brokers say they have data on half of all transactions in the US, so it's safe to say that your transactions are more likely to be sold than not. Nobody cares about your data (unless you're high profile), but -- for example -- hedge funds and the like will spend big bucks to get aggregate sales data before this quarter's financial reports are written.
  • hansword 4y ago
    It's being poor, that scars you. As with everything, during childhood impressions are stronger and effect your life more, but being really poor in your 20s has quite a similar effect.
    • ricardobayes 4y ago
      That's true, I grew up during the 2008 recession so I constantly have that at the back of my mind. Massive layoffs, housing crash, breaking news everyday, everyone in just constant worry for an extended period of time. Now in 2022 I find myself reliving these memories a little, and I have observed my behavior to be extremely risk-averse these days.
      • nomel 4y ago
        For me, the current projection of the economy are justifying all of me, most likely unhealthy, behavior.
  • almost_usual 4y ago
    > Being poor in general, during your childhood, scars you for life. You can learn to cope with the anxiety better if you talk to a therapist but it will never fully go away.
    • wolverine876 4y ago
      Who can afford a therapist?
      • nomel 4y ago
        Especially if you have anxiety around spending money.
        • wolverine876 4y ago
          Great point.
  • Markoff 4y ago
    Not necessarily, I grew up pretty poor, my mother stealing food from kitchen she worked to save money (and I had to lug it every day when I was older), father having mediocre salary (later divorced without father's income), yet now belonging to like top 3% earners in country I live, I have like 150K EUR in stocks and don't really give a F about losing currently 10-20%, it's long term investment. It probably also helps I bought apartment without mortgage in 4th most touristy city in Europe. So yeah, I dislike the idea of being mortgage slave, but if I didn't optimize my income I wouldn't mind taking one to buy investment apartment, so I had to invest money in stock. But the funny thing is I will refuse to buy something I consider overpriced even when total sum makes absolutely no difference at my income, I just don't like the idea of wasting my money on something which can be bought cheaper, so some people may think I am poor or cheap although I don't mind spending money on something I consider worth the money. For instance almost nobody here in Czechia has AC, but I am one of those few people who have one, because I value my comfort at home more than having newest smartphones and other crap.
  • twoquestions 4y ago
    True facts, this. My spouse never had to wonder where the electric or gas money was coming from, even though their family is really frugal despite making really good money, and I'm still surprised at their decisions that I irrationally describe as extravagant even though they're better decisions all told. Even though I have a great job now and have for years, I still find myself shying away from good things that I really can afford, or buying cheap shoes when dropping a Benjamin is better even in the immediate term.
    • scottLobster 4y ago
      Coming from the more well-off side, it makes friendships with people on the other side harder as well. By chance a good chunk of my social circle in college was less well off than me, and while we liked playing games together I got weird looks for buying shirts new at Macy's or Michelin tires. It just seemed to rub them the wrong way, like they thought I was trying to show off or rub something in their face even though I'm just upper-middle-class and buying what I saw as the best product for what I needed. It's not like I was showing up in a new Lexus or something. Some of them also expected me to drive them everywhere even though they had working cars of their own, and that got rather toxic after a while.
      • mettamage 4y ago
        Can confirm this. Middle class here. Have a relationship with someone well-off. I view it as cultural differences that we need to overcome. In our case we did. The only "downside" is that it takes a very consistent form of energy. I'm constantly thinking "if I'd be as rich as she is, how would I deal with the situation?" I can imagine it to some extent due to how I play poker and seeing parallels with my stack size versus my financial situation. Long story short: when I feel I don't have enough, I get very tight on my spending. When I feel I have enough, I get loose and lax. As one might imagine, I wasn't a very good poker player because of that ;-)
        • dkn775 4y ago
          I’ve been with my fiancée 10 years, she was solid middle class with a single mother teacher, I am pretty solid upper middle class growing up. I just want to say that if allowed to happen you can really be a force together, a moderation force coming from your side and your SO. She buys higher quality trash bags and tires (lol) now and I don’t splurge on stuff all the time now, and don’t waste as much money. I really appreciate the perspective being with her has given me.
  • throwaway0a5e 4y ago
    Everyone's character, behaviors, preferences, etc, etc, are formed in very large part by their life experience. If I had a nickle for every time someone said something about the poors being scarred or broken and then in short order started spewing nonsense about how the poors have minimal agency, need guidance or protecting from themselves, are doing it wrong, etc, etc. I would be a very wealthy man. And a hell of a lot of HN would be poorer in $.05 increments. Did you (in general, not personally) ever think that maybe it's all the upper middle class types who are doing it wrong and the only reason we get away with it is because we have money to sustain the lifestyle? People who act like cheapskates, buying $500 cars, $20 Walmart jeans, while their peers sneer about the $2k Camry, and $50 Levis being a "better value", seem to do well at all levels of the economic ladders and even frequently improve their lot in life.
  • spaetzleesser 4y ago
    It doesn’t have to even be in your youth. I lost a lot of money with a real estate deal in the 90s plus a lot more when the .COM bubble crashed. Since then I have no confidence in investing or jobs. I always look over my shoulder and wait for things to go bad. Especially since 2008 it made sense to blindly invest into housing and stocks even while knowing they would crash eventually. Being gunshy from previous experience made you lose out on a lot of gains.
    • wing-_-nuts 4y ago
      Yeah, it's not just in childhood, it also hits early adulthood as well, when people are just starting out. I scraped by on ~ $600 / mo in disability until I graduated college in my mid 20s in 2008. My spending habits, my hobbies, everything was ingrained around that age. Today I make 25x as much, and barely spend 2x. It's hard to change early habits.
  • kosyblysk2 4y ago
    you can make the same argument (in reverse) about being rich. it is like saying: ohhh my mommy was so bad to me and now i have issues, ohhh my mommy was so good to me and now i have issues. victim mentality
    • tidbits 4y ago
      Or extremes are bad?
    • Fezzik 4y ago
      Not all consequences are the same, even if the initial conditions are of the same-type; not all people who acknowledge negative consequences think of themselves as victims. Saying one is aware that certain conditions and circumstances in childhood tend to cause certain negative behaviors in adulthood is helpful information. Dismissing it as having a victim mentality is unhelpful.
    • wing-_-nuts 4y ago
      I think you should try and understand the definition of 'victim mentality' a little better. There's great power in understanding where you came from, and how that affects your behavior today.
    • bobkazamakis 4y ago
  • DrBazza 4y ago
    Another way of stating that article is that most people in their 20s and 30s have only ever known low-inflation and stability. Those in their mid-40s onwards are possibly young enough to remember how what their parents dealt with in the 70s.
    • w-j-w 4y ago
      Low inflation, yes, but not stability. Many people in their 20s now watched a parent lose their job during the 2008 housing crisis. Just because they didn't see the 70s don't mean they haven't seen macroeconomic calamity affect their parents microeconomic reality.
    • itronitron 4y ago
      I remember sitting in the car with my mom outside an Amtrak train station in the late `70's asking her why she was cutting the tops off of several cereal boxes that we had just bought from the grocery store. Apparently they were for a discount on train tickets.
      • thebigspacefuck 4y ago
        Some coupons are just worth it. A guy in the 90s figured out he could get millions of frequent flyer miles from a few thousand dollars of pudding.
        • DrBazza 4y ago
          Or a military jet? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_v._Pepsico,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_v._Pepsico,_Inc.
    • thebigspacefuck 4y ago
      What about the Great Recession?
    • laputan_machine 4y ago
      I'm in my 30s, I remember 2008 not being a fun time, didn't feel stable watching friends and family lose their jobs and then their houses!
  • ciconia 4y ago
    > scars you for life. You could also say being poor in childhood teaches you how to be frugal. I regard this as a healthy habit and better discipline I wish I had with money (coming from a middle-class family). Another way to look at frugality is just an aversion to spending money on whatever it is that society or mass media tell you you have to buy, an important and healthy attitude one can have, IMO.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    • option 4y ago
      It’s not just frugality. Being “penny wise and pound foolish” and being risk averse is a huge drag on one’s financial opportunities.
    • short_sells_poo 4y ago
      I think you are both correct. It is true that people who grow up poor simply have much fewer chances to learn how to grow wealth. They may be frugal and manage the little they have with care, but that kind of mindset is not enough in general. They don't get any chance to learn how to invest money properly, because they don't have any to invest. If they do put something aside, they are encouraged (by the circumstances) to keep it as safe as possible (ie cash), which is generally a bad investment decision. You are also right in that there are plenty of people who are high earners, but never get to actually build wealth because they spend it all. This can often be the curse of living in a high cost of living area. You see all the wealthy people driving in nice cars and living in luxury homes, and this makes it difficult to consciously deny yourself these things and live (relatively) modestly but build long term wealth instead.
      • wolverine876 4y ago
        That overlooks the basic point, that poverty causes trauma. Budgeting is just one symptom. It causes negative life-long outcomes; there's plenty of research on this.
    • stu2b50 4y ago
  • mabbo 4y ago
    My wife grew up very close to the poverty line, with her parents always just about to lose the house. And she has this anxiety. (Edit: to be clear, she's a successful civil engineer, considered one of the best in her field locally and makes great money- she has nothing to worry about.) In order to help with it, we have a bank account that our bills come out of that has a little more than 6 months worth of all our bills (mortgage payment included) just sitting there, collecting zero interest. Every time a bill is paid, we top it up to the target amount. If we stop making money today, we don't have to do anything differently for 6 months. It's not logical or financially wise, but it means that she doesn't worry about money as much. I consider the opportunity cost on the interest we might collect on that money as a bill that I'm happy to pay.
    • collinvandyck76 4y ago
      with the market being as it is, actually very wise to have a lot of cash on hand :) we also operate this way. i could become unemployed today and we buffer enough so that it's not an emergency at all.
      • Melatonic 4y ago
        I prefer a layered approach - some investments take longer than others to cash out. And some are in between but still provide some return. A ton of cash on hand is probably a bad idea
        • moffkalast 4y ago
          https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/tou7v2/oc_warren_buffetts_2022_portfolio_update_at/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/tou7v2/oc_... Even Warren Buffet always keeps at least something like a fifth of his investments in cash. Otherwise how the hell are you going to buy low?
          • Melatonic 4y ago
            I would imagine though that he is also very often selling / buying so that hes not just sitting on a pile of cash for months at a time?
  • Melatonic 4y ago
    I have seen it also go other ways though - I think it really depends on the family and how they deal with being poor. Families who are poor in currency but very rich in love and social connections seem to still produce great adults who might have some of the scars you are talking about but also are able to overcome them.
  • wolverine876 4y ago
    > Habits that even after you remove poverty from your live, you still feel the the anxiety and triggers in your head. In high school, I went to a friend's house for lunch. Their father served a mountain of food. My friend said, a bit exasperated, 'Dad - why do you always serve so much food?!' Dad said, caringly but directly: 'Remember that I grew up in a refugee camp in Palestine. It is very important to me that nobody ever runs out of food to eat in my home.' An eye-opening moment for a teenager.
  • 01100011 4y ago
    I feel like the results of risky behavior in the real world are somewhat similar to risky behavior in investing. When there is a bull market and overall growth trajectory, risky behavior is more likely to pay off. When a nation is in its growth phase, risky behavior is also more likely to pay off. If a nation starts to enter a phase of decline, perhaps more conservative behavior is a better gamble? Certainly you have to take risk to make outsized gains, I'm just thinking the likelihood of a payoff changes depending on the overall environment.
  • jmcgough 4y ago
    It's pretty well studied that people who grew up poor have a harder time saving and are actually more reckless about spending, because they a) didn't have modeling or financial education from their parents and b) had to spend money when they got it before some random fee or cost gobbled it up
  • sbf501 4y ago
    > penny wise and pound foolish I've seen this in action: e.g., clipping coupons but not paying down debt faster than the schedule.
  • refurb 4y ago
    "Scars you for life"? I mean, the generation who went through the Great Depression did pretty damn well in terms of savings, investment and a lack of waste.
  • LoveGracePeace 4y ago
    Came here to say this, completely agree.
• refurb 4y ago
  "“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 earlier or later would just be younger or older in the year 2000, which likely impacts driving too. Oh economics! You keep calling yourself a science, but you need to start acting like one!
  • anamexis 4y ago
    Presumably if it was just based on age, the effect would be fairly uniform, instead of correlated to periods of price shock.
  • NickRandom 4y ago
    Link to Full paper https://cseveren.github.io/files/FormativeExperiences_Paper_and_Appendix.pdf https://cseveren.github.io/files/FormativeExperiences_Paper_... if that helps?
    • refurb 4y ago
      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.
      • JumpCrisscross 4y ago
        > 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, and 2017 ACS” [1]. Confirmation bias much [2]? [1] https://cseveren.github.io/files/FormativeExperiences_Paper_and_Appendix.pdf https://cseveren.github.io/files/FormativeExperiences_Paper_... bottom of page 6 [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias
• quantified 4y ago
  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 building their lives around unsustainable inexpensive consumption. Look where we are for sprawl and emissions.
  • cs137 4y ago
    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 today's market, that usually means a shit-ass load [1] of driving. ---- [1] You don't want to know how much time I spent deciding whether to use the more conventional hyphenization ("shit-ass-load") or the version with better cadence.
    • quantified 4y ago
      Hopefully a lot less than you spend behind the wheel getting anywhere.
    • mistersquid 4y ago
      > You don't want to know how much time I spent deciding whether to use the more conventional hyphenization ("shit-ass-load") or the version with better cadence. It’s not a question of “cadence” but of grammar. “Shit-ass“ is an adjective modifying the noun “load”. Your choice is grammatically correct.
      • lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 4y ago
        Could there not be a noun, "ass-load"?
• weinzierl 4y ago
  It's more that abundance in formative years spoils you for life.
  • kylecordes 4y ago
    Extreme are often bad. Having either not enough, or excessively much early on, lead to various irrational or otherwise maladaptive behaviors later. Humans perform best in a happy middle range along many axes.
    • april_22 4y ago
      This is so true. The middle is the best for most things in life. Too much pleasure can also mean pain
  • cs137 4y ago
    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.
    • daniel-cussen 4y ago
      Yeah and like rich kids have impunity, poor kids have excess punishment meted out against them. Scapegoated a lot of the time.
    • ponow 4y ago
      Huh? Social status is relative, that is, defined by some kind of difference in a characteristic over which there is some competition (like wealth, looks, connections, fame, etc.). So how do you get that rich kid status without reference to material abundance? Remember, most people are comparatively poor: the wealth histogram is heavily skewed toward zero and with a wide tail toward infinity. It's impossible for everyone to be relatively wealthy and relatively high status. It is possible for everyone to have absolute wealth (or at least income) beyond a fixed absolute level, yet still widely disparate status.
• cageface 4y ago
  My grandmother grew up during the great depression and often went hungry as a child. Decades later when she had plenty of money she still refused to ever throw anything away. Her huge house was stuffed full of balls of old string, used popsicle sticks, ancient newspapers and wire.
  • NickRandom 4y ago
    I had a relative that was a child during WWII and they had some very distinctive (borderline maladaptive) 'quirks' .... One of which is they would never take the last item of anything from out of the fridge (eggs, cheese slices etc) and would become irate if anybody else did. They (much like your grandmother) were also unable/unwilling to throw anything out 'just in case'.
• cs137 4y ago
  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-old Millennials dropping dead of preventable causes. The American healthcare system has already killed millions, but it's also killed future millions.
  • tootie 4y ago
    My grandma did this. Never left a penny on the sidewalk, always took the bread from a breadbasket home. Even my parents absorbed some of that behavior despite being born in the next generation.
    • JamesSwift 4y ago
      Yep, my parents are baby boomers and definitely have this ingrained in them. I also have some habits around eating where I (usually) waste nothing, which was instilled in me by my grandfather.
      • distances 4y ago
        Not wasting food is just normal though, or is it just so ingrained in me that it only seems so?
        • JamesSwift 4y ago
          When I say dont waste food I mean my plate is completely clean when I'm done. I eat everything off a chicken wing so its _just_ bone left (eat all the cartilage and clean every bit of meat off). My grandfather would actually break the bones and suck the marrow out of each one.
    • Markoff 4y ago
      > always took the bread from a breadbasket home Care to explain it to non native speaker from Europe? Is it some bakery chain and she took home some cheap/free leftover bread?
• bambax 4y ago
  "scar" consumption? Or immunize against compulsive consumption?
  • ponow 4y ago
    Absa-bloody-lutely. Living through a price shock informs you of actual reality, not the government created illusory one (constructed with central banking and government policy) that encourages indebtedness and leaves you weak and unprepared for unforeseen events.
  • meepmorp 4y ago
    Keep in mind, this article is from a business school website. The perspective is going to be skewed towards whatever is perceived towards benefitting businesses.
  • mjmsmith 4y ago
    How Price Stability in Formative Years Incites Consumption for Life
    • fuzzfactor 4y ago
      Yes, with low appreciation for how overpriced so many things are, it leads to a life scarred by consumption.
• bitcurious 4y ago
  My grandparents didn’t go hungry this year (after Russia’s invasion) because they had a cellar full of preserves. For them, it was part of a tradition of hunger, a “never waste food” mentality reinforced by WWII, and Holodomor prior, and WWI prior, and the experience of being serfs prior to that.
  • kgwgk 4y ago
    > WWI prior, and the experience of being serfs prior to that They may be quite old!
    • nostromo 4y ago
      > it was part of a tradition
      • kgwgk 4y ago
        it was a joke, anyway
  • 2-718-281-828 4y ago
    In the spirit of the article or at least the title one might say your grandparent's regular food wasting attitude has been scarred by WWII.
• seunosewa 4y ago
  Is it fair to conclude that fossil fuel price shocks are good for the planet? If everyone experiences them early then we will all reduce our carbon footprint for life and slow global warming?
  • jrumbut 4y ago
    The article addresses that a bit. The effect is small and they are still driving everywhere alone (instead of public transport) so the authors say that electric vehicles are the only way out.
  • ffggvv 4y ago
    what if i told you a lot of fossil fuels go into producing electric cars, which then drives up the price of them making them out of reach for the avg person
    • throitallaway 4y ago
      I'm sorry, but are you saying that the high price of EVs is due to fossil fuel prices? EVs were far out of reach of the average person well before fuel prices ticked up. They're priced high because they're based on relatively new technology and processes.
      • ffggvv 4y ago
        no i’m saying high energy prices make them even more expensive
  • duffyjp 4y ago
    I 100% welcome higher gas prices. Americans are so wasteful it's ridiculous. It'll hurt if you're currently in an inefficient car but once you get a hybrid / EV you won't care. I don't even look at the price filling up my Prius. SUVs that look like school buses and people commuting to an office job in full size trucks is madness.
    • deleted 4y ago
• varispeed 4y ago
  I know someone who immigrated from a former communist country. She talked how they lived in extreme poverty and now despite having great job and substantial savings, she pretty much lives the way she learned. For instance cooking the same food her parents used to cook from whatever they managed to find, only wearing used clothing. When her phone was stolen and she had to buy a new one, she literaly cried for a week thinking that for the lost money she could have food for months. The bad side is that I remember she berated her then boyfriend because he bought potatoes in the store that had them 20p (like a quarter in the US) more expensive than the one little farther from her place. Can you imagine being screamed at for 20p? He eventually left her and needed to attend therapy.
  • Markoff 4y ago
    I perfectly understand her, I am in similar position despite being in top 3% earners in Czechia I will refuse to buy overpriced goods I know they are cheaper in other shop. I have 4 years old phone, wanted to upgrade for really long time, but I don't see the value in new one worth spending that much money for flagship just because I want compact phone with good camera and battery (Pixel 4A was closest price wise, but battery and punch hole killed it) despite I could buy easily 4-5 flagships from my monthly income. Is there something wrong though with keeping your spending habits low instead splurging on stupid things and risking potentially you will have to adjust them, if you lose job? I find it better to just keep them pretty much stable no matter how high is the income. Though I would not touch second hand clothes, but would not have problem to buy second hand phone and I consider people buying brand new cars crazy, you will lose lot of value just after leaving the dealership. It probably helps my wife is (stereo)typical Chinese who will reuse everything and has problem to throw away anything, that's even more extreme than me not buying overpriced goods when I know they are cheaper elsewhere (I'm actually supporting price competition this way, sadly most of the people are lazy and don't give a F about few cents causing inflation for everyone). I love especially expiring food with 60-70% discounts, finding best possible deal makes me probably more happy than products itself.
    • baal80spam 4y ago
      Can almost fully relate and I also grew up in a communist country (Poland).
• mmaunder 4y ago
  Notable that the gas price doubled in 3 years. We’re almost at that point today. https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=pet&s=emm_epm0_pte_nus_dpg&f=m https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=pet&s=e...
• CapitalistCartr 4y ago
  I remember there not being seconds at supper (1960s), Mom would serve, deciding how much everyone got: Dad first, then each of four kids, then herself. I know this is part of who I am, and some of why the house is stuffed. My wife laughs at how much clothing I have, because I still have clothes from 1979. Well, mostly she laughs at my stuff from the Eighties. But I remember shopping at Goodwill or my mom making everything we wore. It's not worth the anxiety to not-have.
  • scruple 4y ago
    At first appearances, I'm not too dissimilar to you though I am younger (in my 40s). > It's not worth the anxiety to not-have. Yes, but having too much stuff can also cause anxiety. There's a line in there somewhere that I strive to meet.
• photochemsyn 4y ago
  Mindless consumption is nothing but a disease, of the mental illness variety. People who get a dopamine burst or some similar neurotransmitter release when they go shopping have been indoctrinated into patterns of behavior that do them no good in the long run. They'll end up with a house crammed with possessions they never use, bought on a whim in order to make themselves feel better. A better mentality is to always think: "Do I really need this product/service, or can I make do with things on hand that I can rebuild/repair/reuse in some manner, and am I sure this purchase isn't just for the dopamine reward?" Sometimes the answer will be yes, and a simple purchase can have a lot of positive knock on effects - good tools, for example, allow you to repair things that would otherwise cost much more to replace, and last much longer than cheap tools. The claim that economic growth relies on consumer confidence (high levels of consumption) is also pretty suspect and relies a lot on how you define 'growth' - what's wrong with a steady-state economy with a stable human population and fixed levels of demand for goods and services, anyway?
  • AuthorizedCust 4y ago
    > what's wrong with a steady-state economy with a stable human population We don’t have a stable population. It’s growing. We like things to get better even if we don’t have “more”. I don’t have multiple cars just for me. But the car I have now has adaptive cruise control. It costs more, it makes my driving experience better, and I’m glad I have it. Both of these, among many other factors, influence economic growth.
    • onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
      > We don’t have a stable population. It’s growing. The rate of growth is declining, though. So it's not unreasonable to foresee peak population in the near future (most estimates are around 2060, and it's not going to increase much between 2050 and then).
    • usrn 4y ago
      No it's not, most developed countries force their populations to accept immigrants to keep the population growing in order to prop up the "growth" economy.
• PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
  The paper fails to consider: 1. the cotemporaneous rise of (this iteration of an) environmental movement during exactly the same time period as the "price shocks" for gasoline that it considers. This has almost certainly had a significant impact on the zeitgeist for the cohort the study is considering, and it doesn't take much imagination to believe that it is a much more substantive impact. 2. studiously avoids an international comparison. The 78-80 "shock" caused by the Iranian revolution had impacts on gasoline prices everywhere, and even if (as the paper notes) the USA is a much more car-centric culture than elsewhere, certainly people were driving a lot in Europe during that period too. If the effect is real, you should be able to demonstrate it there too.
• ffggvv 4y ago
  scarring consumption is probably a good thing at an individual level as most people are reckless with money but the way our society is built we need people to consume to keep the economy afloat
• giantg2 4y ago
  I had a grandfather who lived through the depression. He never threw away anything that could possibly be useful in the future.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
• mdeck_ 4y ago
  > Between late 1978 and early 1981, drivers in the U.S. saw the price at the pump nearly double from 63 cents to $1.31 a gallon. Not sure how that change would amount to NEARLY doubling...
  • selimthegrim 4y ago
    I don’t think inflation was on holiday during those years…also nearly doesn’t have to mean almost
• jmyeet 4y ago
  Let's extend this a little further. If we accept that events in life can scar or even just affect you for life (as this article claims) then why stop there? These people have children. Do you think that habits that form out of trauma, housing insecurity, food insecurity or were in fear of their lives don't subconciously impact their children? We don't even have to imagine that. We have physical evidence that the conditions a woman faces can impact her grandchildren [1]. Remember that a cis-woman is born all the ova she'll have so pregnancy conditions can affect grandchildren. But even if you ignore the physical, you'll find cultural and psychological effects on children from people who, say, fled a war zone or survived the Holocaust or whatever. If you accept all that you've then accepted that generational trauma is real (which it is). So what do you think that slavery did to people long after chattel slavery (officially) ended? [1]: https://www.science.org/content/article/moms-environment-during-pregnancy-can-affect-her-grandchildren https://www.science.org/content/article/moms-environment-dur...
  • krapht 4y ago
    At least from the conversations I've heard about this topic, the issue isn't acknowledging that slavery and Jim Crow has caused problems for generations of blacks. The problem comes when measures to address it are discussed, like reparations or quotas. People see it as monumentally unfair because, while being black is a handicap, it's only one of many that are too endless to enumerate. For example, there is no affirmative action for poor whites who grow up in broken homes. There is no affirmative action for simply having parents who are a standard deviation below the population in IQ. Insofar as student spots at high-tier institutions go, here poor whites see favorable action to benefit blacks when they themselves never played a part in their oppression. Black, well-spoken immigrants from Nigeria who never experience discrimination in their home countries get benefits merely by dint of their skin color, and not actual suffering. Even if you limited it to some way to only US blacks who could prove lineage to an actual enslaved individual, suffering is difficult, if not impossible, to quantify. So... why action on this topic is politically impossible. I think color-blind welfare policies based on economic resources would be much more feasible, but... good luck raising taxes to increase the size of the welfare state.
• nonrandomstring 4y ago
  > Scar Consumption for Life Sounds like a good thing in a world where we over-consume almost everything? I can't agree with some of the commentary in this thread about risk, drive and early poverty. Some of the wealthiest people started out dirt poor. They didn't like it and resolved to become rich. Plenty more started out spoiled rotten and grew up to be lazy minded with mediocre life outcomes. "Brewster's Millions" is still a great film on this theme of growing a healthy relationship with money.
• swatcoder 4y ago
  There was an article here yesterday[1] about a study showing a correlation between Glucosamine and reduced lung cancer mortality. The top comment[2] challenged the worth of the study on the grounds that these sort of observational studies in large populations have too many confounders to be taken seriously. There's truth to that point, but it's interesting to see which topics slide into skepticism and critiques of method, and which take results at face value and build a discussion on top of them. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31746980 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31746980 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31747822 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31747822
• tomcam 4y ago
  Growing up not rich in the 60s and 70s was useful on the balance. I was willing to take risks in business because when you don’t have much to lose you are perhaps a little more free to try scary things. I read tons of how to succeed books and biographies and learned a lot about how failures are learning experiences. OTOH many of my peers wound up dead, on drugs, or incarcerated. I do tend to be hoardy and my clever technique has been to just buy more houses, so not a great role model in that regard.
• beezle 4y ago
  I was a kid during both oil shocks of the 1970s. That has absolutely nothing to do with my driving. What does, and not just for driving, is the family taught cultural value of 'don't be wasteful'. So unlike so many people today, I don't make 12 trips a day to stores/friends/whatever when I can just make one or two if I actually think 5 minutes ahead. That applies whether gas is $1 or $5 per gallon. I also try to make good use of what I own and not discard things that are functional simply to get the new shiny.
  • sbf501 4y ago
    In the late 1970's Star Wars toys still worked if the batteries died! Can't say that about an iPad.
    • babypuncher 4y ago
      I wonder which is more wasteful: A built-in rechargeable battery that lasts 500-1000 charge cycles but is difficult to replace, or a requirement of six AAA batteries that need replacement after every 3-4 hours of use.
      • tessierashpool 4y ago
        ok, but you're replying to a comment about toys that don't need their batteries replaced, because they still work without the batteries. a toy with optional batteries obviously requires less battery use than a thing which requires a battery. it's tautological.
        • babypuncher 4y ago
          I think it's a weird comparison to begin with because an iPad is a hell of a lot more versatile than a Darth Vader action figure.
      • aembleton 4y ago
        You can use rechargeable AAA batteries so its not so wasteful.
• Grustaf 4y ago
• dukeofdoom 4y ago
  I don't really think penny pinching works during inflation. Your money will be worth less in the future
• annoyingnoob 4y ago
  My grand-parents lived through the Great Depression and were the most frugal people I've ever met.
• mathgladiator 4y ago
  I grew up and watched Enron implode with stories of life savings going poof. That influenced me to sell every vesting round which is averaging. This strategy always haunted, but thankfully my performance made up for it. With the recent crash, the stock went down over 50% and it turns out that my strategy yielded me an average loss of 22% from peak. I feel like it is more optimal to have those scars to be cautious earlier than later. That being said, there is also a truth in taking more risks earlier in life. There is a balance to be achieved.
• sys_64738 4y ago
  This isn't exactly unexpected as your childhood and adolescent experiences are what people vividly remember the most. Adulthood is all a blur otherwise.
• qgin 4y ago
  As an aside, gas prices now are basically the same as they were in 2013, adjusted for inflation.
• giarc 4y ago
  I have a form of this in other areas. Growing up we didn't have a ton of money and batteries were expensive. We never had batteries to replace depleted ones, so once a toy was out of batteries, it was done. We just played without those features. Now, having kids, I'm so conscience of batteries. I have a tester and check each battery when "dead" and put them in a separate box if I think they have enough juice for a lower power item. We have the money to just replace batteries when we need to... I just need to conserve them. The other area is colour ink. Printing in colour as a kid was a big deal. I think think I'm going to get in trouble at work when I print in colour... like the massive organization I work for is going to care about 5 pages of full colour document.
  • countvonbalzac 4y ago
    You can get rechargeable batteries.
    • giarc 4y ago
      Ya now I have the money to buy whatever batteries I need (thank you Amazon Basics) but as a kid we definitely didn't have the money to afford batteries. We didn't even buy paper towels, just used tea towels (as we called them). This also created an aversion to over using paper towels in my adult years. This isn't meant as some "whoa is me", but just a comment on how pricing and costs growing up can affect you for a very long time.
• crikeyjoe 4y ago
• sbf501 4y ago
  > Americans Have an Affinity for Driving Anecdata: I hate driving. I'd much rather take a bus or light rail, but that battle was lost in the 1940's[1], along with asinine city planning that was pro-car, anti-community that still exists today. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp...
• fleddr 4y ago
  A "food shock" variation... My late grandmother, whom lived to the respectable age of 99 years, experienced the Dutch hunger winter. A period of famine during WW2. For the rest of her lengthy life she could not tolerate any type of food waste. As an example, she'd buy a cabbage and then eat cabbage the entire week, even as it increasingly goes bad. She had zero interest in food quality or nutritional value, just food in itself. Behavior learned during the famine where you don't have the luxury to discriminate. As an example, she once babysat me and my brother and made an abundance of snacks. Just way too much. Quite soon we were full, but the single word "finish..." and her stare told us all we needed to know. We finished, with stomach cramps. Out of respect. Also, she had 9 children and survived 7 (genetic blood disease). She survived two husbands. In her extended family and friends, she survived...everybody. We have a single photo of her childhood, where she stands in front of her house. Which was...made from clay and reed. An astonishing reminder of how even in today's developed nations, wealth for common people is brand new. Despite plenty of opportunities in her lifetime, she rejected material wealth outside some basics. Zero material desires. Despite all this, not once in her life have I seen her sad or complain or moan. If us grandchildren did something bad or stupid, she didn't give a shit. You're still alive, in health...so what's the problem? Carry on. She didn't eat very healthy, smoke a pack a day and didn't exercise. And still she made a daily trip on her bicycle to get her own groceries. Or make two trips in a row if needed. Up to the age of 98. The collapse was short and sudden. After a hospital stay she was returned home to die. As she got carried out of the ambulance she saw my dad's work: her front-garden completely replanted with hundreds of blooming flowers, a sight to behold. "That looks nice" She was never very generous with compliments. And those were her last words. I'd call her Iron Lady, but it's an insult really. Iron is too soft to describe her. She lives on as my compass for life. When I worry, see darkness in the world, contemplate about world events and threats, I think of her. I'm alive, and I'm eating. I'm fine. Her scars are my lesson, and it's liberating. She lived in an occupied country, ate grass and flowers, whilst nearly freezing to death. She encountered enough personal loss to fit several lifetimes. And still lived a full life and remained positive throughout. So if at one point I have to cancel my Netflix, yeah...I think I'm going to be fine.
  • hinkley 4y ago
    My great grandmother was 9 at the end of the Great Depression. Not that she talked about it, but I did an assignment for an anthropology class that was basically, "bother some old people about one of these Bad Times." She actually was a good cook, a lot of her dishes rode the line between simple and fancy. She had either the oldest fancy stove or the fanciest old stove I'd ever seen, and she treated every glass jar she met as a reusable container (to this day the majority of glass jars on store shelves are the same dimensions and threading as a Ball Mason Jar lid), had odd collections of belongings and many of her wide, wide variety of plants seemed to have come from an extensive network of barter and gift economy. We spent one trip to her house clearing her entire pantry of expired food, because my mom found one can, asked some questions and did not like any of her answers. Some of it was bad. Rob you and leave your body in a ditch bad.
• fleddr 4y ago
  Economic shocks are not fun, but to lighten the mood I figured to share a weird but hilarious subculture: vrekken. A "vrek" is the dutch word for somebody that is extraordinarily frugal in unhealthy ways. The vrekken culture embraces this as a quality and then escalates it to Olympic standards. Not even out of necessity, instead as an avenue for creativity. Here's one such vrekken news paper of the "Saver of the Fatherland": https://www.vrekkenpagina.nl/ https://www.vrekkenpagina.nl/ I'm unsure if there's international versions of this culture?
  • somebodynew 4y ago
    In America there are subcultures devoted to couponing (hunting for discount promotions) and churning (opening many credit card or bank accounts to collect "new account bonuses").
  • indecisive_user 4y ago
    There was a TV show on the TLC channel that covered people like this in the US. Called Extreme Cheapskates https://youtu.be/D8Yerg78m7M https://youtu.be/D8Yerg78m7M
  • mrleinad 4y ago
    Sounds like my father in law: voluntarily chooses not to turn up the heat in winter to avoid spending, even when he could pay the bill multiple times and still have plenty left from his retirement monthly paycheck.
• funstuff007 4y ago
  When I was a lad, my grandfather used to hound me to finish all the food on my plate, and not waste a thing. When I'd complain to my mom her explanation was Grandpa grew up during the Great Depression and he often went without enough food.
• shahbaby 4y ago
  When people learn to live with less and within their means, it only hurts the rich bankers that publish these type of articles.
• kwatsonafter 4y ago
  It is indeed difficult to unlearn being poor. It is possible though.
• fortran77 4y ago
  My parents grew up in the depression and I was in high school in the 70s. I'm very careful with money, and have always been a frugal saver. Of course, people who save money are punished the most by government policies, and especially by politicians like Joe Biden.
• ddingus 4y ago
  Scar? Frankly, what happens is people learn the value of prudence early in life which then saves them a ton of money, time and anguish. I grew up in hard times, and spend to solve problems was rarely the right answer. Each new skill mastered was worth an awful lot of money! I picked up many and have broad competence today. The savings are still compounding. If you ask me, the current emphasis on consumption and so damn many things made to fail hard and or be replaced rather than serviced, refused or repurposed is morbid! Gluttony on parade. A lot of people need work and or to live on not a lot of money too. Right to repair plus some way for people to learn, maybe learn together would put a dent in many businesses. I get that, but which is it? Pay them more to actually consume, or maybe we all should not be surprised when large numbers of people begin to really walk that rugged individualist talk.
• panny 4y ago
  Interesting to me is 1) How the article focuses entirely on fossil fuel consumption rather than something much more damaging, like housing 2) The author's key takeaway is this is great and we should use it to manipulate people into consuming less fossil fuels by making their usage punishingly expensive. In particular, 1) is a societal wrecking ball, because no home means no stable environment to raise children, means more trouble in the pipeline for the next generation. Many people in the generation won't even have children and others will have fewer than replacement rate. 2) makes me think the same sort of people are behind the housing crisis. They believe in overpopulation and therefore they want to curtail it by making housing punishingly expensive.
• kbelder 4y ago
  Price shocks in formative years cure overconsumption later in life.
• lbschenkel 4y ago
  I was a kid during hyperinflation years in Brazil: 80s to early 90s, sometimes higher than 70% a month. To this day I'm very frugal, and I have a strong aversion to having debt of any kind: the only kind of debt I ever had was a mortgage and I paid them off as soon as I possibly could. I can only sleep well at night if I don't owe any money to anyone. I cannot be sure, but I have this feeling that it is due to my formative years in that kind of environment.
• bergenty 4y ago
  Scar is a weird way of referring to being prudent.