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That's one big paradox. Coming from poverty, I work with plenty of talented people, but nowhere as talented as the people I've studied in shitty schools. Now

That's one big paradox. Coming from poverty, I work with plenty of talented people, but nowhere as talented as the people I've studied in shitty schools. Now most of those people from my poverty times continue to be poor, because of many problems poverty brought to them. I can clearly see that, and that I was the lucky one to find a way up many times. Yet, my new social circle believe that I'm talented because of my DNA and efforts, and blame others for their poverty. But I know that those people making "poor" decisions in the view of riches are actually just trying to survive. With themselves, with the baggage they carry, and to the fact that they weren't as lucky as me. Talent, intelligence is literally everywhere. People that are awesome and ambitious is abundant. Nobody is really much better than others, but America post-ww2 managed to sell this idea to everyone, including many really smart and talented folks, that think they are gifted. To sum up, nobody chooses to be poor and humanity could progress faster if we focused instead in eliminating poverty, creating more possibilities for everyone... Than believing almost trillionaries will guide us to where we need it.

jack2312 3y ago
To anyone interested in how poverty (and scarcity in general) affects our mental state, and thus our ability to function well and improve our lives, I'd highly recommend the book _Scarcity_ by Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir. I've found it quite illuminating and interesting. It's written from an academic perspective, so it has plenty of research behind it, and the narrative flow is not bad. If you want something more concise and to the point, the article "The Science of Scarcity" [0] in Harvard Magazine provides a pretty good summary of the book. The themes from the book complement those in the article fairly well. [0]: https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2015/04/the-science-of-scarcity https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2015/04/the-science-of-scarc...
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jacquesm 3y ago
Luck is the big differentiator.
dcist 3y ago
Some people are indeed much better. Anyone who played sports as a kid understands this. Huge differences are immediately apparent in small children. But generally, I agree that, for most life tasks, the differences between people are not enormous. Humanity could do a much better job eliminating poverty. In the future, we may view enormous disparities in wealth as evil as we do racism today.
- deleted 3y ago
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- lwhi 3y ago
  Better at sports .. but I bet there's a fairly even distribution between people who have money and don't. > In the future, we may view enormous disparities in wealth as evil as we do racism today. A lot of people already do.
  - ajkjk 3y ago
    Yeah seriously, it's pretty much standard at this point.
  - WendyTheWillow 3y ago
    And a lot of people would be very wrong. There’s a floor to survivability, below which you can’t keep yourself alive, but there is no ceiling. If everyone is above the floor, there’s no reason for concern about those looking for the ceiling. In the future we’ll pull people up to the floor, but that doesn’t require attaching a ceiling. The will never be a successful society that substantially punishes achievement above a certain point.
    - lwhi 3y ago
      You're wrong. Fundamentally it requires redistribution and a complete change of mindset.
squidbeak 3y ago
I agree with you, talent's abundant. Something is very badly wrong with our societies and economic systems if so much of that talent is in the mud and unusable.
FirmwareBurner 3y ago
> humanity could progress faster if we focused instead in eliminating poverty, creating more possibilities for everyone... Those with the wealth and the power to change this, don't have an interest in spreading out welfare and therefore making themselves less wealthy and powerful in the process, but enriching themselves or at least maintaining the status quo, and that usually comes at the expense of keeping those less fortunate where they are. A lot of goods and services that we take for granted in the west, like commodities in our daily lives: cheap cocoa, cheap coffee, cheap exotic fruits, cheap sneakers and clothing, cheap electronic gadgets, all rely on an underclass of less fortunate people who have no choice in life but be prisoners in a neo-slavery system where they have to work in their given conditions for the give pay, with no way up or out. Please google and check out the human exploitations going on in cocoa and coffee farming at your own discretion. Do you think the kids and adults working on those farms for pennies in the beating sun and bitten by mosquitos, wouldn't rather do something else with their lives than picking coffee beans, like go to school/university and work in an office? But if we would spread welfare for them to have that choice, who would then choose work in those bad conditions for nothing to provide western consumers with cheap commodities? Robots aren't even remotely there yet. Same with mining minerals to make iPhones, PlayStations and EVs. If we were to make their lives and jobs fair while also watching over the environment, then the price of commodities would explode, so the mega conglomerates who own these markets, like Nestle or Apple for example, would have to take a missive hit on their profits, or the western consumers would have to stomach the explosion in prices, or both simultaneously, neither of which are acceptable trade-offs in the west, so we keep the status quo of having to rely on perpetual underclasses of people slaving away in poverty for us, while pretending we're great humanitarians and benefactors. I said "we" here, because it's not just the great evil billionaires like Bezos, Jobs, Saudis, and so many others who profit from and enable this exploitation, but also the western governments like US, Switzerland, Netherlands, etc. where they're HQ but have the audacity to lecture them on human rights and environment concerns, plus the individual shareholders, employees, taxpayers and consumers who enable them as well. Sure, a lot of people in poor nations got out of poverty "thanks" to globalization and mega conglomerates outsourcing of less desirable manufacturing and services there, but let's not forget they didn't do this out of the goodness of their hearts, but to extract even more profits. People getting out of poverty was just a happy side effect.
webdood90 3y ago
I have a similar experience but have a different opinion. I am 100% lucky that I was in the right place at the right time so that I could be offered the opportunities that I had. But I think you have to be disciplined in that you must try and try and try to do everything in your power to put yourself in the right place. Of course, even if you do this, you might never be given the opportunity. But if you don't try, you _definitely_ won't. Many of the people I grew up with did not do this. They had the ability to do it, but they lacked initiative or the ambition. They were complacent with what they had, even though it was very little. Not everyone comes from an unbroken home, or had a support network to do these things - I get that. But I see many people that could do better and just don't do it for what I'd guess is because it's hard. Instead they make bad decisions that are easy and increase quality of life on the short term: racking up debt, having kids at a young age without a career, etc. Do people not shoulder some of the blame in today's information age?
- thiago_fm 3y ago
  A lot of talented people try hard and end up in poverty. Luck > any attribute (IQ, etc)
CPUstring 3y ago
Coming from the middle class, I've never met anybody talented coming from a shitty school who didn't also get filtered into a gifted program at a good school. Maybe your school system just wasn't competent at filtering people? Those that I know who have made bad life decisions (kids too early, dropping out of college, leaving extremely supportive parents) could totally have been expected to based off looking at GPA/SAT signals.
- corobo 3y ago
  > I've never met anybody talented coming from a shitty school who didn't also get filtered into a gifted program I'm not sure I understand this one.. how would you know the gifted program missed them if they're now spending their life dealing with poverty? I'm guessing you don't mingle with the poors? I've never met anyone that lives their entire life in the middle of a rainforest. So weird! Also what the fuck is a gifted program lmao. That must be some London thing, aye? We were lucky to have teachers of the subject teaching the class up north haha
  - VBprogrammer 3y ago
    Even if such programs exist and exceptionally talented people get filtered into them, it completely ignores the fact that there is still a huge disparity in outcome for people who are merely modestly above average.
  - laurencerowe 3y ago
    Gifted programs are American things. Talking to my California born partner it seems to be a kind of streaming thing. They don’t seem to have as much ability setting here as I was used to in UK (where for certain subjects classes are split by ability.)
    - corobo 3y ago
      Ahhh, gotcha. The focus on UK in the article and many comments put me in a UK-centric mindset. My bad there. Aye we had splits in some subjects like that. Weirdly all the rich kids (for my town, mostly middle class really) were in the top classes and the poor kids in the bottom haha
fngjdflmdflg 3y ago
The correlation of IQ with income is 0.30[0]. Educational attainment is 0.32. So if you are intelligent (talented) or educated then you are statistically likely to have above average income. If you have both even more so. [0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0160289607000219 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01602... (https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.intell.2007.02.003 https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.intell.2007.02....) page 5 table 1.
- Cpoll 3y ago
  That's correlation at best (as you said, but worth emphasizing). And IQ is a problematic metric for anything other than how good you are at taking IQ tests.
  - RationalDino 3y ago
    IQ measurement definitely has major flaws.. But IQ is better correlated with job performance than job interviews are. As they say, perfect is the enemy of good. IQ tests are good. We do ourselves no favors by attempting to downplay what standardized testing tells us.
  - 10xDev 3y ago
    After a point, say 130 IQ, the differences between people's capacity become intangible. But there is certainly a big difference between someone under 80 IQ and someone with 130 IQ, which is why the US military doesn't even accept individuals under 80 IQ.
- deleted 3y ago
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- SketchySeaBeast 3y ago
  I didn't read the paper, but are we sure that A (wealth/education) follows B (IQ) and not vice versa?
  - fngjdflmdflg 3y ago
AlexandrB 3y ago
Stephen Jay Gould said it best: > I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.
- thiago_fm 3y ago
  That is it. Just imagine. We would already have found all rules that govern our universe.
moralestapia 3y ago
>Nobody is really much better than others This took me several decades to grasp and then "forgive" myself for not being the person I wanted to be. I also think it is a message that is worth spreading, particularly among young folks. It's quite easy to amalgamate the concept of meritocracy with that of success, such that a lack of the latter implies a lack of the former. This is (or, at least for me, it was) an endless supply of anxiety of pain, which is completely unfounded. Everyone fails dozens of times before hitting on something good, it's just the nature of things. Some lucky people can just fail as much as they need to, while some other's can't even afford to try even once. I read this somewhere else and stuck with me, "people don't make better choices, they just have better choices".
elmomle 3y ago
https://theamericanscholar.org/the-disadvantages-of-an-elite-education/ https://theamericanscholar.org/the-disadvantages-of-an-elite... A university professor's personal observations about how a typical city college student faces myriad obstacles to success with little support, whereas a typical student at an elite college must practically struggle to fall through all the safety nets and actually fail. The article should be required reading for anyone who is or has been in any way involved with a higher-tier university in the United States.
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sershe 3y ago
Strongly disagree. I went to an average school in Russia where I was from one of the poorest families, then hung out a few times with people from a selective maths focused school where I was invited but didn't go to because I was lazy, then later lived for a few years in a worse neighborhood and hung out with my neighbors (ranging from ex cons to people working construction and loading dock), and I've worked in tech obviously. Sure there are better and worse people everywhere, but on average the more meritocratic the system, the more poor people suck! With the exception of immigrants who start from 0. In completely non-meritocratic system like Soviet Union you could have people living next door to each other in similar conditions, who went to the same schools and had the same opportunities, and one would be a Physics professor and the other a raging alcoholic. A system where equality is not forced just sorts them better. Many people are really much better than others at most things, including merely being a decent worker/friend/partner. And many are worse
- zozbot234 3y ago
  These things are cultural and collective in nature, they're not the fault of any individual. "Poor people suck" in Russia and elsewhere because their upbringing has failed to educate them with the middle-class values that are the foundation of any genuinely prosperous society. (To be sure other things are important too, such as social cohesion and even some degree of egalitarianism.)
badpun 3y ago
I think plenty of people are well aware of this. That's why parents insist for the best possible education for their children - they know that it's the credentials carried by the diploma, and not the child's actual talents (or lack or thereof) will decide the future quality of life of the child. Cue in tutoring, extensive paid college exam/SAT prep etc.
BizarroLand 3y ago
It's hard to explain what life is like as a formerly very poor™ person to people who have never experienced it. Like, every once in a while I get a craving for poverty comfort foods like ramen with frozen veggies, a slice of American cheese, and a sliced up microwaved hotdog. Or trying to explain why it's so hard for me to let go of a 20 year old pickup truck that still works because I used to sleep in it. Or how no matter how much money I earn now I always feel poor and one step away from homelessness. How I won't go and buy new clothes, why I shop at thrift stores and pawn shops when I can afford new, how I don't feel like I own anything, why I always plan for and expect the worst out of every event and encounter I have, how I dedicate my self to working hard so that the places I work at can't "afford" to fire me, so much so that I have been accused of being an overworker and a slave driver. On an income basis I'm probably at the top for my entire family right now, but years of homelessness and over a decade of extreme poverty have made their marks on my life and I don't know if it will ever get better. I could win the lottery and I'd still be cutting coupons and searching deal sites for discount codes, wearing discount clothes and shopping in pawn shops.
- achenet 3y ago
  you can reprogram your brain. Journaling and meditation have helped me a lot, and I've heard of others who have had success with therapy. If these habits/accumulated traumas are causing you pain, know that there are ways to heal that. :)
andrei_says_ 3y ago
Associating wealth with discipline and virtue is a successful propaganda campaign with framing rooted in strict father / conservative worldview. Per George Lakoff (full interview: https://newsarchive.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2003/10/27_lakoff.shtml https://newsarchive.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2003/10... ) The conservative worldview, the strict father model, assumes that the world is dangerous and difficult and that children are born bad and must be made good. The strict father is the moral authority who supports and defends the family, tells his wife what to do, and teaches his kids right from wrong. The only way to do that is through painful discipline - physical punishment that by adulthood will become internal discipline. The good people are the disciplined people. Once grown, the self-reliant, disciplined children are on their own. Those children who remain dependent (who were spoiled, overly willful, or recalcitrant) should be forced to undergo further discipline or be cut free with no support to face the discipline of the outside world. So, project this onto the nation and you see that to the right wing, the good citizens are the disciplined ones - those who have already become wealthy or at least self-reliant - and those who are on the way. Social programs, meanwhile, "spoil" people by giving them things they haven't earned and keeping them dependent. The government is there only to protect the nation, maintain order, administer justice (punishment), and to provide for the promotion and orderly conduct of business. In this way, disciplined people become self-reliant. Wealth is a measure of discipline. Taxes beyond the minimum needed for such government take away from the good, disciplined people rewards that they have earned and spend it on those who have not earned it.

jack2312 3y ago

To anyone interested in how poverty (and scarcity in general) affects our mental state, and thus our ability to function well and improve our lives, I'd highly recommend the book _Scarcity_ by Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir. I've found it quite illuminating and interesting. It's written from an academic perspective, so it has plenty of research behind it, and the narrative flow is not bad. If you want something more concise and to the point, the article "The Science of Scarcity" [0] in Harvard Magazine provides a pretty good summary of the book. The themes from the book complement those in the article fairly well. [0]: https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2015/04/the-science-of-scarcity https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2015/04/the-science-of-scarc...

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jacquesm 3y ago

Luck is the big differentiator.

dcist 3y ago

Some people are indeed much better. Anyone who played sports as a kid understands this. Huge differences are immediately apparent in small children. But generally, I agree that, for most life tasks, the differences between people are not enormous. Humanity could do a much better job eliminating poverty. In the future, we may view enormous disparities in wealth as evil as we do racism today.

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lwhi 3y ago
Better at sports .. but I bet there's a fairly even distribution between people who have money and don't. > In the future, we may view enormous disparities in wealth as evil as we do racism today. A lot of people already do.
- ajkjk 3y ago
  Yeah seriously, it's pretty much standard at this point.
- WendyTheWillow 3y ago
  And a lot of people would be very wrong. There’s a floor to survivability, below which you can’t keep yourself alive, but there is no ceiling. If everyone is above the floor, there’s no reason for concern about those looking for the ceiling. In the future we’ll pull people up to the floor, but that doesn’t require attaching a ceiling. The will never be a successful society that substantially punishes achievement above a certain point.
  - lwhi 3y ago
    You're wrong. Fundamentally it requires redistribution and a complete change of mindset.

squidbeak 3y ago

I agree with you, talent's abundant. Something is very badly wrong with our societies and economic systems if so much of that talent is in the mud and unusable.

FirmwareBurner 3y ago

> humanity could progress faster if we focused instead in eliminating poverty, creating more possibilities for everyone... Those with the wealth and the power to change this, don't have an interest in spreading out welfare and therefore making themselves less wealthy and powerful in the process, but enriching themselves or at least maintaining the status quo, and that usually comes at the expense of keeping those less fortunate where they are. A lot of goods and services that we take for granted in the west, like commodities in our daily lives: cheap cocoa, cheap coffee, cheap exotic fruits, cheap sneakers and clothing, cheap electronic gadgets, all rely on an underclass of less fortunate people who have no choice in life but be prisoners in a neo-slavery system where they have to work in their given conditions for the give pay, with no way up or out. Please google and check out the human exploitations going on in cocoa and coffee farming at your own discretion. Do you think the kids and adults working on those farms for pennies in the beating sun and bitten by mosquitos, wouldn't rather do something else with their lives than picking coffee beans, like go to school/university and work in an office? But if we would spread welfare for them to have that choice, who would then choose work in those bad conditions for nothing to provide western consumers with cheap commodities? Robots aren't even remotely there yet. Same with mining minerals to make iPhones, PlayStations and EVs. If we were to make their lives and jobs fair while also watching over the environment, then the price of commodities would explode, so the mega conglomerates who own these markets, like Nestle or Apple for example, would have to take a missive hit on their profits, or the western consumers would have to stomach the explosion in prices, or both simultaneously, neither of which are acceptable trade-offs in the west, so we keep the status quo of having to rely on perpetual underclasses of people slaving away in poverty for us, while pretending we're great humanitarians and benefactors. I said "we" here, because it's not just the great evil billionaires like Bezos, Jobs, Saudis, and so many others who profit from and enable this exploitation, but also the western governments like US, Switzerland, Netherlands, etc. where they're HQ but have the audacity to lecture them on human rights and environment concerns, plus the individual shareholders, employees, taxpayers and consumers who enable them as well. Sure, a lot of people in poor nations got out of poverty "thanks" to globalization and mega conglomerates outsourcing of less desirable manufacturing and services there, but let's not forget they didn't do this out of the goodness of their hearts, but to extract even more profits. People getting out of poverty was just a happy side effect.

webdood90 3y ago

I have a similar experience but have a different opinion. I am 100% lucky that I was in the right place at the right time so that I could be offered the opportunities that I had. But I think you have to be disciplined in that you must try and try and try to do everything in your power to put yourself in the right place. Of course, even if you do this, you might never be given the opportunity. But if you don't try, you _definitely_ won't. Many of the people I grew up with did not do this. They had the ability to do it, but they lacked initiative or the ambition. They were complacent with what they had, even though it was very little. Not everyone comes from an unbroken home, or had a support network to do these things - I get that. But I see many people that could do better and just don't do it for what I'd guess is because it's hard. Instead they make bad decisions that are easy and increase quality of life on the short term: racking up debt, having kids at a young age without a career, etc. Do people not shoulder some of the blame in today's information age?

thiago_fm 3y ago
A lot of talented people try hard and end up in poverty. Luck > any attribute (IQ, etc)

CPUstring 3y ago

Coming from the middle class, I've never met anybody talented coming from a shitty school who didn't also get filtered into a gifted program at a good school. Maybe your school system just wasn't competent at filtering people? Those that I know who have made bad life decisions (kids too early, dropping out of college, leaving extremely supportive parents) could totally have been expected to based off looking at GPA/SAT signals.

corobo 3y ago
> I've never met anybody talented coming from a shitty school who didn't also get filtered into a gifted program I'm not sure I understand this one.. how would you know the gifted program missed them if they're now spending their life dealing with poverty? I'm guessing you don't mingle with the poors? I've never met anyone that lives their entire life in the middle of a rainforest. So weird! Also what the fuck is a gifted program lmao. That must be some London thing, aye? We were lucky to have teachers of the subject teaching the class up north haha
- VBprogrammer 3y ago
  Even if such programs exist and exceptionally talented people get filtered into them, it completely ignores the fact that there is still a huge disparity in outcome for people who are merely modestly above average.
- laurencerowe 3y ago
  Gifted programs are American things. Talking to my California born partner it seems to be a kind of streaming thing. They don’t seem to have as much ability setting here as I was used to in UK (where for certain subjects classes are split by ability.)
  - corobo 3y ago
    Ahhh, gotcha. The focus on UK in the article and many comments put me in a UK-centric mindset. My bad there. Aye we had splits in some subjects like that. Weirdly all the rich kids (for my town, mostly middle class really) were in the top classes and the poor kids in the bottom haha

fngjdflmdflg 3y ago

The correlation of IQ with income is 0.30[0]. Educational attainment is 0.32. So if you are intelligent (talented) or educated then you are statistically likely to have above average income. If you have both even more so. [0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0160289607000219 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01602... (https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.intell.2007.02.003 https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.intell.2007.02....) page 5 table 1.

Cpoll 3y ago
That's correlation at best (as you said, but worth emphasizing). And IQ is a problematic metric for anything other than how good you are at taking IQ tests.
- RationalDino 3y ago
  IQ measurement definitely has major flaws.. But IQ is better correlated with job performance than job interviews are. As they say, perfect is the enemy of good. IQ tests are good. We do ourselves no favors by attempting to downplay what standardized testing tells us.
- 10xDev 3y ago
  After a point, say 130 IQ, the differences between people's capacity become intangible. But there is certainly a big difference between someone under 80 IQ and someone with 130 IQ, which is why the US military doesn't even accept individuals under 80 IQ.
deleted 3y ago
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SketchySeaBeast 3y ago
I didn't read the paper, but are we sure that A (wealth/education) follows B (IQ) and not vice versa?
- fngjdflmdflg 3y ago

AlexandrB 3y ago

Stephen Jay Gould said it best: > I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.

thiago_fm 3y ago
That is it. Just imagine. We would already have found all rules that govern our universe.

moralestapia 3y ago

>Nobody is really much better than others This took me several decades to grasp and then "forgive" myself for not being the person I wanted to be. I also think it is a message that is worth spreading, particularly among young folks. It's quite easy to amalgamate the concept of meritocracy with that of success, such that a lack of the latter implies a lack of the former. This is (or, at least for me, it was) an endless supply of anxiety of pain, which is completely unfounded. Everyone fails dozens of times before hitting on something good, it's just the nature of things. Some lucky people can just fail as much as they need to, while some other's can't even afford to try even once. I read this somewhere else and stuck with me, "people don't make better choices, they just have better choices".

elmomle 3y ago

https://theamericanscholar.org/the-disadvantages-of-an-elite-education/ https://theamericanscholar.org/the-disadvantages-of-an-elite... A university professor's personal observations about how a typical city college student faces myriad obstacles to success with little support, whereas a typical student at an elite college must practically struggle to fall through all the safety nets and actually fail. The article should be required reading for anyone who is or has been in any way involved with a higher-tier university in the United States.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

sershe 3y ago

Strongly disagree. I went to an average school in Russia where I was from one of the poorest families, then hung out a few times with people from a selective maths focused school where I was invited but didn't go to because I was lazy, then later lived for a few years in a worse neighborhood and hung out with my neighbors (ranging from ex cons to people working construction and loading dock), and I've worked in tech obviously. Sure there are better and worse people everywhere, but on average the more meritocratic the system, the more poor people suck! With the exception of immigrants who start from 0. In completely non-meritocratic system like Soviet Union you could have people living next door to each other in similar conditions, who went to the same schools and had the same opportunities, and one would be a Physics professor and the other a raging alcoholic. A system where equality is not forced just sorts them better. Many people are really much better than others at most things, including merely being a decent worker/friend/partner. And many are worse

zozbot234 3y ago
These things are cultural and collective in nature, they're not the fault of any individual. "Poor people suck" in Russia and elsewhere because their upbringing has failed to educate them with the middle-class values that are the foundation of any genuinely prosperous society. (To be sure other things are important too, such as social cohesion and even some degree of egalitarianism.)

badpun 3y ago

I think plenty of people are well aware of this. That's why parents insist for the best possible education for their children - they know that it's the credentials carried by the diploma, and not the child's actual talents (or lack or thereof) will decide the future quality of life of the child. Cue in tutoring, extensive paid college exam/SAT prep etc.

BizarroLand 3y ago

It's hard to explain what life is like as a formerly very poor™ person to people who have never experienced it. Like, every once in a while I get a craving for poverty comfort foods like ramen with frozen veggies, a slice of American cheese, and a sliced up microwaved hotdog. Or trying to explain why it's so hard for me to let go of a 20 year old pickup truck that still works because I used to sleep in it. Or how no matter how much money I earn now I always feel poor and one step away from homelessness. How I won't go and buy new clothes, why I shop at thrift stores and pawn shops when I can afford new, how I don't feel like I own anything, why I always plan for and expect the worst out of every event and encounter I have, how I dedicate my self to working hard so that the places I work at can't "afford" to fire me, so much so that I have been accused of being an overworker and a slave driver. On an income basis I'm probably at the top for my entire family right now, but years of homelessness and over a decade of extreme poverty have made their marks on my life and I don't know if it will ever get better. I could win the lottery and I'd still be cutting coupons and searching deal sites for discount codes, wearing discount clothes and shopping in pawn shops.

achenet 3y ago
you can reprogram your brain. Journaling and meditation have helped me a lot, and I've heard of others who have had success with therapy. If these habits/accumulated traumas are causing you pain, know that there are ways to heal that. :)

andrei_says_ 3y ago

Associating wealth with discipline and virtue is a successful propaganda campaign with framing rooted in strict father / conservative worldview. Per George Lakoff (full interview: https://newsarchive.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2003/10/27_lakoff.shtml https://newsarchive.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2003/10... ) The conservative worldview, the strict father model, assumes that the world is dangerous and difficult and that children are born bad and must be made good. The strict father is the moral authority who supports and defends the family, tells his wife what to do, and teaches his kids right from wrong. The only way to do that is through painful discipline - physical punishment that by adulthood will become internal discipline. The good people are the disciplined people. Once grown, the self-reliant, disciplined children are on their own. Those children who remain dependent (who were spoiled, overly willful, or recalcitrant) should be forced to undergo further discipline or be cut free with no support to face the discipline of the outside world. So, project this onto the nation and you see that to the right wing, the good citizens are the disciplined ones - those who have already become wealthy or at least self-reliant - and those who are on the way. Social programs, meanwhile, "spoil" people by giving them things they haven't earned and keeping them dependent. The government is there only to protect the nation, maintain order, administer justice (punishment), and to provide for the promotion and orderly conduct of business. In this way, disciplined people become self-reliant. Wealth is a measure of discipline. Taxes beyond the minimum needed for such government take away from the good, disciplined people rewards that they have earned and spend it on those who have not earned it.