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One convenient fiction that many wealthy people (in the US) tell themselves, is that poor people are "lazy"; and that's why they're poor. I know lots of folks

One convenient fiction that many wealthy people (in the US) tell themselves, is that poor people are "lazy"; and that's why they're poor. I know lots of folks without a pot to piss in, or a window to throw it out, and not one single one, is "lazy." In fact, a few have more than one (difficult) job. I am old enough to see a few of them getting into the back nine, with no cushion. I'm extremely grateful for what I have. [EDIT] Added "many" because it's more appropriate, and short-circuits the implied "all."

gumby 2mo ago
Being poor is a lot of work, as is very well documented. When you have more money you can offload some (or in extreme cases pretty much all) of the labor.
andsoitis 2mo ago
> convenient fiction that wealthy people (in the US) tell themselves, is that poor people are "lazy" just like all poor people aren't lazy, so too all wealthy people don't think this.
- cindyllm 2mo ago
  [dead]
- ChrisMarshallNY 2mo ago
  Never said they did. Interesting read of what I wrote…
  - andsoitis 2mo ago
    You wrote wealthy people tell themselves that poor people are lazy.
    - ChrisMarshallNY 2mo ago
      Yes, I did. There’s a word that was inserted into what I actually wrote.
      - andsoitis 2mo ago
        By that logic, it is then accurate to say poor people are lazy.
        ChrisMarshallNY 2mo ago
        Sure. Knock yourself out. I won’t lose any sleep over it.
        jrflowers 2mo ago
        I like the transition from “I have an issue with what you said” to “I have an issue with what I imagine you said” after getting clarification That aside the statement was fine as written. For example it takes deliberate and active misunderstanding to twist the statement “people eat meat” into “there aren’t any vegetarians”
        akoboldfrying 2mo ago
        If there was really nothing wrong with the original phrasing about rich people, then there's also nothing wrong with GP's phrasing about poor people. The usages are exactly parallel.
        strken 2mo ago
        Hang on, no, imagine if someone said "people eat meat" and it was the core part of an argument that people need a minimum of 2 acres of farmland to support their food consumption. It would be important to point out that vegetarians and vegans need less than an acre. The context matters and blanket statements can be misleading in certain contexts.
        jrflowers 2mo ago
        > and it was the core part of an argument that people need a minimum of 2 acres of farmland Then we would be in an entirely different thread talking about something else? I was pointing out that trying to use “I refuse to understand what I read” as a dunk doesn’t really work. If you’re trying to say “What if I invent imaginary circumstances where I am right and you are wrong?” then yeah, I’d be helpless in that situation
    - ysingh923 2mo ago
      he wrote "many" wealthy people, not all.
      - ChrisMarshallNY 2mo ago
        To be fair, I added that, after being called on it. It was a fair point, but I also didn't mean "all," so I just clarified the meaning.
p-o 2mo ago
The pervasive myth that hard work == wealth needs to die. Every people I have met in my life wanted to have a shot at a decent life and would have put the necessary work for a decent wage. The word lazy should be identified as what it really is: a pejorative.
- r3trohack3r 2mo ago
  I think it’s self evidently true that hard work is not equal to wealth and I don’t know how that meme became a thing. You can exert extreme effort in unproductive directions and provide marginal, even extremely negative, value. You can work extremely hard, all day every day, and accomplish nothing. Gulags aren’t known for their wealth or value generation. They’re known for their labor input.
  - actionfromafar 2mo ago
    Well some gulags produced heavy industries, now owned by oligarchs.
  - akoboldfrying 2mo ago
    > I don’t know how that meme became a thing. I think it's easy to see: (1) A simplified variation of it is true (namely, that if effort1 > effort2 then outcome(env, effort1) >= outcome(env, effort2) for any fixed environment env); (2) It flatters those who have achieved high outcomes, regardless of how much effort they put in.
- buran77 2mo ago
  The myth is so pervasive because it's propagated by people with more wealth against people with less of it, and the conflict of interest prevents anyone from giving it up. Everyone wants to feel better about themselves and the easiest way is to look down on someone who has less. Less "whatever" really, people always find something that they think makes them better, money is just the obvious choice because society slowly associated money with success. It doesn't matter if the wealth came from their parents, or luck, they can still pretend it makes them better. It's one of those situations where everyone's in on it. The poor really haven't much else to go on and they'll take this little boost in their standing, the rich are tempted to think they so much better than most other people. Everyone in between sits somewhere on that scale.
Jtarii 2mo ago
Some people just have a several hundred year head start on others.
- sublinear 2mo ago
  Ah, so you're jealous of the inheritance generation currently enshittifying everything? What word would you use to describe them? "Lazy"?
- theamk 2mo ago
  Talk to the immigrants - a lot of them came to the US with only a few thousand $$$ in the bank or even less. They are not multimillionaires, but a lot of them got from zero to high-paying programmer jobs. Granted, there is a healthy dose of luck and talent involved, but saying that the only way to get rich is to have rich parents is a lazy and wrong take.
  - thfuran 2mo ago
    I’m a software engineer, and my job is so easy for the pay it’s ridiculous. I assure you, I do not work 5-10x harder than the guys who just installed my fence.
    - mlboss 2mo ago
      Can you do their work if there is a nobody to help ? Can they do your work if there is nobody to help ? You are underestimating the amount of time/energy spent in developing the skill.
  - tonyarkles 2mo ago
    Here’s the thing about the immigrant pulled-up-by-bootstraps story: immigration is expensive. When you hear about someone coming to North America with “only a few thousand dollars in their pocket”, you have to remember that by time they’ve landed, they’ve already sunk likely tens of thousands of dollars into getting the paperwork to get here (unless they already had a job lined up, which generally means educated). Many not-poor people I know in Canada wouldn’t have the means to immigrate elsewhere without saving up for a few years at way above minimum wage. Education and skill are going to make them more desirable immigration candidates than, say, someone who barely graduated high school. It’s really not an apples-to-apples comparison at all.
userbinator 2mo ago
It's not "lazy"; it's "made the wrong choices"... which I suppose you could call "intellectually lazy".
- ChrisMarshallNY 2mo ago
  Or… were never given a choice/opportunity…
- kajman 2mo ago
  It only makes sense that fetuses which choose to be born into blue collar families in the wrong zip code are more likely to continue to make poor decisions for the rest of their lives. You just can't trust people with such a poor history of judgement. Unless they're C-Suite.
- dagss 2mo ago
  I'm trying hard to make your post make any sense at all.. I guess you believe everyone gets the same starting point and same opportunities? How did you come to believe such a thing? Have you looked around to see what society is like?
  - userbinator 2mo ago
    I'm not saying that; I'm saying that people can make decisions with very different outcomes even if they started out the same, and vice-versa. But if you're already brainwashed with socialist ideology, then obviously you can't see that...
    - jimbooonooo 2mo ago
      conversely, people can make the same decisions in the same-ish environment, with very different outcomes. it sounds like you discount the effect of luck in timing, or geography, or acquaintance, which are wildly different from just making intellectually robust decisions.
teaearlgraycold 2mo ago
The more money I’ve been paid the less hard I’ve had to work. Across my friends this seems to be a pretty strong trend.
- jethro_tell 2mo ago
  I've worked in both tech and construction. Never seen a tech worker go home and come back with the soles of their shoes resoled overnight because they didn't have a better option for work tomorrow. Is that the best option? Generally no, it's probably not worth your time to do things that you don't specialize in. But at some point, you run out of hours to profit from the things you specialize in, and you still need something, so you figure it out. You do your oil changes, and fix your shoes and repair things even when they would generally considered 'totaled'. You miss work or at least hours on days when your late model car doesn't start. You take care of your own house repairs and yardwork, if your lucky enough to own something your landlord's yard and maintenance work more likely. And this is all off hours stuff because that's the option you have. I've worked so much less in tech, yeah the hours can be long and oncall sucks. But I end up being able to redirect all my effort into the thing I'm specialized in and that I get paid the most to do. Which means I can pay to have my boots resoled, or just buy new ones, I take my (newer cars that always start) to the dealer every 6 months. I can pay a premium for delivery of food and staples, I can hire help around the house for anything from lawn care to tree trimming to roof repairs. When I left the trades, 50 hours was generally required and 60 was becoming the norm. I'm not working any more in tech at work, but I work a lot lest to have a better life outside of work. It's just night and day.
  - teaearlgraycold 2mo ago
    And there are jobs where you’re paid >$200k and work 20-30 hours per week. I have friends doing that right now. When I was at Google I earned $350k and my boss literally told me I could stop working for 12 months and still get paid if I wanted to. I chose to quit instead to go somewhere where I’d learn more.
- bawolff 2mo ago
  That is kind of the expected outcome of capitalism - the more value you provide the harder it is to replace you and the easier it is for you to leverage that for better working conditions. If you'll excuse the dehumanizing metaphor, you probably treat your valuable possessions a lot better than your cheap possessions too. Capitalism makes possessions out of all of us.
fragmede 2mo ago
There's four quadrants, lazy, works hard on one axis, and poor and rich on the other axis. Of those four quadrants, people exist in all four of them and it's stupid to pretend otherwise. That means that not pretending lazy poor don't exist, nor that rich hardworking people also exist. I know lazy poor people that aren't lazy so much as have severe mental health problems related to being poor, but also know rich people who could have fucked off to the beach forever by now but they keep working for some reason. Why do I bring this up? Am I nitpicking? (yes) Until such time that there are no poor people, claiming there are no lazy poor people just gets people that actually know lazy poor people to tune out anyone's dreams of UBI because I'm not paying taxes on income I earn through me working, so that everyone else can be lazy and not work. It's as simple as that. Yes we can point to systemic and racially moviated biases that lead to unequal outcomes, but that isn't convincing on why my tax dollars should go to lazy poor people who refuse to work or even go to the EBT office to. I'm all for my tax dollars going to hard working poor people, and especially to their health care because a cancer or diabetes diagnosis should not bankrupt anyone, but the rest is hard to swallow.
- slowin 2mo ago
  Your tax dollars go to all kinds of things far worse than helping people survive. The Protestant work ethic cannot die soon enough. Never once have I cared if someone is "lazy". A rich person may work very hard exploiting others, that's far worse than not working at all. I feel like even a lot of atheists get trapped in this Protestant mindset because we've been raised in this environment (like a fish trying to detect water), but if you think it through you'll see it doesn't actually make sense. Especially under capitalism.
  - loeg 2mo ago
    Something like 90% of my tax dollars go to social security net programs.
    - ChrisMarshallNY 2mo ago
      Not 90%[0]. Social Security is kind of a "zero-sum gain," if you believe people, because we are supposedly being paid back what we spent a lifetime, having withdrawn from our wages. [0] https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/federal-spending/ https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...
bagxrvxpepzn 2mo ago
> One convenient fiction that many wealthy people (in the US) tell themselves, is that poor people are "lazy"; and that's why they're poor. If they aren't physically lazy, they're unambitious or refuse to attempt nominally mentally difficult things (like math) and that is mental laziness. Poverty isn't random.
- ChrisMarshallNY 2mo ago
  > Poverty isn't random. Now you're just trolling. Be nice.
  - bagxrvxpepzn 2mo ago
    Making neutral statements in concordance with reality is the nicest thing you can do for a reader.
zer0x4d 2mo ago
Not lazy, smart -> Likely to become a millionaire Not lazy, not smart -> Will probably make ends meet, but not a millionaire Lazy, samrt -> Toss-up. Can either make it far or end up broke Lazy, not smart -> Likely to be broke
- fcarraldo 2mo ago
  Not factual
- hiddencost 2mo ago
  You are going to have a rude awakening if you get a bit unlucky.
tmoertel 2mo ago
Yeah, most people probably underestimate the effect that several things have on where they end up in life: education, self discipline, hard work, making good decisions, persistence, and, especially, chance. If you screw up majorly on any the factors under your control, you dramatically reduce your chances of “the good life.” But, even if you do all of them right, you are still at the mercy of chance. Get born in the wrong year or at the wrong place or into the wrong family or with the wrong genetics and that's all it takes to set you up for a hard life. The tragedy is that we could have a society that gives people more opportunities to escape the downward pull of chance gone wrong early in life. Maybe someday we'll get there.
- deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
- toomuchtodo 2mo ago
  Most of life is luck, with regards to success and economic prosperity. We’ve built a system that ignores that for the benefit of a privileged few, using fairy tales around exceptionalism and faux meritocracy. We should build socioeconomic systems where luck is less a component for survival and living a good life, imho. I think we’re on our way there (support of democratic socialism and their candidates is at record highs, mostly around the young, and the old age out at a rate of 2M per year 55+ [higher support of capitalism because they were lucky under it]), but it’s going to take another decade or two to see the improvements (political cycles, electorate turnover, policy implementation lag, etc.) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49357337 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49357337 (citations) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49027462 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49027462 (citations)
  - p-e-w 2mo ago
    Luck is just as important even with perfect economic equality. It’s just that economic luck gets replaced by luck of genetics, luck of immaterial circumstances, etc. I have always found the assumption strange that one is somehow preferable to the other, but most people seem to believe that, so maybe one day they’ll get what they’re asking for and then find out that it’s not what they wanted after all.
Hikikomori 2mo ago
Also prosperity evangelism.
sublinear 2mo ago
You might be misunderstanding what is meant by "lazy". I don't think it's such a difficult perspective to understand. What if your wealth was created by self-employment and building up a business? When you see so many talented and hard working people rejecting all of their available opportunities to do so, what word would you use? Ignorance? Arrogance? I can't think of any positive word. At least "lazy" implies they're still waiting for a lower risk moment to pounce. This is how most of the wealth in the USA was built, so I don't think it's offensive. It's the prevailing culture.
georgemcbay 2mo ago
> One convenient fiction that many wealthy people (in the US) tell themselves, is that poor people are "lazy"; and that's why they're poor. I've noticed the same thing over my life (I'm almost 53) and by and large the well-off people who assume the poor are lazy are among the laziest, most useless nepobaby piles of shit I've met. It is like they themselves had an easy road to success thanks to having well off, well connected parents and assume people significantly poorer must be even lazier than they are because their own success wasn't very hard to achieve, oblivious to the fact that the poor people they are looking down on started in a very different starting position than they did. And to be clear, I'm not saying all wealthy people are lazy, some have worked legitimately hard for their success, and I'm not saying some poor people aren't lazy, of course you'll find examples of both. But there are tons of extremely hard working poor people, and tons of extremely lazy wealthy people who make absurd amounts of money doing very "bullshit" jobs.
dboreham 2mo ago
This is basic psychology: being rich for no apparent reason causes cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is annoying/painful. So rather than change beliefs to see one's self as very lucky, in most cases the brain re-works reality to provide a rational explanation: the rich person worked hard/is smarter, etc.
jandrewrogers 2mo ago
Persistent poverty is usually a byproduct of poor impulse control. That will quickly undo any compounding created by hard work. No other factor comes close to being as predictive of whether or not someone in the US gets out of poverty as impulse control. I've seen it in every poor community I lived in. There is no satisfactory way to address this reality. Impulse control is significantly innate. Attempts to improve it have limited success in the best cases. Someone with no impulse control will squander or lose resources given to them, whether through their own hard work or handouts. See also: lottery winners. It is a very deep local minima.
- euthymiclabs 2mo ago
  I'm open to this correlation. But I wonder about causality. Adverse childhood experiences are significantly associated with both impulsivity and future earning potential. Breaking the cycle of poverty is difficult, but I'm not an expert on where the best investments to solve this problem would be.
  - bawolff 2mo ago
    I also wonder if its rational behaviour at the end of the day. If you don't have anything to your name, why delay gratification? Its not like you'll get benefits of delaying, and you may very well suffer a loss if you wait. I think you have to have a certain amount of wealth before the types of behaviours that actually make you wealthy make sense in the average case.
    - cucumber3732842 2mo ago
      It's rational within a really crappy local maximum.
  - datadrivenangel 2mo ago
    The original marshmallow test fails for this reason, but also it's true that poor impulse control makes it harder to break out of situations that do not reward delayed gratification.
  - 2mo ago
gmadsen 2mo ago
In my lived experience, the majority of poverty is the inability to delay gratification. Whether you want to attribute that to personal failings or to other things is a separate question
- dgacmu 2mo ago
  Most likely you're seeing the causality in the wrong direction - poverty creates a strong incentive to go for immediate benefits rather than absorb the risk of one that is delayed.
  - deleted 2mo ago
    [deleted]
  - gmadsen 2mo ago
    That is a fairly sterile reading of the situation. It’s hard to explain to those who haven’t been close to it. It’s like how defaulting to invest in a 401k creates massive improvements for savings for the population with a 401k There are those who will frivolously spend money that could pay an electricity bill, then end up without power.

gumby 2mo ago

Being poor is a lot of work, as is very well documented. When you have more money you can offload some (or in extreme cases pretty much all) of the labor.

andsoitis 2mo ago

> convenient fiction that wealthy people (in the US) tell themselves, is that poor people are "lazy" just like all poor people aren't lazy, so too all wealthy people don't think this.

cindyllm 2mo ago
[dead]
ChrisMarshallNY 2mo ago
Never said they did. Interesting read of what I wrote…
- andsoitis 2mo ago
  You wrote wealthy people tell themselves that poor people are lazy.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 2mo ago
    Yes, I did. There’s a word that was inserted into what I actually wrote.
    - andsoitis 2mo ago
      By that logic, it is then accurate to say poor people are lazy.
      - ChrisMarshallNY 2mo ago
        Sure. Knock yourself out. I won’t lose any sleep over it.
      - jrflowers 2mo ago
        I like the transition from “I have an issue with what you said” to “I have an issue with what I imagine you said” after getting clarification That aside the statement was fine as written. For example it takes deliberate and active misunderstanding to twist the statement “people eat meat” into “there aren’t any vegetarians”
        akoboldfrying 2mo ago
        If there was really nothing wrong with the original phrasing about rich people, then there's also nothing wrong with GP's phrasing about poor people. The usages are exactly parallel.
        strken 2mo ago
        Hang on, no, imagine if someone said "people eat meat" and it was the core part of an argument that people need a minimum of 2 acres of farmland to support their food consumption. It would be important to point out that vegetarians and vegans need less than an acre. The context matters and blanket statements can be misleading in certain contexts.
        jrflowers 2mo ago
        > and it was the core part of an argument that people need a minimum of 2 acres of farmland Then we would be in an entirely different thread talking about something else? I was pointing out that trying to use “I refuse to understand what I read” as a dunk doesn’t really work. If you’re trying to say “What if I invent imaginary circumstances where I am right and you are wrong?” then yeah, I’d be helpless in that situation
  - ysingh923 2mo ago
    he wrote "many" wealthy people, not all.
    - ChrisMarshallNY 2mo ago
      To be fair, I added that, after being called on it. It was a fair point, but I also didn't mean "all," so I just clarified the meaning.

p-o 2mo ago

The pervasive myth that hard work == wealth needs to die. Every people I have met in my life wanted to have a shot at a decent life and would have put the necessary work for a decent wage. The word lazy should be identified as what it really is: a pejorative.

r3trohack3r 2mo ago
I think it’s self evidently true that hard work is not equal to wealth and I don’t know how that meme became a thing. You can exert extreme effort in unproductive directions and provide marginal, even extremely negative, value. You can work extremely hard, all day every day, and accomplish nothing. Gulags aren’t known for their wealth or value generation. They’re known for their labor input.
- actionfromafar 2mo ago
  Well some gulags produced heavy industries, now owned by oligarchs.
- akoboldfrying 2mo ago
  > I don’t know how that meme became a thing. I think it's easy to see: (1) A simplified variation of it is true (namely, that if effort1 > effort2 then outcome(env, effort1) >= outcome(env, effort2) for any fixed environment env); (2) It flatters those who have achieved high outcomes, regardless of how much effort they put in.
buran77 2mo ago
The myth is so pervasive because it's propagated by people with more wealth against people with less of it, and the conflict of interest prevents anyone from giving it up. Everyone wants to feel better about themselves and the easiest way is to look down on someone who has less. Less "whatever" really, people always find something that they think makes them better, money is just the obvious choice because society slowly associated money with success. It doesn't matter if the wealth came from their parents, or luck, they can still pretend it makes them better. It's one of those situations where everyone's in on it. The poor really haven't much else to go on and they'll take this little boost in their standing, the rich are tempted to think they so much better than most other people. Everyone in between sits somewhere on that scale.

Jtarii 2mo ago

Some people just have a several hundred year head start on others.

sublinear 2mo ago
Ah, so you're jealous of the inheritance generation currently enshittifying everything? What word would you use to describe them? "Lazy"?
theamk 2mo ago
Talk to the immigrants - a lot of them came to the US with only a few thousand $$$ in the bank or even less. They are not multimillionaires, but a lot of them got from zero to high-paying programmer jobs. Granted, there is a healthy dose of luck and talent involved, but saying that the only way to get rich is to have rich parents is a lazy and wrong take.
- thfuran 2mo ago
  I’m a software engineer, and my job is so easy for the pay it’s ridiculous. I assure you, I do not work 5-10x harder than the guys who just installed my fence.
  - mlboss 2mo ago
    Can you do their work if there is a nobody to help ? Can they do your work if there is nobody to help ? You are underestimating the amount of time/energy spent in developing the skill.
- tonyarkles 2mo ago
  Here’s the thing about the immigrant pulled-up-by-bootstraps story: immigration is expensive. When you hear about someone coming to North America with “only a few thousand dollars in their pocket”, you have to remember that by time they’ve landed, they’ve already sunk likely tens of thousands of dollars into getting the paperwork to get here (unless they already had a job lined up, which generally means educated). Many not-poor people I know in Canada wouldn’t have the means to immigrate elsewhere without saving up for a few years at way above minimum wage. Education and skill are going to make them more desirable immigration candidates than, say, someone who barely graduated high school. It’s really not an apples-to-apples comparison at all.

userbinator 2mo ago

It's not "lazy"; it's "made the wrong choices"... which I suppose you could call "intellectually lazy".

ChrisMarshallNY 2mo ago
Or… were never given a choice/opportunity…
kajman 2mo ago
It only makes sense that fetuses which choose to be born into blue collar families in the wrong zip code are more likely to continue to make poor decisions for the rest of their lives. You just can't trust people with such a poor history of judgement. Unless they're C-Suite.
dagss 2mo ago
I'm trying hard to make your post make any sense at all.. I guess you believe everyone gets the same starting point and same opportunities? How did you come to believe such a thing? Have you looked around to see what society is like?
- userbinator 2mo ago
  I'm not saying that; I'm saying that people can make decisions with very different outcomes even if they started out the same, and vice-versa. But if you're already brainwashed with socialist ideology, then obviously you can't see that...
  - jimbooonooo 2mo ago
    conversely, people can make the same decisions in the same-ish environment, with very different outcomes. it sounds like you discount the effect of luck in timing, or geography, or acquaintance, which are wildly different from just making intellectually robust decisions.

teaearlgraycold 2mo ago

The more money I’ve been paid the less hard I’ve had to work. Across my friends this seems to be a pretty strong trend.

jethro_tell 2mo ago
I've worked in both tech and construction. Never seen a tech worker go home and come back with the soles of their shoes resoled overnight because they didn't have a better option for work tomorrow. Is that the best option? Generally no, it's probably not worth your time to do things that you don't specialize in. But at some point, you run out of hours to profit from the things you specialize in, and you still need something, so you figure it out. You do your oil changes, and fix your shoes and repair things even when they would generally considered 'totaled'. You miss work or at least hours on days when your late model car doesn't start. You take care of your own house repairs and yardwork, if your lucky enough to own something your landlord's yard and maintenance work more likely. And this is all off hours stuff because that's the option you have. I've worked so much less in tech, yeah the hours can be long and oncall sucks. But I end up being able to redirect all my effort into the thing I'm specialized in and that I get paid the most to do. Which means I can pay to have my boots resoled, or just buy new ones, I take my (newer cars that always start) to the dealer every 6 months. I can pay a premium for delivery of food and staples, I can hire help around the house for anything from lawn care to tree trimming to roof repairs. When I left the trades, 50 hours was generally required and 60 was becoming the norm. I'm not working any more in tech at work, but I work a lot lest to have a better life outside of work. It's just night and day.
- teaearlgraycold 2mo ago
  And there are jobs where you’re paid >$200k and work 20-30 hours per week. I have friends doing that right now. When I was at Google I earned $350k and my boss literally told me I could stop working for 12 months and still get paid if I wanted to. I chose to quit instead to go somewhere where I’d learn more.
bawolff 2mo ago
That is kind of the expected outcome of capitalism - the more value you provide the harder it is to replace you and the easier it is for you to leverage that for better working conditions. If you'll excuse the dehumanizing metaphor, you probably treat your valuable possessions a lot better than your cheap possessions too. Capitalism makes possessions out of all of us.

fragmede 2mo ago

There's four quadrants, lazy, works hard on one axis, and poor and rich on the other axis. Of those four quadrants, people exist in all four of them and it's stupid to pretend otherwise. That means that not pretending lazy poor don't exist, nor that rich hardworking people also exist. I know lazy poor people that aren't lazy so much as have severe mental health problems related to being poor, but also know rich people who could have fucked off to the beach forever by now but they keep working for some reason. Why do I bring this up? Am I nitpicking? (yes) Until such time that there are no poor people, claiming there are no lazy poor people just gets people that actually know lazy poor people to tune out anyone's dreams of UBI because I'm not paying taxes on income I earn through me working, so that everyone else can be lazy and not work. It's as simple as that. Yes we can point to systemic and racially moviated biases that lead to unequal outcomes, but that isn't convincing on why my tax dollars should go to lazy poor people who refuse to work or even go to the EBT office to. I'm all for my tax dollars going to hard working poor people, and especially to their health care because a cancer or diabetes diagnosis should not bankrupt anyone, but the rest is hard to swallow.

slowin 2mo ago
Your tax dollars go to all kinds of things far worse than helping people survive. The Protestant work ethic cannot die soon enough. Never once have I cared if someone is "lazy". A rich person may work very hard exploiting others, that's far worse than not working at all. I feel like even a lot of atheists get trapped in this Protestant mindset because we've been raised in this environment (like a fish trying to detect water), but if you think it through you'll see it doesn't actually make sense. Especially under capitalism.
- loeg 2mo ago
  Something like 90% of my tax dollars go to social security net programs.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 2mo ago
    Not 90%[0]. Social Security is kind of a "zero-sum gain," if you believe people, because we are supposedly being paid back what we spent a lifetime, having withdrawn from our wages. [0] https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/federal-spending/ https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...

bagxrvxpepzn 2mo ago

> One convenient fiction that many wealthy people (in the US) tell themselves, is that poor people are "lazy"; and that's why they're poor. If they aren't physically lazy, they're unambitious or refuse to attempt nominally mentally difficult things (like math) and that is mental laziness. Poverty isn't random.

ChrisMarshallNY 2mo ago
> Poverty isn't random. Now you're just trolling. Be nice.
- bagxrvxpepzn 2mo ago
  Making neutral statements in concordance with reality is the nicest thing you can do for a reader.

zer0x4d 2mo ago

Not lazy, smart -> Likely to become a millionaire Not lazy, not smart -> Will probably make ends meet, but not a millionaire Lazy, samrt -> Toss-up. Can either make it far or end up broke Lazy, not smart -> Likely to be broke

fcarraldo 2mo ago
Not factual
hiddencost 2mo ago
You are going to have a rude awakening if you get a bit unlucky.

tmoertel 2mo ago

Yeah, most people probably underestimate the effect that several things have on where they end up in life: education, self discipline, hard work, making good decisions, persistence, and, especially, chance. If you screw up majorly on any the factors under your control, you dramatically reduce your chances of “the good life.” But, even if you do all of them right, you are still at the mercy of chance. Get born in the wrong year or at the wrong place or into the wrong family or with the wrong genetics and that's all it takes to set you up for a hard life. The tragedy is that we could have a society that gives people more opportunities to escape the downward pull of chance gone wrong early in life. Maybe someday we'll get there.

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toomuchtodo 2mo ago
Most of life is luck, with regards to success and economic prosperity. We’ve built a system that ignores that for the benefit of a privileged few, using fairy tales around exceptionalism and faux meritocracy. We should build socioeconomic systems where luck is less a component for survival and living a good life, imho. I think we’re on our way there (support of democratic socialism and their candidates is at record highs, mostly around the young, and the old age out at a rate of 2M per year 55+ [higher support of capitalism because they were lucky under it]), but it’s going to take another decade or two to see the improvements (political cycles, electorate turnover, policy implementation lag, etc.) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49357337 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49357337 (citations) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49027462 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49027462 (citations)
- p-e-w 2mo ago
  Luck is just as important even with perfect economic equality. It’s just that economic luck gets replaced by luck of genetics, luck of immaterial circumstances, etc. I have always found the assumption strange that one is somehow preferable to the other, but most people seem to believe that, so maybe one day they’ll get what they’re asking for and then find out that it’s not what they wanted after all.

Hikikomori 2mo ago

Also prosperity evangelism.

sublinear 2mo ago

You might be misunderstanding what is meant by "lazy". I don't think it's such a difficult perspective to understand. What if your wealth was created by self-employment and building up a business? When you see so many talented and hard working people rejecting all of their available opportunities to do so, what word would you use? Ignorance? Arrogance? I can't think of any positive word. At least "lazy" implies they're still waiting for a lower risk moment to pounce. This is how most of the wealth in the USA was built, so I don't think it's offensive. It's the prevailing culture.

georgemcbay 2mo ago

> One convenient fiction that many wealthy people (in the US) tell themselves, is that poor people are "lazy"; and that's why they're poor. I've noticed the same thing over my life (I'm almost 53) and by and large the well-off people who assume the poor are lazy are among the laziest, most useless nepobaby piles of shit I've met. It is like they themselves had an easy road to success thanks to having well off, well connected parents and assume people significantly poorer must be even lazier than they are because their own success wasn't very hard to achieve, oblivious to the fact that the poor people they are looking down on started in a very different starting position than they did. And to be clear, I'm not saying all wealthy people are lazy, some have worked legitimately hard for their success, and I'm not saying some poor people aren't lazy, of course you'll find examples of both. But there are tons of extremely hard working poor people, and tons of extremely lazy wealthy people who make absurd amounts of money doing very "bullshit" jobs.

dboreham 2mo ago

This is basic psychology: being rich for no apparent reason causes cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is annoying/painful. So rather than change beliefs to see one's self as very lucky, in most cases the brain re-works reality to provide a rational explanation: the rich person worked hard/is smarter, etc.

jandrewrogers 2mo ago

Persistent poverty is usually a byproduct of poor impulse control. That will quickly undo any compounding created by hard work. No other factor comes close to being as predictive of whether or not someone in the US gets out of poverty as impulse control. I've seen it in every poor community I lived in. There is no satisfactory way to address this reality. Impulse control is significantly innate. Attempts to improve it have limited success in the best cases. Someone with no impulse control will squander or lose resources given to them, whether through their own hard work or handouts. See also: lottery winners. It is a very deep local minima.

euthymiclabs 2mo ago
I'm open to this correlation. But I wonder about causality. Adverse childhood experiences are significantly associated with both impulsivity and future earning potential. Breaking the cycle of poverty is difficult, but I'm not an expert on where the best investments to solve this problem would be.
- bawolff 2mo ago
  I also wonder if its rational behaviour at the end of the day. If you don't have anything to your name, why delay gratification? Its not like you'll get benefits of delaying, and you may very well suffer a loss if you wait. I think you have to have a certain amount of wealth before the types of behaviours that actually make you wealthy make sense in the average case.
  - cucumber3732842 2mo ago
    It's rational within a really crappy local maximum.
- datadrivenangel 2mo ago
  The original marshmallow test fails for this reason, but also it's true that poor impulse control makes it harder to break out of situations that do not reward delayed gratification.
- 2mo ago

gmadsen 2mo ago

In my lived experience, the majority of poverty is the inability to delay gratification. Whether you want to attribute that to personal failings or to other things is a separate question

dgacmu 2mo ago
Most likely you're seeing the causality in the wrong direction - poverty creates a strong incentive to go for immediate benefits rather than absorb the risk of one that is delayed.
- deleted 2mo ago
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- gmadsen 2mo ago
  That is a fairly sterile reading of the situation. It’s hard to explain to those who haven’t been close to it. It’s like how defaulting to invest in a 401k creates massive improvements for savings for the population with a 401k There are those who will frivolously spend money that could pay an electricity bill, then end up without power.