Wealth, Health, and Child Development: Evidence from Swedish Lottery Players

There's the question of whether or not it will be spent appropriately, which raises the prospect of whether or not there are a class of people whose economic decisions ought be made for them. Or rather, what additional classes of people exist meeting that criterion, as we already hold that children, the senile, and various handicapped individuals cannot see after their own affairs.

My dad came from a family of systemic poverty. Money was something to be spent. Ironically, he was in charge of saving money for our family, which understandably went poorly. He tanked nearly all of our money in the dot com boom.

One of the biggest things that stands out to me in retrospect was how little respect he had for his body, especially as a manual laborer. Rather than trying to preserve the resource that he used to make money, he broke his back (doing absolutely dumb things) twice. At this point he was functionally unable to work, and became a stay at home parent because it was the only option left to him. There was no backup plan. He'd dropped out of high school to go to Vietnam, and hadn't saved money in a safe way in case of a catastrophe -- even after one had already struck. Rather than a safe, well diversified plan, all of our money that was not immediately spent was put into tech stocks. And then the dot com bubble hit.

People who are systemically poor are more likely to be content with a good gig, even if it is not sustainable. They are less likely to hedge against risk in this situation as well.

This showed in other areas as well. For example, he'd lost all of his teeth by 40.

My mother on the other hand was situationally poor -- her father's family had a good bit of money, but he passed away very young leaving her and her two siblings with a single mother, who worked in public schools. My mom pursued a degree in journalism, while her brother went into tech. While in school, she dropped out to become an administrative assistant for a large uranium company that was paying more than she was looking at as a journalism grad.

People who are situationally poor are willing to take low risk opportunities with a good reward (take a job that pays more, leave school -- if it works then that's great, if not then you head back to school with more money as a buffer). They are less likely to make a career out of things that use your body as a resource, as such careers are usually unsustainable.

Upper class people I've met are far more likely to take high risk opportunities, even without a buffer. A decision my wife and I made that I think is a more 'upper class' decision was moving to Seattle without much of a financial buffer and no jobs, because we thought it had a very good chance of being the best payoff for our degrees. It's a decision that has accelerated both of our careers and earnings immensely.

Upper class people network. A lot. While they are born into connections, I'm shocked at how few people (myself included) have not picked up the networking skill.

Upper class people are also more likely to understand that their brain/body is a resource that needs to be taken care of to have personal and economic success. For instance, attitudes towards consumption of media, food, and learning materials is something that is shockingly different.

There's a reason why when you read about the success that upper class people have had, there's usually very little mention of television, and an extreme amount of "i used to read a lot."

I considered myself to be someone who read a lot, and compared to my peers I did, but when I'm hanging out with people who grew up in this culture, I'm simply unable to keep up with the amount of references that they make.

There's more, but this has gone on for longer than I was expecting it to, and of course it's all just my opinions and observations.