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Comment by jjeaff | Hacker News Reader

But there's a difference. That company wasting $50k is the equivalent of a poor person buying the brand name bread instead of store brand. Not a life altering decision. Make that a $5m purchase and the higher ups in the company will probably spend a great deal of time weighing the pros and cons.

I have seen people in fire situations get a one time windfall of $8,000 dollars and spend all of it for a down payment on an expensive car. That's the kind of decision making that keeps you poor.

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As income inequality increases, relative percentage comparisons like this become more infuriating than comforting.

The more money you have, the dumber you can be with it and still be guaranteed survival. At a certain level of poverty, you have to operate at peak financial efficiency to live a mean lifespan.

50,000$ properly spent could change the course of human history. It could supply the nearby treatment center for children with behavioral/emotional problems for years!

I could buy a few mig welders, some angle grinders, associated PPE, several hundred pounds of scrap metal, and still have enough left over to pay two unemployed people in rural Missouri to make tiny metal sculptures for model towns for 6-12 months.

The above is my goofballs, no thought business plan for 50k. I'm not even trying and the ROI on that hairbrained stupid plan is better than atleast 10 different decisions I've seen made over 50k.

I'm not even being creative or thoughtful. For someone like me to see someone be told "We don't need this." and them respond "eh fuck it, it's just 50k" is...

It's astounding. It's mind altering. It's the name brand bread vs. human lives metaphor in your face and on fire.

So yeah there is a difference.

>pay two unemployed people in rural Missouri to make tiny metal sculptures for model towns for 6-12 months.

Wait... what?

I have very often thought what would happen if I was to suddenly come into a substantial amount of wealth and this is what I would do with a no holds barred method of paying skilled people to do cool things that they do not have the money to do otherwise. There are incredibly talented people that if given 20k to make their Magnus opus they would make the most breathtaking and increadible stuff imagined.

The trouble is finding those people.

Most people I meet are literally stereotypical consumers and couldn't come up with a unique idea to save themselves.

You act like spending $50k on something you don't need is the equivalent of lighting the cash on fire. That money goes back into the economy. It provides jobs, it increases money velocity. For the economy as a whole, it's really good that the wealthy or large companies aren't super frugal with their money. After all, someone has a business employing people to make custom leather interiors for private jets, when the standard interior (or first class commercial) will do just fine.

Something to consider:

On HN a few weeks back, I read someone's comment that some poor people are poor because they own cheap cars that cost a fortune in repairs because they're always breaking down, preventing them from saving up for a better one that won't need repaired so often, which would allow them to save and get ahead.

Maybe that's not always the kind of decision-making that keeps you poor after all.

I don't buy that argument outright. I have a six figure savings account and six fig investments going on in my mid 30s earned on my lonesome in the low-wage midwest, and I've always been taken advantage of here on top of it (low paid even for here). Frugality is my game because I care not about materialism. I believe one has to have a brain the size of a pea, to be impressed by someone's possessions. I coudln't care less about someone having a Mercedes. The Europeans have the right idea, being a big spender is actually extremely tacky and anti-social in my view.

One of my cars is terrible (2000 Mazda). I waste, but not much. I'm repairing it quite often. A single $500 repair is one (very cheap) car payment on a new one. I'm way ahead keeping the old beast going. I can replace the whole car 3 to 6 times over before I get to the price of a new one.

What I do pay with is inconvenience and my time to drag it into the shop. That's value too, but purely financial costs I'm winning.

Overall in the end, I'm going to pickup a cheap (15K), affordable car to replace it with. Toyota Corolla, Honda Civic, Hyundai Elantra range of vehicles. At those prices, the financial gain is outweighed by convenience for me. So we all "have a price". At least until more of those Tesla Model 3's have been out a while, I'll spend more than I normally would on one of those beauties. :)

A lot of people say it's not worth fixing a car that's worth less than the repair. I disagree, it's money in vs money out. Same concept as calories in calories out. Obviously, the comment you quoted would be correct when you start dealing with outliers/extremes. There's money pits, then there's real money pits.

Sounds like the "Sam Vimes 'Boots' theory of economic injustice", from the Discworld novels.

https://wiki.lspace.org/mediawiki/Sam_Vimes_Theory_of_Econom... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Vimes#Boots_theory_of_soci...

I don't knnow how accurate it is, but it does make sense for some things, such as shoes, and thinking about it, train tickets (season tickets are better value for money but very expensive), and essentially anything where bulk/long term is better value, but only being affordable to some people, and I think the space to store things comes into play as well...

I don't think the problem is that they cost a fortune. Overall the money spent is probably the same.

The problem is that an unreliable car is far more likely to cause sudden "emergency" events that require a lot of liquid money upfront and if you don't have that money this might cause a chain reaction so you lose your job and then your home.

On the other hand (at least where I live) expensive cars means expensive repairs and maintainance.

Simply isn't true-if that were the case companies that make millions would never go bankrupt-yet they do. Why? According to you, they'd spend a great deal of time weighing pros and cons...

The fact is you can't always weigh pros and cons and always get a positive outcome. There are many poor people that will always be poor-but entire industries have spent decades making decisions weighing pros and cons and completely collapsed because of things outside of their control. Why can this principle not apply to a portion of the poor?

I'm sure it does apply to a great deal of the poor. My comment was simply that some people make terrible financial decisions. Are you implying that no one is poor due to their own decisions? It's all just things outside their control?

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