Comment by ergothus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ergothus | Hacker News Reader

> That misdirection is useful for people in power, including self-help gurus who want to sell books. (Orman didn’t respond to a request for comment.)

You always see reporters give the "I'm going to report one watmy or the other, dont you want to share your side?" argument when asking for comment, but I cant recall ever seeing such a perfect example of "I told you so!"

Anyway, this article touches on a big problem with boomer <-> millenial relations: the boomers normalized the idea of finance as morality. That is, having money shows you are "worthy" - hard work WILL give you success, and therefore success means moralvalue, and poverty indicates some failing (laziness, etc).

Millenials are not as well off, so either this pardigm is being applied (and millenials judged as the source of their own problems) or the paradigm itself is being judged (and boomers end up looking hypocritical and smug).

This is the problem with equating morality and finance systems. You cant criticize a financial decision without it also being a moral judgment, which at a minimum makes it much harder to evaluate intelligently. The truth lies in the middle, at some point, along various axis, but because of the moral judgements it is hard to find exactly where.

I'm curious to see how many passing judgement about coffee are comparing to the consumption of beer and cigarettes of their own youth, versus comparing to some platonic ideal of purchasing.

I don't think this is a generational or age thing strictly speaking. There are several confounding variables or you could say non-orthogonal axes.

There's a "human nature" axis that interacts with the money axis. People, no matter the age, tend to take credit for their successes a lot more than their failures. For example if you have a lot of money, you'll overstate the hard work that went into it, and understate all the good luck you had. Meanwhile if you have no money, you'll overstate all the bad luck (including blaming the system, and I'm not saying the system doesn't suck) and understate any faults or foibles of yours. To the extent that this becomes your paradigm, you'll also use it to judge other people. So the richer person (who thinks they got rich through hard work) sees a poor person and assumes they're poor because they didn't work hard. And the poor person (who thinks they're poor because of luck), will see someone rich and assume they got rich through luck. (Hopefully it's obvious this paragraph is less a "truth" than a trend or tendency.)

Moving on, there's a political axis that interacts with the money axis. People on the Republican side tend to espouse a belief in self-reliance while the Democratic side talks more about helping each other. (Notice that I say "espouse" and "talk about," cleverly avoiding having to talk about what their policies actually accomplish.)

There's a power axis that quite obviously interacts with the money axis - As people become rich they use money to get more power, and as they become powerful they use power to get richer.

Finally (and here's where the age correlation comes in), older people tend to be richer because they've had more time to make money. And older people right now I suspect tend to be richer than older people at other times in history, because they reaped the benefits of industrialization and the fossil-fuel boom.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com