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Comment by ackbar03 | Hacker News Reader

I think there's actually another side to prestige and wealthy up-bringing. You sort of inherently act differently if you were bought up rich. Its hard to describe exactly but you tend to be more (blindly) self-confident and just behave a bit differently compared if you were brought up in a lower class family. Having worked in banking I've seen this myself (although anecdotal experience always tends to be biased in itself). Some of the more brilliant entry recruits/interns but from low income families just tend to have trouble fitting in and sometimes end up not getting a return offer. It's unfair and kind of sucks but I don't really see a solution for it either.

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I studied in Europe's Universities and met and befriend a lot of smart people coming from lower classes families.

The number one problem with them is they being "penny wise, dollar fools". They had been trained all their lives in saving money, so they continue doing it even when it does not makes sense.

For example I had one friend that spent a week trying to save $100. I had to take him apart and give him a talk: Listen, your company is paying for you 9000 euros a month, it is beyond stupid what you are doing. He understood that rationally pretty well, but emotionally he has been trained all his life into this behavior, and it was hard changing habits.

You could also see the opposite behavior. "New rich" people wasting money because they don't know what to do with it.

Educated people inherit lots of knowledge from other educated people like their parents or just the books that you have in your house from the smartest people that have existed in the world.

When I was a kid I just read from books that were in my house because it was normal, all my family did it. So it was a shock to know that most people were so naive about so many topics.

Why would you be bothered by him doing whatever with his own finances? It does not sound like he was harming himself much by trying to save those 100?

Opportunity cost.

Here, two cartoons of SMBC on this concept:

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2012-12-29

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2014-04-20

We don't know what the 100 was for. If it was for a networking opportunity (dinner out, some white shoe party, etc), it was a poor decision. If it was for a bunch of Hermes ties that look no different from a Thomas Pink, than that was a good decision.

> For example I had one friend that spent a week trying to save $100. I had to take him apart and give him a talk: Listen, your company is paying for you 9000 euros a month, it is beyond stupid what you are doing.

I'm making more than 9000 euros a month and can also spend considerable amount of time to avoid spending $100. It's called avoiding lifestyle inflation.

Sure, but you can avoid lifestyle inflation while still knowing your worth. At €9,000 / month (> €50 / hr), 2+ hours spent trying to save €100 just isn't the best use of your time.

That's not really how it works though, it's a monthly salary and you aren't actually paid more if you spend more time doing work. If anything the contrary works: if I've spent an hour taking a dump at work, then I've just been paid 50 euros for taking a shit

I can't get overtime at my work. Which means that, the time beyond the 40 hours per week when I working, is worth $0.

I've heard this put an alternative way: it's not that posh people have unwarranted self-confidence, it's that everyone else has excess self-doubt. We've been broken in by our schooling.

Don't know if there's any truth to that, but it's an interesting way of looking at it.

I think both are true. There is too much confidence among the "posh". Folks like current POTUS are exactly the type of people who get to where they are almost entirely by being confident. Notice that confidence (and being old money rich) is the only fundemental qualification here...

Successful people are very often full of shit - since perception is hugely important in any human endeavor, the people who have attained success must have mastered bullshitting (incl. faking confidence) along the way. Then, like any other life skill, they pass it onto their children. I see this mechanism in my father and in myself.

You pegged it mate!

I always knew I was full of shit, and often received gentle and not so gentle reminders about it. But I didn't realize how much more full of shit was my father until a few years ago. It's a hard life.

Well you have to be full of the exact right kind of BS, with lightly understated confidence, and mostly certainty about what your social-peers proper place in society is.

true.. it irks me to no end to watch self-confident idiots spout endless bullshit that amount to zero value to the company (which usually means actually getting an objective accomplished). It's not actually 'what' they're saying that seems intriguing to people, but more about 'how' they're saying it, typically bordering on arrogance. To many lower-level employees, perhaps suffering from their own imposter syndrome, generally assume that there must be something to it, even if what they hear is objectively wrong or lacking any material substance. These people seem to have learned that they can act and speak in a particular way, they can attain positions of authority, without having to actually do anything. They're immediately put into command positions with staff to execute their useless (and usually selfish) agenda. This is usually confirmed by those in positions higher than them, who have attained those positions in largely the same way. Management consulting is probably the most egregious case I've seen first-hand. You know, where a bunch of 22-year olds from 'good schools' in nice suits come into your company and dictate 'strategy' at $3-4K US per day. Most of these people didn't have a clue, and readily admitted it. Yet there they were..wasting tons of money. I couldn't understand it until I realized that their very presence there was simply a function of the broad confirmation bias that existed at the highest levels of the company.

This is my experience with more sr members at multiple "faang" as well, there is a lot of cheating especially at more senior "engineering" levels, a lot of these people realistically wouldn't cut it as tech support.

I don't understand how these people sleep at night.

> You sort of inherently act differently if you were bought up rich. Its hard to describe exactly but you tend to be more (blindly) self-confident and just behave a bit differently compared if you were brought up in a lower class family.

What you describe here is the concept of symbolic capital most famously examined by Pierre Bourdieu: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolic_capital

Bees do that to their queens the N-th degree. Humans might be lower, but it's still there

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