In many European countries, freedom of attention is attained by having strong social support (eg free day care, education, health care, quality food, strong employment and tenant laws).
Many people in Europe live without thinking about money 24/7 but are in absolute terms less rich than high paid people in nyc and sf.
It feels mostly like a healthcare thing specific to the US. And it ignores the fact that most severe healthcare outcomes will ruin you in more ways than just the financial.
Aside from healthcare, there are no real expenses I can think of that would suddenly "ruin my life".
The two real examples I can think of are:
- an uninsured house fire/collapse, mitigated by... insurance
- severe mental illness / breakdown that results in spending my life savings
Otherwise, it's like, ok, beyond age 21 I have at least a few months savings.
It doesn't matter what their income is. A spendthrift can always find something to spend all their money on no matter how high their income is.
The American spendthrifts are also the types to have huge levels of debt to service.
If you always spend everything you have and everything you are credit worthy of you are not going to be able to handle an unexpected financial shock. Even if healthcare was free in the US, there would be some other shock that would be a problem almost by definition of being a spendthrift.
These discussions are always so pointless because the relationship people have to money is so hugely varied.
It is also why it was a huge disservice to spendthrifts in the US to pause student loan payments for this long. Not only is that student loan payment gone for 50% of the people but it is probably actually servicing additional debt after this long.
Yet many became homeless because of one glitch, or perhaps a series of mistakes, that cascaded into a catastrophic failure.
Once in 1997, I was living in a homeless shelter, and a TV reporter came to interview us. One of the residents went on camera to say "Every one of us who is living paycheck to paycheck just doesn't realize that we're one mistake away from losing it all." And that's the truth, because there are so many Americans who indeed live "paycheck to paycheck" without any building or planning for the future beyond next month.
I've been homeless and I sure didn't anticipate it, but it was inevitable, the way I was mismanaging my finances, my relationships, my employment, and my housing.
Last year I would've been ruined by medical debt if my father didn't swoop in to pay it all off. I was trying to do things the hard way; I went to the hospital about 5 times in 12 months, and they all hit me with enormous bills. I couldn't get coverage, I couldn't negotiate them, I was hardly aware of their existence at some points until they were sent to collections.
Medical debt will well and truly ruin some of us around here, even if we're insured, because it's designed to be ruinous. Now into this mix you add some mental illness or executive dysfunction and we have a real crazy time dealing with paperwork and bills, much less holding down a job.
One of the horrific things about hospitalization is that you're cut off from the outside world and you can't take care of your affairs. I would worry about paying my rent and bills. If those were late, there could be ruinous fees or the eviction process could begin. I could become homeless just for being hospitalized too long. Some of us have nobody "on the outside" to assist in these matters. The hospital won't give you a computer or cell phone or WiFi access.
Most people would greatly benefit from both disability insurance and long-term care insurance. The latter is very expensive, but if you need long-term care then those costs are going to devour every penny you've saved anyway. So it's a good idea to front-load that and perhaps you'll pay less in the long run. Private disability insurance is great and can pay out cash when you need it the most. It really helps to be insured for these eventualities. I wish I could afford all of that.
Fwiw, this is all pretty idealised, and in practice a lot of these institutions can break down, or don't provide as much support as they should, or whatever else. I agree that insurance is really valuable in a lot of these cases, and you should get it if you can.
But I think there's generally a problem if these sorts of benefits are only available to those whose parents are rich enough to provide that safety net.
everyone is a mistake away from being penniless
Accepting less, living below your means, and finding happiness in non-material things could be one way to escape this.
Of course, there is also the option of moving to developing countries and leveraging your financial privilege as an American, e.g. South America/South East Asia.
Otherwise there will still be a tendency to view money in "have it / don't have it" terms, or similar lines of thought that will require not only thinking about money all the time, but doing so in a way that takes far too much personal attention and energy.
A lot of people have the false belief that thinking about money too much is a sin, or an unwise mistake. But you can also look at this tendency as beginner-level money-ing. Education and deep experience / analysis of the topic really help.
IMO you can also still retain happiness in material things if you develop your relation to/with them, too. For example, understanding them as symbolic totems or touchstones, or pointers toward a higher quality of life in terms of any perspectives they may symbolically suggest independent of your own established perspectives. (Once you start to do this you'll start to eat away at merchants' profit margins since your concept of worth & value will deepen, and a sort of optimization skill will set in. :-))
"Money don't buy what you really need
It make an ice man cry, it make a stone man bleed
But when you get right down to it, no matter who you are
It rules your life like a virgin queen
One day you might get over it, but in the meantime
It rules the world like a green machine"
-- The Alan Parsons Project, "Money Talks"
That leaves a total of .... 0 countries.
yes, WW-3 might be right over the horizon and we all can be bombed out of extinction.. but the world has changed from middle ages.
Kissinger said so, therefore it must be true.
> but the world has changed from middle ages
No one said the world is in the Middle Ages.
But Europe always comes needing US support though.
Give me the American flavor of greed any day. At least some great ideas and some great stories come from it.
So you know. Same thing except all that money flows to the top, and the bottom still has to think about medical bankruptcy.
For all the good and bad, a service like Uber could never have been invented in Europe. I remember when it was accepted that taking a taxi was just for rich people.
“Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.”
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...
A couple of house owners discussing putting solar heating on their roofs because the government launched a subsidy for it and one of them heard about it. With the subsidy the panels would start giving a modest return on the investment after an estimated 25 years. These people had no interest before in "green energy".
A young wife being asked by her aunts when she's going to have kids. The answer: I have to finish my degree, then work for at least two years so I can qualify for the maximum benefits when I go off on maternity leave. In the context of getting that degree and job for that specific purpose.
The most boring of all was listening to small business owners and their endless small time scheming with putting everything as a business expense to deduct on their taxes. I'm all for not paying a dime in taxes, but what kind of life do you end up having?
So the above is just life, everyday life for everyday greedy people. That's why I wrote give me the American flavor of greed any day. That greed that goes into creating things like the high tech stuff discussed here on HN every day.
This is an interesting form of market distortion of volition if you will where the confines of self interest take on somewhat strange shapes under specific directed ends and incentives offered by government programs. This is in contrast to unspecific non-directed open ended ends of a free(er) market economy letting self interest take on whatever shape it will unprovoked.
I wonder if that open ended structure encourages or at least gets out of the way of people who do the creative value producing thing. Interesting thoughts about the mental path of least resistance and where the thoughts of a subpopulation find themselves when shaped and prodded in a certain direction.