This is what happens when you lend money to poor people | Hacker News Reader

This is what happens when you lend money to poor people

bloomberg.com

So far this thread is setting the record for deleted comments, as people who responded angrily realize it was a parody.

Perhaps the reason people reacted so violently is that they can imagine some reasonable arguments that sound like these. I.e. this is a case of people being made maddest by statements they worry might be true.

To be honest, I somehow missed the possibility that it was a parody, as well. Which brings me to something a little 'meta' as far as this goes: What are some good heuristics / algorithms to determine if something is a parody? :)

With the current political climate, I don't think such a litmus test actually exists.

"When Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973, the distinguished musical satirist Tom Lehrer decided that he could no longer perform. "It was at that moment that satire died," says Lehrer, "There was nothing more to say after that.""

http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/documentaries/features/feature_...

It's more satire than parody. Some helpful heuristics:

(1) Is the author saying "things you can't say" in a place where normally the rules apply? (Bloomberg isn't an especially politically-incorrect news/opinion outlet.)

(2) Is the author out of character? This could have been written under a haughty pseudonym ("Edgar Charles Hyannisport, III") -- but was under the name of author Michael Lewis instead, who's written popular books about finance, business, technology, and sports. If a professional writer offends, you can figure they calculated to offend in service of their real persuasive/entertainment goals.

(3) Does the presentation match the implied mindset? Even people with similar views don't present them in this way, if they want to be effective.

(4) Gradual progression of implausibility. Lewis starts merely speaking more crudely than typical of "the poor", but then goes to the absurd (the poor should have teams of lawyers) and proceeds to talk of debtor's prisons and requiring menial labor of the indebted. A slow build keeps readers guessing, for at least a little while, while eventually causing most/all to realize the author is being facetious.

Your last clue should've been the biggest. If you read the article through to the part about dressing poor people up as clowns and seeing how many you could shove into a Maybach as entertainment at rich kids' birthday parties and still thought the author was being serious, your satire detector really, really needs a tune-up.

The fact that the author is from Berkeley is a good hint ;)

I always wondered if you had a log of all those comments I posted and then deleted five minutes later. :-)

To the contrary, what angered me ( yeah yeah, I also didn't realize it was a parody ) was the over generalization and the possibility that someone actually thinks like this.

That being said, I could see the statements being true to an extent. Probably even a greater extent that I'd like to admit. Its just the generalization that gets me... I think you'd get much the same reaction from people if you replaced "the poor" with, "the mexicans", or "the blacks", or "the rednecks".

Or maybe people reacted because they disagree.

Who knows, maybe they even heard these arguments from people in mainstream society, coworkers and friends, who they thought were otherwise reasonable; perhaps they were shocked to hear such things from people they previously, but no longer, considered thoughtful, reasonable, and kind.

And while we're at it, maybe they would be just as surprised to hear that it's their own conclusions that make them take offense. "You disagree, so it must be true." Hearing this from someone they previously, but no longer, considered insightful might be understandably unpleasant, and I wouldn't be surprised if they were to delete their comments when the reality of the matter sets in: that the human social hierarchy, in all of its stark animal glory, doesn't care about those who are born and live in a state of poverty and powerlessness; time is once again entering an era where it is increasingly socially acceptable to judge (and profit from) people based on their birth circumstances, a sad situation which has been the story of human history to date and which humanity as a species shows no signs of overcoming.

But we musn't say such things.

I like what they do with microfinancing in india. Give someone a little bit of money to start a simple street business, i.e. food vendor, and only give him a bit more if needed to help his business run. The real problem is throwing money at problems without much thought. We westerners have done this way too much.

Credit unions are useful too, for similar reasons. There's a difference between borrowing a little money to lever yourself out of poverty, and borrowing an obscene amount of money so you can buy that dream house your salary won't stretch to half of because You're Worth It.

Frickin' hilarious. Through thought #1, it's just a bit wry and tongue-in-cheek, but by the middle of thought #2 -- "I trusted these people to get their teams of lawyers to vet anything before they signed it" -- it's high satire. I laughed out loud at its continuation: "Turns out, if you're poor, you don't need to pay lawyers. You don't like the deal you just wave your hands in the air and moan about how poor you are. Then you default."

I really hope this is a joke... even then it isn't funny.

Weak satire.

Really, though. If a credit-unworthy person can't pay back a loan, and a lender takes a bath on it, well I'm fine with that. Let the one declare bankruptcy. Let the other write it off his taxes. Fine.

There's just one thing I don't want to do: Have money stolen out of my pocket to ensure that either or both of the above idiots are protected from their own bad wagers.

The comments here by people who don't recognize TFA as satire are funnier than TFA itself.

The irony is that "the rich," or at least those who own mortgage-backed bonds, probably do want a bailout for "the poor." They get the money in the end, and a lot more of it than they can recover from foreclosures.

If somebody owed me a lot of money and had no prospect of paying it, I'd love to see a third party step in and pay with no strings attached.

In college sometimes my housemates would buy this tabloid called the "Weekly World News" that always had ridiculous stories. One of the regular features was editorials by "Ed Anger" that were obviously trolling for angry letters to the editor. This looks just like an Ed Anger piece.

> By poor, I mean anyone who the SEC wouldn't allow to invest in my hedge fund

This dipshit classifies everyone who doesn't qualify to be an Accredited investor as poor? Wow.

He also thinks its the poor people's fault for taking sweet deals that were offered to them? If you look at it from an economic perspective, all they had to lose was the property on which they took out the loan and a bad credit rating, but their credit rating sucked already anyway. (Granted, this may have emotional consequences as they foreclose and have to move out, but that doesn't really impact the economics of it.) In contrast, the lenders are losing their investment! Isn't it the responsibility of the lenders to invest in, uhm, sensible investments?

OK, I should stop bitching about this troll's obvious flamebait.

[EDIT: after reading the rest of the piece, I see that this is satire. he sure got my blood boiling as I read it.]

You do know who the writer is, dont you?

It is precisely because there is risk involved in giving a loan that there is any profit to be made. If the legal system actively enforced repayment through debtors' prison and the like, there would be no basis for interest.

Well, there would still be a basis for some interest, because the lender could make more money on their capital by using it for another purpose, such as buying T-bills or some other security with essentially zero risk. Intuitively I'd think that part of the interest charged on a loan is literally just to "rent the money", preventing it from being used for another purpose; the rest is to account for the possibility that the loan might not be repaid.

Regarding the subprime fiasco, it should read "This is what happens when you build an entire industry based on tricking people into borrowing more than they can afford!"

Or "this is what happens when you lend money to people who can't persuade anyone to lend them money"...

...no.

What about kiva.org?

Us poor people aren't too dumb or disorganized to burn the Hamptons to the ground if pushed too far.

Note: this is the same guy who wrote Moneyball, which is an interesting book about applying a bit of reason to an insane market (baseball recruiting).

Clearly this guy is outside his mind. You might have a bad experience with a few white, black, poor, or rich people, but this certainly does not mean they are all the same. I have experienced similar situations several where people ask me stupid fucking questions or make ignorant comments just because of where I am from. I usually do not respond to such low level of maturity and knowledge and the few times I do I make sure they leave the room felling way less intellectual than I am (although I am not so smart, maybe a little bit). Sorry you got screwed by poor people, but not all poor people are the same. There are several stories we can tell about rich people screwing other rich people, in fct I am sure there are more of those cases than his.

If you had read more than the first two paragraphs you would have realized it was satire.

I read the entire thing and I had no idea. I've a habit of leading people on to see how absurd of a thing I can get them to agree to. Like go to "conservative" club meetings (in college) and see how many people you can convince that Arabs shouldn't be considered human. Or why people that can't afford health care obviously don't deserve it, or how they ought to be forbidden to reproduce, etc.

It's scary.

The key piece of evidence that it's satire:

"Michael Lewis in Berkeley, California"

They would crucify him there if he really meant what he wrote;-)

I didn't find it particularly entertaining, though.

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