Money on the Mind [video] | Hacker News Reader

Money on the Mind [video]

video.pbs.org

57 pointsrbanffy72 comments

> You, like a real rich person, start to attribute success to your own individual skills and talents, and you become less attuned to all of the other things that contributed to you being in the position that you're in.

Rather than hammer an obvious point about the general bias against social services by the wealthy, I think it's more useful to point out the other side of the coin, which is that many poor people are poor not because of a direct lack of talent or skill but because of all the other things that contributed to them being in the position that they're in. There was another post recently on HN that compared poverty to a rogue background process that drains willpower, and yet another one about how entrepreneurs are disproportionally from well-to-do backgrounds. You can't take risks when you're poor, you don't have mobility, you can't pay for childcare, you spend time clipping coupons instead of reading... the list goes on.

It's the discounting of luck, as described by the Fundamental Attribution Error. The line you quote is about as short an example of the error as is possible.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error

you can't pay for childcare

Having children is a choice. There are no storks dropping babies into random homes.

True, people do make bad choices for a variety of reasons (teen pregnancy, for example), but nearly every parent, including teens, have some idea that children are a major responsibility that require a considerable amount of care, attention and financial resources from their parents.

This is not simply a matter of social/economic conditions or of genes. I remember being a teenager not all that long ago (I'm 32 now). The girls that got pregnant all knew better - I remember sitting through the same lectures in class that they did - but they made their choices.

So if it's not social conditions or genes, what is it?

I really think it boils down to ideas, which are accessible to anyone and everyone:

1) Life is for keeps. You only get one go at it, and that's it!

2) Your own life matters most, and it is possible to make something of it, if you try.

3) What's good for you does not come at the expense of other people.

4) How can you make your mark on the world if you're just starting out and all of your spare time is spent changing diapers?

---

Your ideas are not determined by your social/economic conditions.^ If the ideas people held were simply a matter of economic conditions, no one would ever rise out of poverty. (I'd supply some names, but it's better if you just do a Google search for "poor people who became rich.")

^Nor are they determined by your genes - I won't delve into this because I'm assuming that this point is obvious.

It's not just a choice in a vacuum, there are other things that contribute significantly to you making right and wrong choices, and specifically when it comes to making good life choices, a lot of those decisions are influenced negatively by poverty.

Citation please.

No but Seriously. This is just a series of platitudes: decisions are influenced negatively by poverty? Yes, and some are influenced positively by poverty, as in "this sucks and I don't want to be hungry anymore".

I know it motivated me to see my parents struggle, to eat government cheese, and to move all the time because of the need for new work for my dad. Experience is a great teacher, and it motivated me to not make the same mistakes my parents made.

Its not a zero sum game. Even being poor isn't poor anymore. When I was little, and we were poor, dirt poor in the backwoods of Tenessee we didn't have a phone, we had one kerosene heater, we lived on a dirt road, no health care, and we got our milk from the neighbors cow ( real milk kids is gross ). Compare that with the average "poor" person today, cell phone, government health insurance, clean safe water to drink, a government provided debit card to go shopping ( no govt cheese for them), paved roads!

Yep, life's tough. They'll never get out of poverty. Maybe you're right. If it's too nice, why bother. I definitely didn't want to be backwoods poor, it positively influenced my decisions. I ain't poor no more.

You're welcome to dismiss my argument as a series of platitudes, but you should also agree to allow me to dismiss your story as a platitude, about how you were so determined not to be poor that it drove you to succeed.

I'm not actually dismissing your story -- I am in no position to judge fairly -- but I'm trying to point out that the fundamental attribution bias and the closely related actor-observer bias (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actor%E2%80%93observer_bias) are both powerful. What if your personality type made it such that you had a high likelihood of success whether you were rich or poor?

Finally, with all this talk about "choice", let me go ahead and throw out a controversial statement: we have a lot less free will than we want to believe we do.

Is this some performance piece about entitlement based on the source article?

I remember being a teenager not all that long ago (I'm 32 now). The girls that got pregnant all knew better - I remember sitting through the same lectures in class that they did - but they made their choices.

And obviously you were in the same situations they were, and had the same upbringing, so the comparison is valid? It's nice that you can rationalize your current situation as stemming entirely from all the correct choices you've made, but have you considered that you are far from an unbiased source in such a rationalization?

The truth is that people are not rational actors. Adolescents are even less so. To state that all the girls in your age group knew better when they got pregnant does not immediately point towards them having the wrong goals (or ideas, as you term them), but towards a failure in your reasoning (or at least a failure of imagination).

>The truth is that people are not rational actors. Adolescents are even less so.

And yet, any remotely intelligent person living in a remotely modern country is completely capable of not getting pregnant or getting someone else pregnant, should they choose not to. Let's not completely absolve people of blame just because they're poor/young/whatever. Everyone is capable of autonomy.

This isn't actually completely true. If you're having trouble eating well, access to condoms and birth control isn't always an easy thing.

One would say that if you're having trouble eating well, you might as well want to prioritize something apart from having sex.

Can we take this to mean impoverished people are less entitled to some of the enjoyable aspects of life?

What's your solution, free sterilization?

All I'm saying is, your mouth can't get pregnant.

But it can catch diseases. Acting as if pregnancy is the only possible ill effect of promiscuity is narrowing the argument as to be useless, when it was already so narrow it was useless.

Fuck poor people am I right? They should be forced to live in anguish because of their poor decision of not being born into a well off family.

I seem to recall there was another pregnancy avoidance technique that didn't cost anything, but it's been many years since I last took health class.

I made no case for absolving people of all their responsibility, just for accepting that conditions differ for different people, and the responsibility may not entirely lay with them. By refuting the absolute put forth, I'm not proposing the opposite absolute.

It's trivially provable that some vanishingly small percentage of people have no choice in life (e.g. die/incarcerated until death while young through no fault of their own). Accepting that, I think it's logical to conclude that some circumstances will negatively impact you more than others, and affect your chances at success. That does not resolve people of responsibility, but in my mind it does make a case for compassionate handling of poor circumstances.

"Everyone is capable of autonomy."

Thank you for so concisely and cogently resolving what may well have been philosophy's longest-standing and most ontologically profound line of inquiry. I'm confident that one day I will look back and consider myself blessed for having had the opportunity to effectively witness such an historic event first hand.

I don't usually endorse snark, but I think a large set of the new HN don't have any appreciation for the history of thought about a lot of hard problems. It's part of the new "I've got an opinion so it must be one that has value (because I have value)." It's true, you do have value, but that does not make your opinion informed.

Frequently "poor people who became rich" stories leave out important details (e.g. the definition of 'poor' is pretty loose, an extraordinary overlap of luck and timing, etc.). That isn't to discount the actual "poor became rich" stories that are completely 'legitimate.' They exist.

But pointing them out as examples to diminish the importance of socioeconomic conditions impact on a person's choices is like holding up any statistical outlier as proof that the statistics are 'wrong.'

You make a few points which stand on pretty dubious ground.

"Your own life matters most" - In what sense? More than that of others?

"What's good for you does not come at the expense of other people." - Do you have evidence for this? Does stealing, which might in some moment be good for a person, not come at the expense of another?

"How can you make your mark on the world" - Doesn't this presuppose that 'making a mark in the world' is a more 'important' cause than changing diapers?

"If the ideas people held were simply a matter of economic conditions, no one would ever rise out of poverty." - Id be interested to see some statistics of the frequency with which people escape poverty. I have a feeling the numbers are fairly low.

"Your own life matters most" - In what sense? More than that of others?

You know what? This is a sloppy formulation. But see the point immediately below, because I think it deals with most of the trouble you're having with what I'm saying.

"What's good for you does not come at the expense of other people." - Do you have evidence for this? Does stealing, which might in some moment be good for a person, not come at the expense of another?

Was stealing good for Bernie Madoff? Look at the evidence. He ended up in jail, penniless, and what's left of his family will not speak to him. His son committed suicide. Even before he was caught, his life was a living hell - he admitted as much in an interview.

"How can you make your mark on the world" - Doesn't this presuppose that 'making a mark in the world' is a more 'important' cause than changing diapers?

Things are important or unimportant only in relation to particular lives, and everyone has unique, specific goals. For example, if my goal is to become a world-class concert pianist, fathering children before I was thirty would definitely make the more important (again, to me) goal impossible to achieve.

Statistics are only useful when you are ignorant of a specific phenomenon, and have no way to make the necessary observations yourself. What matters is specific, actual people, not some aggregate average that describes nothing in particular and no one specifically.

The fact that some people rise from poverty is all that is needed to prove that it is possible.

One last point occurred to me. People rose out of incredible poverty en masse over the last 150 years, following the industrial revolution. in the 1860s, even the wealthiest businessman could not fly across the country in a few hours, call people around the world, get treatment for serious illnesses (e.g., valve replacement heart surgery), use computers, etc. A lot of people look at poverty from the perspective of relative differences, but I'm just happy to be alive in a time and in a place where there is so much available, in absolute terms (because that's the thing that actually makes a difference in my standard of living).

Stealing was good for the majority of people in the financial services business who didn't get caught and go to jail.

Your grasp on the use of statistics seems tenuous. It is not to prove possibility but likelihood. I could give one random person a million dollars and that would prove that people can escape poverty? Yes, they "can" but not at a rate or in a way that is meaningful for those stuck there or concerned about the problem.

Stealing was good for the majority of people in the financial services business who didn't get caught and go to jail.

The financial services industry, according to 2011 statistics, employed roughly 5.5 million people (and this is surely lower than the pre-2007 statistic). Do you honestly think that the majority of these people are thieves?

I could give one random person a million dollars and that would prove that people can escape poverty?

That's not how people escape poverty. People who rise up have to work to achieve it.

Yes but if you had a shitty childhood or life, you're only hope may be to have children and give them better opportunities than you've had.

There may be a real finding here: If you perceive yourself as rich, you act more confidently, other things being equal.

However, behaving more confidently does not necessarily make you less ethical. This work is constructing false ethical standards, and then "crying wolf" when people don't reach them. For instance:

(a) There is no moral reason that one person should go through the crosswalk before the other. One has to go through before the other. (I hate the feeling of making cars stop for me because it wastes the car's momentum.)

(b) If a moderator tells you that you can eat the candy, presumably there is surplus candy. Otherwise, they wouldn't tell you that you could eat it! Unless they're a dick. That lady did not come off as being a dick.

Frankly, there are lots of highly ethical and highly unethical people across all "class" boundaries. I know that from personal experience and observation.

I could keep going, but hopefully I've given some evidence that this video is not science. It's blatantly irrational. Maybe the paper is better than the video, but I'd be surprised.

There was a previous discussion a couple of months ago on hn about this fairly silly set of "studies":

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6122707

The greatest part is where they admit that, for one experiment, rather than study actual rich and poor people, they just had undergraduates pretend to be rich or poor:

"We adopted a paradigm used in past research to activate higher or lower social-class mindsets and examine their effects on behavior."

> The greatest part is where they admit that, for one experiment, rather than study actual rich and poor people, they just had undergraduates pretend to be rich or poor:

Because if you did that, then people would instantly start attributing it to the past history of the rich vs the poor folks or something! The whole point of the lab manipulation is to start with a homogenous group of people, randomize, and then observe the effect of giving them some small amount of power.

Maybe next biologists will start studying bald eagles by dunking golden eagles upside-down in a can of white paint.

It's a good thing none of the people pretending to be rich or poor had any preconceived notions of how ethical those groups are.

And it's a good thing that none of the psychologists told the subjects 'please mentally imagine that you are Warren Buffett'. ಠ_ಠ What on earth sort of manipulations do you think they're using? Seriously.

I don't quite grasp how you can purposefully ignore the general bias on the possession of wealth currently in the common mind, much less the mind of a Berkley student. This is where people got pepper sprayed for Occupy. They're going to have a bias...

> I don't quite grasp how you can purposefully ignore the general bias on the possession of wealth currently in the common mind, much less the mind of a Berkley student.

I am ignoring it because if you bother to read the papers and look at their manipulations, there is no reason to expect the manipulations which increase a subject's 'wealth' or 'power' by trivial amounts to then trigger cultural preconceptions or ideologies about plutocracy and 'the rich'.

To be honest, once you've read the actual papers, the main question becomes the opposite of what you and the other commenters are claiming! These manipulations are so minor and represent so little real 'wealth' or 'power' that it's not clear why I should expect these results to have any meaning in the external non-laboratory world.

And don't forget the Stanford prison experiment!

Now let's do a simple switcheroo on this one: "You, like a real poor person, start to attribute failure to external causes, and you become overly attuned to all of the other things that may or may not have contributed to you being in the position that you're in."

So which one is the norm? Is the norm poor people attributing failure to external causes (as well as other people) or is rich people attributing success to themselves the norm? Or is the truth somewhere in the middle perhaps?

Or, perhaps, it's much easier to come a conclusion there's nothing one can do to improve one's position, if one attributes successes and failures to external causes rather than attributing successes and failures to themselves; Since it's generally perceived that it's possible to change oneself but much more difficult to change others and the surrounding environment.

Therefore, if you assume poor people do attribute the causes of their situation to their surrounding environment, and that rich people attribute causes of their situation to themselves, it can be hypothesised rich people got to be rich because of their perception that they can change themselves to achieve their financial wealth, whereas poor people gave up because of the perceived difficulty changing their surrounding environment.

What evidence do you have to support your thesis of poor people attributing their situation mainly to external factors?

And why can't both be true? Is it possible that humans innately attribute success to themselves and failure to their environment?

> And why can't both be true?

I did express that possibility (I said, "or is the truth somewhere in the middle perhaps?"). In fact I have reasons to believe that that is the case.

Maybe this should be a template for the poor. The rich just play the system better than everyone else. Give a hustler a set of rules and that hustler will push those rules as much as possible, even to the point of going over the line at every opportunity. If you want something, you have to grab it, and you have to beat out the competition who are also looking to grab theirs.

ETA: The monopoly experiment was interesting. The game was rigged so that the person running the experiment would always win. When asked, the "rich" felt they should win. The video called this entitlement, but perhaps the rich see these rules of Monopoly as the same sort of bullshit rules the real world imposes on them. All games are rigged by someone, so you have to do a bit of cheating to turn the odds.

Or you could create legitimate value. Is it a law of the universe that zero-sum hustling is the game that should win?

Yes, evolution is the ultimate long-con.

>All games are rigged by someone, so you have to do a bit of cheating to turn the odds.

Just don't get caught. And if you do get caught, make sure you have enough money to not get thrown in prison for years or decades. Make sure that if you do get thrown in jail, you have a hidden nest egg to return to. Make sure that if you escape jail but not civil fines, that you still have a hidden nest egg to return to.

>Maybe this should be a template for the poor.

Wait a second...

This assumes that I was talking about straight up criminal behavior, which I wasn't.

I was talking more about pushing the law into the gray area. Should Uber be allowed to operate in NYC when taxis are regulated? Should AirBNB be allowed to compete with hotels? I think the founders of these services knew they could run into problems, but they chose to take the risk anyways. I think this is more of a risk oriented mind-set. People who aren't willing to take on risk may not even dare to get close to the edges.

It's only after the financial crisis that people were wondering if we should be locking a bunch of people up who were partly responsible for the mess. Did anyone go to jail? I don't know, but the list of people who did is probably pretty short. Obviously the people involved were pushing their rules as far as they could go.

Apparently even the government will do this. The NSA obviously pushed their given rules as far as they could, possibly into illegal territory, but still gray enough that it isn't obvious that we should be locking people up.

And laws change because a situation may not be obviously illegal. One day your actions may be illegal. Another day they may be fine. Again, separating those two lines is a bit of gray area. Perhaps successful people are there partly because they are more willing to push. Some may call this unfair and cheating. But that person may still walk if the issue was brought to court.

The world isn't fair. Sometimes it's the strongest and most ruthless people who win. The U.S. ended WW2 with a nuke and still has a lot of power through a superior military. Sometimes the U.S. will play by the rules, sometimes not.

I think people who are highly successful may tend to see that the rules aren't always solid. Sometimes they may be more like the edge of a rising and falling tide. Less successful people may see the rules as like prison walls. Not only do you not try to test them, you don't even get close to them.

Ah, but the opportunities available for the poor to grab what they can will likely have them facing the rough side of well-financed and increasingly militarized police force.

You can play by your own rules but the reality is that if you do so as a poor person you will end up being fucked by the law. Subversive unethical behavior is solely the domain of those who can afford to commit it or those too shortsighted to care.

Simple experiment to prove this theory wrong: drive to a poor neighborhood at night and walk around...

How does he square his findings (which are unearthing pretty mild transgressions) with, say, data about wealth in relation to violent crime?

It would seem obvious why there might be a negative correlation between wealth and violent crime. Violent crime essentially has the lowest barrier to entry. I'd have to imagine that if poor people had the option to choose white collar crime over violent crime, they would.

My understanding is that they do if it is available. Fraud is the most accessible flavour of white crime that I'm aware of.

Depending upon how you define violent crime: war is rarely started by the poor.

How many rich people do you think are responsible for starting wars in the past century?

Being as loose with "rich person starts a war" as possible, I really can't see that number going higher than the low hundreds. Peanuts, in the grand scheme of things.

That's astonishingly naive. Who sets corporate, national and international policies?

I am including those people in my "low hundreds of rich people" guess. Lets say for the sake of discussion that Oil Barons are responsible for Iraq... how many of those are there actually? How many rich oil barons are responsible for Iraq?

The point of being rich and powerful enough to start wars is that there aren't many other people like you. Being unusually powerful and being common are mutually exclusive.

And what percentage of all 'rich people' is that number? I would venture that it is quite high. Certainly a much higher percentage than the number of poor people responsible for these wars (which I think was OP's point).

> And what percentage of all 'rich people' is that number?

A very very small percentage. Currently there are several million millionaires in the US alone. Now, the question isn't "are rich people responsible for starting more wars than poor people". Of course the answer is "rich".

The question is whether poor people or rich people are more unethical. Poor people have a very disproportionate amount of violent crime. Rich people have a disproportionate amount of war-starting. However few rich people get a chance to start a war.

I don't doubt for one second that poor people commit more crime per capita than rich people start wars per capita. Maybe somebody can work out those numbers, but it seems plain enough for me to not even bother.

Lots of rich people lobby for wars, and support wars, and get richer off of wars. Poor people not so much (except perhaps those who go fight, and take exceptional advantage of things like the GI Bills.)

I'd say that wealthier people commit crimes over not having what they want, whereas not so wealthy people commit crimes over not having what they need. There's a mighty big divide between greed and desperation.

And what those not-so-wealthy people need is money for drugs.

Craziest fiends I ever met came from wealth and means

Very True. When papa cuts off funding to drugged-up little Johnny, watch out.

Marginal_propensity_to_consume hookers and blow has been shown in some studies to shorter lives and balance sheets of pro basketball players.

What do you think the chances are that the guy who broke into my car a few months ago (only to steal a few dollars in toll quarters I had in the center console) came from wealth and means? If you were a bookie, what odds would you put on that?

That's a bad use of statistics. There are significantly less wealthy people than poor people, so any single instance is going to be much more likely to be perpetrated by a person from a poor background. That doesn't prove that people from poverty are more likely on aggregate to break into your car.

"Behind every great fortune is a great crime."

I disagree with the findings being a blanket truth.

I encounter a great many persons that appear to maintain their own internal pride by practicing anonymous civility in the everyday world. So much so that it becomes almost competitive courtesy that eats a little extra time. I'm fine with some of that. Perhaps the strategy is selfish shrewdness: to prevent misunderstandings that could be very costly.

It's a natural psychological process for people to attribute to themselves good outcomes and to attribute to others bad outcomes. This seems to twist that to same something about ethics. Also, the playacting by undergraduates some of whom may have been pepper sprayed by agents of the 1% (in their view) seems not exactly unbiased.

Well when it comes to business you can replace words like unfair and unethical with a term like 'competitive advantage'.

So, I have no problem with "unfair" as a competitive advantage since that's kind of the point of having an advantage (i.e. to not be fair). I'm not sure about unethical; would you care to illustrate?

Something could be perceived as unethical by a poor person but as ethical by a rich one.

Ethical relativism

Or offshore tax 'minimization'

So, Steve Jobs was a criminal? Obama? Bono?

I ask because such icons usually short circuit the synapses of zealots who have been indoctrinated into believing that making money, being well paid or, in general, busineses, corporations are evil. All are evil until you bring up Apple. CEO's are money grubbing bastards, until you bring up Steve Jobs. Bleeding heart liberal artists are cool and "one of us" while reality is that they earn tens of millions of dollars per year doing relatively little. My favorite new example being Bono who, while pulling at everyone's heart strings is, behind the curtains, evading taxes in Ireland through some machination involving passing money through The Netherlands. Yet, he isn't evil. Other's are evil, but these examples never are.

Given that the average profile of HN posters is on the young side it is easy to see that there's a fair degree of indoctrination at play here. This comment is likely to be mercilessly down-voted, as is anything that points out that the emperor has no clothes.

I don't know what it takes for someone to see past their indoctrinated beliefs. I do not necessarily want to have you see things my way but rather see that you think things through and don't opine as you are told but rather after carefully studying and understanding the facts. Yes, that's hard work, particularly when your Pavlovian reflex is to do exactly the opposite. You say "Burn the witch!" while not making an effort to determine if she is, in fact, a witch.

One can't escape using Obamacare as an example of this. Unions, through the same Pavlovian reflex, militantly supported this abomination. Lots of people tirelessly pointed out that it was a mess. Nobody listened. Now we have a remarcable scenario where Jimmy Hoffa, Teamsters president says something like this in a letter published in The Wall Street journal[0]:

"Time is running out: Congress wrote this law; we voted for you. We have a problem; you need to fix it. The unintended consequences of the ACA are severe. Perverse incentives are already creating nightmare scenarios:"

This is the consequence of indoctrination of the masses. Of cargo cult thinking. Of sheep, not independent humans. Call it what you wish.

Wake up and snap out of this bullshit thinking. In the US the poor are poor because most of them don't want to make an effort, not because they are being oppressed. I know a number of them. They just don't care. In the meantime poor immigrants come to the US without command of the language, work their asses off and succeed. I personally know a guy who slept in his car for nearly six months while launching a delivery service. Now, years later, he owns several homes and employs dozens of people. Yet assholes like those who might write articles like the OL might call him a greedy bastard, even a criminal.

I also know entrepreneurs who have literally died (dead as a nail) from the effort and stress of navigating a business through rough waters.

There are also poor that are so through circumstances outside their control. These people should receive our help and compassion. Can we lift absolutely everyone out of poverty? Nope. Won't happen. A friend of mine lost his brother to alcoholism. They tried every form of intervention they could think of. Every welfare check he'd go get drunk. One day they found him dead behind a 7-eleven due to exessive alcohol consumption. You can't save them all. And. Yes, welfare has created generations of perennially poor families without the drive or interest to elevate themselves in any imaginable way.

Th subject of poverty is complex. Don't believe everything you are told, regardless of the source --myself included. Listen to all points of view. Get some life experience. Then decide.

[0] http://blogs.wsj.com/corporate-intelligence/2013/07/12/union...

I wonder at what level of wealth people start believing they are above the law.

And also, what percentage. I'm sure most wealthy people after some level believe they are above the law. The law is designed for the average person, and they probably believe they are above average, therefore, above the law.

Everybody believes that its necessary to bend the law, that is universal.

Another thing is that rich folk will not admit to being upper-class, it must be considered bad form to do so. The rich consistently categorize themselves as "upper-middle" class (because they are always comparing themselves to the ultra-rich rather than the middle-class). If they were to ever read a study like this, it would never be about them, only about the folks richer than them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com