Comment by seivadmas | Hacker News Reader

Comment by seivadmas | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

At the risk of sounding callous, perhaps they are poor BECAUSE they are so indiscriminately generous.

Everyone is needy. Everyone always needs help. People have an infinite capacity to suck up your help and they will always need more.

Probably like many programmers, I love producing work for other people that makes them happy. There is nothing that delights me more than watching someone's face light up while using my software and saying "Oh, this is EXACTLY what I need!"

The problem is there are many people out there who will happily take your best work and pay little to nothing for it. I've learned this from bitter personal experience.

A truly selfless person would give their best work away forever for as little as they needed to survive. But this kind of generosity will leave you penniless and the kind of people that use your work for nothing will not thank you for it.

Your employer only pays you because he needs you. If you respond to neediness by giving, you lose your power and your ability to get paid for your work.

To retain wealth requires a kind of dulling of your own innate urge to help others. Because nobody else will stop you from giving and giving and giving until you are an exhausted shell with nothing to show for it.

I'm not saying this is the ideal way to behave, but we have to live in the reality that exists, not an imaginary idealized one.

So, you're arguing that mean people don't fail, as pg posited, and that this study isn't flawed. But, you're also arguing that selfishness is a rational choice that leads to wealth.

I don't think I buy the correlation is causation claim you've made between selfishness and wealthy people; or, to flip it, that poor people are poor because they aren't more selfish. There are too many other variables that can explain most poor people being poor; by far, the single best indicator of whether a person will be poor is whether their parents were poor. Many other indicators, education, health, nutrition in childhood, abuse, addictions, etc. follow from the first.

So, I find it hard to swallow your premise that greed makes one wealthy and generosity makes one poor. Certainly there are extremes, and it's entirely possible to give away the entirety of ones wealth and become poor, but I don't know of many examples of that (I've read about some cult members who have given away all of their money to the cult, but not a lot of other examples) or any research indicating it is common.

There was recently an article about meritocracy, which had the same basic takeaway I get from this video: That rich people assume they got there by merit and that they deserve everything they have. And, it discussed the tendency among those at the top to exhibit little desire to help others up, or any sense that they might be ethically obligated to do so.

I went through an Ayn Rand phase when I was a kid, so I can kinda see where this mentality comes from. But, I don't know that it actually maximizes happiness or utility (if one allows "utility" to contain values other than money). And, I also doubt it results in wealth for the majority of people who grow up poor and practice selfishness.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com