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Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

Jewelry/gold, when used as financial instruments, form one more "system in place to squeeze." (We may have to agree to disagree regarding to what extent that system is created by poor people.)

A $500 ring that is repeatedly used to secure pawn loans to cover short-term cashflow deficits is a lot like a savings account which seizes 80% of value on deposit and charges a $15~25 convenience fee on withdraws.

bafflingly detached from reality

You'll find alternative financial services, including voluminous material on jewelry as a store of value and collateral for pawn loans, well-represented in the academic literature. Would you like citations?

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Citations on what? No one is arguing that gold rings are an excellent investment strategy. Rather, you're being called out on the claim that 'this is one of the reasons the poor stay poor'. The implication there is that the poor deserve their poverty, or at the least are kept mired in it by their own inadequacy.

I think it follows pretty directly that if poor people are using jewelry as a store of value, then it's going to being making their financial situation even worse, and therefore can be considered one of the reasons the poor stay poor.

You also are committing a fallacy of "if X is true, then I must hold an immoral position Y, so X cannot be true". But logically either Y does not follow from X, or Y is not really immoral. (X = "poor people make bad decisions", Y = "the poor deserve their poverty") This logical fallacy has got you rationalizing everything that poor people do.

A third possibility (remaining within the realm of logic rather than probability) is "holding true beliefs is immoral".

A fourth possibility is that patio11 and idlewords have priors which are not absolutely continuous w.r.t. each other. I.e., idlewords' prior for patio11's hypothesis is 0, and no amount of evidence will change his mind even if he is a completely rational. (It is by this mechanism that a rational Bayesian can also be religious. )

You what? No one introduced the word "deserve" here but you.

I think we agree more than we disagree with regards to "deserving" poverty.

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