[quote=pri_dk]
The main theme of the article was that the financial habits of the lower class are very different today.[/quote]
No doubt, everybody’s financial habits are different because it’s a different world. Corporate “profit-seeking” habits have become quite perverse and overtly predacious in many industries.
The question is; Do the “changes” in these financial habits outweigh the systemic changes that Warren laid out? According to her it’s a big fat no. Meaning, whatever increasingly bad financial habits laid out in that article(which I would love to see their methodology for quantifying this) isn’t the main driver or causal mechanism of a lower standard of living. According to Warren dollar value per segment is usually the same or lower spent a generation ago.
And that just goes right to the heart of a cultural narrative that has been around since the iron age. So it stings that quite possibly these are systemic problems and not individual “management” ones.
The “Just world myth” :
refers to the tendency for people to want to believe that the world is fundamentally just. As a result, when they witness an otherwise inexplicable injustice, they will rationalize it by searching for things that the victim might have done to deserve it. This deflects their anxiety, and lets them continue to believe the world is a just place, but often at the expense of blaming victims for things that were not, objectively, their fault
Now, the past decade of the housing bubble really really distorts this discussion because we all love the stories of the strawberry picker that heloc’d a hummer and 70 inch plasma screen TVs for every room.
Though, I would bet the lion share, at the very least, in dollar damage was done in the top 30%(Which are not the lower or middle class). NYT even ran that article that the well-to-do were much more likely to default than someone of modest means. The ones of modest means are much more likely to suck it up and take the pain – which kind of runs contrary to popular narrative(of the over-entitled lower-classes that need to be disciplined). I’m very interested in the psychology behind that, personally. 1: Why are the lower classes willing to take more pain as a group 2: Why do we give the well-to-do a pass on this.
[quote=pri_dk][ (there was a photograph of a large Hispanic family crammed into a small room with a gigantic TV that seemed to capture the whole point pretty well.)
.[/quote]
That after 18 hours a day working in the hot sun for a pittance and no benefits, the only luxury this large family had energy to enjoy is television, so they pooled money together to buy a big one?
Why does a poor person or large family in this case(which probably means multiple incomes and hence reduces the mismanagement charge) with a big screen TV indicate some obvious deep financial mismanagement issue?
