No Comment - Your Kids are Dumb and You Probably Won’t Finish This And There’s a Twist
- Thread starter MyTeamIsOnTheFloor
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I agree with the notion of a threshold amount of income to live a contented and satisfying life. That amount likely varies based upon a number of factors. My comment is focused on the idea that success varies depending on a so called starting point. I disagree with that.Individual wealth isn't the end all or be all but there is an earnings inflection point where people tend to level off on contentedness. That number is $108,000 in today's dollars (it was $75,000 at the time of the study). That is the point where people tend to stop just getting by and instead are able to obtain a level of comfort which majorly impacts happiness, mainly because of decreased economic stresses involved when you fall below that line.
More money increases happiness beyond $75,000
Making more money is associated with greater happiness and life satisfaction. And contrary to prior research, there is no plateau at $75,000.www.forbes.com
I think CoH was making a mistake up above saying he was as happy in his mountain cabin as the people in the expensive houses. That is comparing Fuji apples to Granny Smith. Both apples and just a question of taste. Comparing that to someone who has made the best decisions they could in life but is stuck in a neighborhood with gun battles, drug addicts, alcoholics, and various other crimes and saying that despite their station they can be happy is true, but man does it overlook the quality of life they are living, particularly when compared to the nice suburb or mountain cabin (which probably is quite a bit more luxurious than a poor Appalachian mountain cabin....)
I don't know what the answers are with any amount of certainty, but I do believe that the distribution of wealth in the country has reached a point of destabilization. Some of the craziness we are all seeing is a function of that IMO.
I think poor people can believe they lead a successful life.
these people are pretty much the same as wealthy who are hopeless addicts or alcoholics.
They can "believe" they lead a successful life? Do you realize how you just completely destroyed your own argument with that one single word?
I don't think success depends on where you start but where you start can impact where you end. I had 2 working/caring parents and grew up in a middle class neighborhood going to an (at the time) pretty good suburban high school. A not insignificant percentage of my high school class went on to college. For us it was the expectation so much that we had kids go to school, because that was what you do, who were actually probably better served to have gone into a trade or something of that sort.
I think all of those things are a positive input into success. They weren't a guarantee of success and lack of them isn't a guarantee of failure but having them helped. Muggsy Bogues made it to a successful NBA career. Height didn't determine his success, but we would be remiss if we didn't mention that we still know his name and Spudd Webbs, mostly because basketball tends to favor those with height.
All that being said, I tend to fall more on the side that most of this is up to the individual to try and resolve but there are things we can do to try and make sure that even those without all the built in advantages at least have some basic chance provided by the society we create (like good public schools). I don't think throwing money at areas suffering from societal breakdown is necessarily the answer either. @crazed_hoosier2 made a point up above that he thinks success is incumbent on the individual. I disagree to a certain degree. I think you want a society that frowns upon some of those poor moral choices and enforces them with it's most useful tool of social control, shame. If somebody still ends up making a poor choice, that is on them. We have a society that glorifies all the stupid decisions that lead to poor outcomes in our entertainment while also having a libertarian, "adults can make adult decisions" disposition. It is clear that allowing adults to make adult decisions doesn't work so well in communities that don't have the advantage of wealth to cushion their fall. Gambling isn't great? Make it so that advertisements for it aren't ubiquitous when watching a sporting event. Being a teen Mom is a poor choice? Enforce that idea.
People don't like the moral scolding but it did serve a purpose.
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They aren't though. If that behavior is equivalent to jumping off a 3 or 4 story building, wealth is a safety net. The more wealth you have means a bigger and safer net. A guy like Hunter Biden can be a "successful" crackhead who blows exorbitant amounts of money on drugs, alcohol, and prostitutes because of wealth. You remove that safety net and the likelihood that those decisions end up killing him increase dramatically. Removing the wealth also decreases the chances of some form of recovery. Most people don't get a life coach and a million dollar home in the California hills to get away from it all and get clean. The lowest of us all live in areas where the booze is on every other corner with the drug peddlers in-between. When they jump off the building they are looking at broken limbs at best.
We can acknowledge that reality without having to accept it is society's duty to equal that inequality out. It is an inequality though. Growing up wealthy is putting the game of life on easy mode. You can still lose the game if you are a really poor player but that wealth provides you way more latitude for mistakes.
Public schooling is lousy and I say this with a certain degree of experience. We homeschooled our 16 year old son for 3-4 years but he wanted to go back to public school. He had gone to public school in Indiana in Kindergarten and 1st grade and then we chose to homeschool him until 5th grade.
When he went back to public school, my wife doubted herself/teaching ability and actually held him back. She had taught him 5th grade at home but made him take 5th grade again at public school. By the time Halloween rolled around, it was clear that my wife had done a better job teaching him in the home than what they were doing in public school.
We live in rural Kentucky and the public school is a political babysitter. I see athletes getting their hair cut at times of the day when they should be in school. I see athletes at the cross fit center training at 1pm when school is in session. Oh it's something else and my son's grades have magically improved since he is now on the baseball team!
Public schooling is a shell of what it was 30 years ago. Punctuation and basic arithmetic are stunningly lost!! Sports, politics, recruiting, etc., are boss....
When he went back to public school, my wife doubted herself/teaching ability and actually held him back. She had taught him 5th grade at home but made him take 5th grade again at public school. By the time Halloween rolled around, it was clear that my wife had done a better job teaching him in the home than what they were doing in public school.
We live in rural Kentucky and the public school is a political babysitter. I see athletes getting their hair cut at times of the day when they should be in school. I see athletes at the cross fit center training at 1pm when school is in session. Oh it's something else and my son's grades have magically improved since he is now on the baseball team!
Public schooling is a shell of what it was 30 years ago. Punctuation and basic arithmetic are stunningly lost!! Sports, politics, recruiting, etc., are boss....
And seems to suggest that the guy who started way ahead was always going to end up ahead too.
I think the big mistake people make is measuring success according to how much money a person makes. I think success is a lot more than that.
Money doesn't make a person happy but I think the lack of money (where a person is struggling to get by) can make a person unhappy.
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This is the grade school that I went to.... 4 rooms with 2 grades in each room. Summit looked pretty high but I made it to the top.
You can start behind as a child on areas unrelated to money, too.
Bad parents--those who physically or emotionally abuse their children or don't provide them with what they need--are more of a hurdle to future happiness than wealth. Children who experience this tend to have more trouble with emotional regulation, are more prone to mental illness, addiction, etc.
Lots of natural light. Lucky bastard.This is the grade school that I went to.... 4 rooms with 2 grades in each room. Summit looked pretty high but I made it to the top.
Again, re individual responsibility, that is all well and good for adults. It makes some sense to draw some kind of line or have some sort of spectrum of responsibility and as a matter of policy, let a person take care of himself and suffer the consequences of his or her shortcomings.
What I'm pushing on is that to the extent the above also affects children, we need to take that into account and mitigate it the best we can. If that means some adults get aid that we don't think "deserve" it, so be it. Giving kids a fair shot is more important, to me, than that.
To CoH’s point, it is somewhat relative. Where you start may impact your ability to become a multimillionaire or end up in the same place as a rich kid, but it does not impact your ability to do well in school(whatever school that is), maintain employment, not commit crimes, be a good parent, etc.
Expecting people with all of their faculties to perform well enough in school to develop basic reading & math skills, parent their children, avoid drugs & crime isn’t analogous to asking a one legged person to run a marathon, more like asking someone perfectly capable to walk around the block. If you’re suggesting that the majority of poor people don’t possess all of their faculties or ability to reason, that’s another conversation that I’d be interested in hearing peoples’ thoughts on…
Your fault? Maybe not, but deserved it? Absolutely….
There was never "income equality" in Appalachia - education and lack thereof - not income inequality - was, is and always will be the main producer of stupid.
Schools have become babysitters - not educators - because the parents and other enablers of dumb kids thought it was unfair, then mean, then racist, to tell a dumb kid "you are dumb - learn to work manually for a living."
Plus, the alleged smart people thought "tradesmen are just tradesmen" - they failed to see the small businessman in the welder. (Prolly thought you needed an MBA to be a businessman.)
Now, they don't want tradesman - they want software workers. They still believe computer satisfaction - not customer satisfaction - makes a business.
What "all their faculties" means, would be up for debate. There are approximately 50+ million people in the United States with IQs of 85 or under, for example. Expecting them, on average, to have the same ability to make investment decisions, using just one example, as the 50+ million with IQs 30-60 points higher is bizarre. Add in possible emotional regulation issues, lack of education, poor upbringing or whatnot and the gap would further widen. (I'm not even using the most obvious factor--age). All of these things definitely impact one's ability to parent, develop reading, math, and thinking skills, etc.
As for the example, that was a way to show the reasoning used was fallacious. I wasn't the one making a blanket statement, crazed was. He made an "all people" statement, and to back it up, provided one example. That's not logically sound and the example amply demonstrates that (it would be a sound argument if I were arguing "no people" with low IQ, emotional issues, poor upbringing, etc. had the same ability to make good decisions as others--but I'm not; I'm arguing people's abilities lie on a spectrum).
I don't know if a majority of those in poverty are so hampered. I'm saying that some of those who aren't starting from the same spot do not have the same "ability" to make good decisions (this point is so obvious, I'm not sure why it's even up for debate) and as a result, are more likely to end up making poor financial (and many other) decisions.
Fair, to a degree, I would change up what that support looks like though.
That's a completely different discussion, and I think we'd probably agree on quite a bit.
Appalachia is a good example of what happens to a society when incomes decline. You can’t blame it on genetics, screens, or anything else.
The same as happened across the US, but at a slower rate. Drugs, lower test scores, incarceration rates, are all correlated to income. Middle-class incomes have dropped relatively for 45 years. Therefore, the middle-class voting for Reagan conservatism was one of the bad choices crazed speaks of. They're coming around.
I know that. My point is you can't keep in the negative every year whether you are talking about the National Debt or the trade deficit. It will eventually collapse which is what I believe is China's goal. They want to be top dog and will topple us if they can. Will we let them or not?
I believe success is not just about money. It is about doing what you were created to do. I've never earned a lot of money. But my heart is satisfied because I get to do what God has called me to. Now of course as I get older it might be a challenge to continue to do it. My goal is to preach till I am 75. Will I make it? I dunno. But I want to try.
1 yr of it. I get it. But year after year is what I am talking about. We are losing jobs because of the trade deficit.
You get a collapse when National Debt goes up alongside the Trade Deficit which destroys jobs. That is how they are doing it.
That's not an explanation, that's just blabber. Please explain exactly why a trade deficit is so bad that it would lead to some kind of "collapse."
I agree entirely.
Maybe the most successful person I know is a Catholic priest. He’s literally had a book written about him.
And I know two billionaires.
Why do you think it won't cause a collapse eventually? Taking 300 billion out of your economy a year doesn't have any impact?
That isn't how it works at all.
First, bilateral imports (i.e., stuff what the US brings in from any specific country), are bullshit numbers. Last literature I have seen, considered those numbers to be inflated by 30%. Take China. China doesn't make stuff out of whole cloth for us, as they still need Japan and South Korea to assist with manufacturing parts for various technology. The components, however, and the cost for those, are then inputed the total China export cost. So the dollar's arent't chinese dollars (using dollars as a generalized term). So in that situation there is a point of shipping which the US uses. The Iphone is an example of this.
Second, companies use China's Bonded Zones (there are like 10 or 11), to ship from because there no taxes, etc.
Third, the trade deficit, apart from being artificially inflated, fails to account for our service experts to any country. That's a a major issue. In addition, we have a tendency to lose where our experts ultimately end up. For example, shipping corrdiors all over the world may end up accounting for good/product that ultimately goess to China.
Fourth, our most productive enconomies have been with trade deficits, because at one point that encouraged foreign investment into captial improvements. For example, the railroad system built in the 1800s was beneficiary of running trade deficits.
Fifth, trade deficits can have a postive impact with the depreciation in the exchange rate. This would lower the cost of our exports and stimulate buying from abroad.
Sixth, we are letting the market and competiveness drive price. All things being equal, we would all want to buy a good that is notably cheaper.
There's another issue too, for example, we can't grow bananas. Try as we might, it doesn't happen. That is one example, but in this one, the countries who grow bananas are likely to be poorer and likely not importing as much as they export.
I know and have known many billionaires. And to a person I can say they have FUN!!!!!!!!!!!! Like REAL FUN!!!!!!! 🤣🤣😩😩😩😩😩😩😩😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😖😖😖
🤣🤣. They live a different life. My old boss’s neighbor was glazer. Man U etc. we had billionaires rolling in and out of the office all the time. I was basically the firm’s Michael Clayton like the movie, only if Clayton was just a bitch. So and so wrapped an Aston Martin around a tree drunk. Dude it’s 3:30 am. Right. Go get it out of there. Now!!!!!! So and so and his fiancée are in the bahamas. Here’s the keys to his house. Get a mover and get all of her shit out of the house now!
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