Though your theory about why “99% of the poor are plagued by a lack of willpower” is somewhat more generous than it would at first appear to be, you’ve jumped way ahead in the scientific process. The observations aren’t in that call for such a theory. Stating that 99% of poor people lack willpower/delayed gratification is pretty presumptuous, no matter how you try to soften it, and ranks as a hypothesis at best.
Your initial comment also lets social/political structures completely off the hook. I know you said that its the inertia of poverty, subtly hinting that maybe there was an external cause at some point, but then completely dismissing that as immaterial. This last comment, that you find railing against a broken system to be hopeless, is a little bit more honest, but characterizing attempts to create a more just system as “bitching” completely undermines any understanding.
This article is about a system that selects for a group that is already at a disadvantage and preying upon their vulnerabilities and lack of choice to suck them dry of what little they have. That smaller system is rewarded lavishly for their vampiric activities by a larger political and economic system designed by the winners of previous rounds. To turn the conversation into one about personal responsibility is pretty tone-deaf. This isn’t about “bitching about rich assholes” it’s about countering and dismantling the selfish and destructive structures that “rich assholes” construct daily in their own favor at the expense of others. Structural change in societies has always been the most important tool to change the conditions of a polity or group. And make no mistake, poverty is the problem of an entire society, not a problem of or for the poor alone.
As others have said, lack of willpower and inability to delay gratification (most likely, my numbers aren’t in either) runs the gamut of economic tiers. To focus on this quality in poor people, and further, to suggest that predatory lenders can somehow paternalistically save poor people from themselves, while at the same time squeezing them viciously for every last penny, is to miss the point pretty widely.
No, it ranks as “I should be working on research right now, studying the human phenomenon because this is what I get paid for, this is an off the cuff statement that is based on a decade of studies of the human phenomenon in the academic and external worlds, but damn…it is just a f’n conversation”.
If you want to talk to my boss about my funding, I’m certain that we can possible get better numbers, but until then, its a conversation on the interweb, so there will be subtleties that are missed.
I mean, you’ve invested 7 comments into defending the theory that emerged from this number, and you do truly noble work with the population you describe, so I’m guessing it matters a bit more than the weight of a passing interwebs comment. It also led to conclusions like the following, which can only be arrived at by ignoring mountains of important data:
I respect that you are working on an interpersonal level with poor people, sacrificing and impoverishing yourself to some degree in the process to do so. But to blatantly ignore the predatory nature of loan sharks and political structures that keep people poor misses an important part of the equation. To me, it rings like a person doing absolutely essential work with wounded veterans who refuses to acknowledge the importance of dismantling the military industrial complex that caused the needless suffering in the first place.
You should read 99% as “sufficiently high number that warrants some truth”.
And as others, you ignore that part about simplification…I purposely said I wasn’t talking about the loan pricing or otherwise. The start of the conversation was about War On General Purpose Computers, and I was discussing one small element of why this ‘could’ be a good thing. If we dismiss everything because the whole system is wrong, we will never figure out what we could be doing right – even if for the wrong reason.
Trust me, in my day there was action taken again a few pay day loan locations in the hood…I’m no longer the radical that I once was, so I will leave the details of this alone (other than a lot of the time, they make it easy because the building are often cheap standalone buildings that wouldn’t hurt anything around it if something were to happen). I agree with you that these predatory loans are horrible, but to me, that is a different conversation. In science, one learns that you have to identify and fix one problem at a time…
That said, the 99% number comes down to – again not moral misfailings of people, and I’m not sure where people are misreading all of this and not seeing that I addressed this – the ability to regulate delayed gratification will not emerge spontaneously in a system that keeps people down. If you want to focus on this number, so be it…if you want to act as it if it ‘victim blaming’ without understanding the subtleties of the argument, it really isn’t worth discussing this more.
In addition, the scammers are good at seducing the poor by dangling temptation in front of them. The housing crisis was caused by the same actions. The true class war element was when the scammers took their ill gotten gains, they then smugly moralized that their suckers were guilty of buying houses that they could not afford and therefore deserved their fates.
A general purpose computer is a computer that can be programmed and used by the owner to do whatever the hell the owner wants it to do. A non general purpose computer may be theoretically just as powerful and versatile as a general purpose computer, but has been artificially constrained by a third party to thwart the owner’s desire to use it for any arbitrary task.
That’s not bad advice, but a big part of the problem is that most people aren’t financial experts. The poorer you are, the less likely you are to have the financial planning skills to know what you really can afford. Then along come a bunch of supposed experts who enthusiastically assure people that this is the car/house/etc payment plan appropriate for someone with your income, and victims sign on the dotted line because they figure those experts know what they’re talking about. After all, why would someone offer you a loan unless they really believed you could pay it back?
Like Cory says, this is basically the same thing that brought down the housing market but with car loans instead of home loans.
What about specifying such bad practices, and making a law that if such practices happened during offering the loan, the loan does not have to be paid back?
