Washington Post has done a study of those who have been charged, and finds a different commonality than getting ideas from Facebook: a large number of those who have been charged have a history of financial difficulties, either personally or through their parents when they were young.
Ooh, that’s super interesting. Thanks for posting that, Northern_Piper! That takes us back to the downtrodden idea and makes much more sense to me than the purely racist driven one.
There are moments that if I didn’t know Trump was lying about the economic issues, I might think he had a point.
He’s lying, but he does have a point. My impression is that there are a lot of people in the US who feel they’re on the edge of disaster, the “one paycheque away…” folks.
Trump, of course, is not “one pay cheque away” and wouldn’t care, but like a classic carnie barker, he knows what attracts the customers. And he mixes it in with the race-baiting, so it’s a particularly unpleasant sales pitch.
We had an interesting thread on the topic a few years ago, comparing the idea of “one bad break” for American dopers compared to Dopers from other countries:
The most depressing post came from LSLGuy:
Have any of the insurgents interviewed explained exactly what freedoms they lost, and were trying to get back? My favorite guy was outside the building, wearing a tan coat, and had a voice hoarse from shouting. When asked “what are you going to do?” it was “WHATEVER WE HAVE TO DO!” to get his freedoms back.
I read that article earlier this week, and it had me thinking about another article I read recently. The article was about the book Hillbilly Elegy and the thesis that it explained the phenomenon of Trump voter.
The author of that article reminded the reader that author JD Vance was born in 1984. He did not come of age post-recession, and the events described mostly happened in the 1990’s and early 2000’s.
That got me thinking about extremism as a reaction to a lack of stability and financial insecurity as a child, a reaction to the way the system treated their parents and all sorts of squishy possibilities.
Then MSNBC did a segment discussing the article and my brother, a good old boy liberal hippie who was a blue collar worker in the South his entire life, mentioned they might be reversing cause and effect. Actually, that’s not what he said.
He laughed and said “You think a bunch of rednecks that believe that crazy shit are going to be good with money? I know those guys, they’re all like that.” I think he has a point.
People that make bad decisions have money problems. Sometimes they try to start to businesses that aren’t viable and borrow money to do so. They frequently do this because they are suggestible and engage in a lot of magical thinking. They get fired from yet another landscaping company and decide to “go into business for themselves”, have no idea what they are doing, fail, and blame everyone but themselves. We tend to give “small business owners” as a class a lot of consideration and respect, but a lot of them own non-viable ventures that are a thin cover for unemployment.
People learn decision making from their parents. If your parents make bad decisions, maybe you are more likely to make bad decisions yourself.
The people that stormed the Capitol and tried to assassinate Congress made the worst decision ever, a bad decision that stands head and shoulders above a sea of really bad decisions.
They are probably really good at making bad decisions, and they’ve probably made a lot of them. And they probably make the kind of bad decisions that involve a lot of magical thinking. Which is a good way to describe January 6th.
I thought the exact same thing. They don’t have a good grasp of how to evaluate information sources, they make monumentally bad decisions, probably have a good amount of wishful/magical thinking. You’d expect that to lead to bad financial decisions.
Then again, I know I’ve seen research about how being under financial strain can cause people to make poorer financial decisions. Financial stress takes a mental toll. So, maybe it’s more complicated.
Many of those people at the Capitol riot were not doing financially badly, which you’re saying is an indicator of poor decision making. Their relative monetary success would indicate, by your standards, some good decision making. That belies your thesis. By your standard, many of these people were showing good decision making skills which led them to some monetary success despite some of their parents’ lack of monetary success.
78 percent of Americans were living paycheck to paycheck back in 2019. That percentage is surely higher now with all the people being laid off due to the pandemic. If you’re saying that all of them are poor decision makers, then there aren’t enough good decision makers to decide much of anything, especially winning an election. If all you’re saying is that some people who have money problems make bad decisions, that’s not saying much. With over 78% of the population living paycheck to paycheck, you could say that some people with money problems are X, and likely be right.
“People who make bad decisions have money problems” is not equal to “people who have money problems make bad decisions.” She didn’t say that, and it does not follow from what she did say – in fact it would be a fallacy.
And what she did say was not meant to be all- inclusive, as opposed to a tendency, I’d wager.
I didn’t say she did, necessraily. That’s why there’s more in the paragraph. Please keep reading.
ETA: You added this after I replied. If it’s just a tendency, then it doesn’t explain much since the first part shows that quite a number of Capitol rioters were financially doing ok.
You’re still getting it backwards, though. I didn’t fail to read.
Please explain.
This is what you said afterward.
The remark from Ann Hedonia was about people who make bad decisions having money problems. Not about people who have money problems making bad decisions. Saying one does not imply the other.
Like, if I said most felons come from divorced families,* that does not imply that most children of divorced parents are felons. Flipping it around that way is a logical fallacy.
*Made up statistic.
It must imply something or it doesn’t say anything at all… If most felons come from divorced families and the divorce rate is 80-90%, that doesn’t say much since most X comes from divorced families. Why bring up divorce at all, especially since the implication is that X is bad?
ETA: And especially since not having money was attributed to poor decision making. I guess in the case of divorce, one could make that implication as well, if they chose - that divorce is due to poor decision making, if one believed that.
If I say “all cats are mammals,” and you say, “so you’re saying all mammals are cats, that’s stupid and wrong,” you’ve created a straw man.
Yes. That’s not what happened here. So that straw man is not mine.
You even did it again here.
Not having money was not attributed to poor decision-making.
Anne Hedonia did not make a causation statement about people who don’t have money (mammals). She made a causation statement about people who make poor decisions (cats).
People who make poor decisions will tend to make poor financial decisions. Again, that does not imply that people who have financial problems tend to be people who make poor decisions. That is your straw man.
I don’t see the evidence for this in general or in the case of the Capitol rioters. In the case of the Capitol rioters, 40% of them had small businesses or were white collar workers. Many of them were at least comfortable. The argument was earlier made that if they were really poor off, they wouldn’t be there, they’d be working.
In general though, there are lots of people who have made poor decisions in other parts of their lives who have made good or lucky financial decisions.
The part where you predicate it on the word “tend” just means that you’re judging it after the fact. If people are poor and they’ve made decisions you disagree with, then the decision making is related. But if they’re rich and they’ve made decisions you disagree with, then it’s only a tendency.
I tried.
To what? Make a convincing argument? So did I.
Not obviously one that convinced you… . . or vice versa.
And yet, they had the time and money to make an expensive trip to Washington.
Not to mention, if they were having financial problems now, paying lawyers to defend yourself against federal felonies…is kinda expensive.