I see what you mean, TaxGuy. I suppose you could apply the ‘smarter means more money’ rule and it would work most of the time. It was just that all the exceptions where intelligence and $ worth have nothing to do with each other were bothering me, like:
Person is underemployed by choice
Person is handed a generous inheritance
Person had to go to bad school because they were poor, were discouraged in their schooling, go on to have a low-paying job despite intelligence
And there’s more, but you get the idea. Plus, there’s what McDuff pointed out, that it is more expensive to be poor (an idea I was introduced to in Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed).
You may be right, and I’m looking at the world with waaaay too idealized a view again. :o
We probably agree more on this than not, but the observation above seems risky to me.
Does the gangster have family or some sort of safety net in (fill in the blank better place?) Bus tickets to faraway places are expensive. Once he arrives he has to address food, clothing and shelter which, if good are expensive and if cheap may be no better than what he left. And how does he pay for all of this while he conducts his job search? In any economy, least of all this one, even a job as a mover can be hard to come by for someone who is unemployed, with no experience or contacts, especially if he is a minority or lacks the physical qualifications for the job.
How does he get all this money and if he can attain that much cash why not just stay put and accumulate more cash? What if he makes the trip and runs out of cash before he lands the job and is stranded in a faraway place without a safety net? Too many question marks and “what-ifs,” IMO. It wouldn’t be impossible and many may have done it, but without some sort of safety net it seems too risky, IMHO.
Yeah, what McDuff, Lorenzo and Magickly Delicious said. Also, Tax, you puzzle me when you say things like
then in the next breath claim the notion of poor people being as smart as rich people is “totally ludicrous”, citing a definite correlation between intelligence and lifetime income. Juh? So then poor people are as smart as rich people but face a myriad of obstacles as mentioned by many other posters including yourself, no?
I think there isn’t that much of an overall difference between the rich & poor re native intellingence.
In fact, the smartest man (on record at least), in america lives in a one-bedroom shack in Rhode Island. I saw that on Sixty Minutes, no joke.
I think it’s all about choices and this…
That it is. My income is not gargantuan by any means, but it is steady, and to me, that is far more valuable. Someone here said it’s more expensive to be poor. Damn Straight it is. So I insured my way out of it using one of the best ways I knew of. Debt. Debt, debt, debt. My interest rates at first were well in to the 20’s, but with a few years of excellent credit, I was able to consolidate nearly all of it down to under 4%. And here’s the funny thing. I am only 24 years old. However, the money I saved by not actually purchasing anything (and just making payments), is really starting to show. Any self made millionaire will tell you “Pay yourself first.” That’s what debt is for.
So, now I have a debt of close to $160,000 (My car, school loans, credit cards & a modest apartment I own), but this troubles me not at all, as my net worth is significantly greater than that. I do hope to be a millionaire one day, & think I will get there, but I can assure all who read that my intelligence doesn’t have much to do with it. I just know how to get overtime & what to do with it.
True, I am lucky in that I don’t have much in the way misfortune, but I am not a genious (unless they count an IQ of 147 as that nowadays, lol), but I think I am doing better than average.
I will not say it’s easy, but most of actually doing my job (I am a Police Officer), is more, erm, challenging than managing my pennies.
Rich people know how to make and keep money. Poor people dont. Thats the extent of their differences with regard to their financial status. If poor people knew how to make money, they wouldnt be poor anymore.
Smart is the ability to use what you know. Being intelligent doesnt make you smart and being smart doesnt mean you intelligent.
Rich people are money smart. Thats all you can say.
Hamish is one of the most brilliant people I know. But he’s quite poor. Why? Because he had to flee from his abusive family as a teenager. Everything he has, he’s had to fight tooth and nail for, and now he just has to keep running to stay in the same place. He’s “working poor”.
A lot or rich people inherited their money (as has been pointed out, but it really is a large number of them). Inheriting wealth takes no brains. Read some of Kurt Vonnegut’s recent books to get his take on the low brain activity level of the rich people he has encountered.
Some people who have gotten rich have done so using methods other than intelligence, e.g., Bill Gates by quite immoral (to me) methods.
OTOH, you can easily fool poor people to vote for a rich candidate but not the other way around.
I was listening to that program on the drive home last night. I believe if I can distill the message down to a sentence or two (discarding the words smart and dumb) it was this:
Poor people have as much ability to appreciate academic discourse as rich people. Whereas the government believes poor only have the ability to appreciate functional discourse.
BTW, “poor” as defined in the program, was “living within 150% of the National Poverty Line.” I don’t think many families of 2 working professors qualifies as “poor” under that definition! (for a family of 4 that is $24,000/year total income. For a single person that is $12,000/year income. 2003 figures.)
Willfully underemployed–I like it. Fits my SO and I to a tee. We both come from middle class families, both have college degrees, and we’re not dumb bunnies by any stretch of the imagination. Yet we both choose to work for non-profits that can’t pay much. Maybe we’re dumb in the sense that idealism is trumping financial ambition.
We were a family of 7 living on about $30 k. Maybe not blindingly poor, but definitely on the lower side of middle-class. Lots of tuna fish & peanut butter ! X-S, I think you put it as well as anyone else did.
I make very good money for my age and am an idiot. Not exactly a large sample size. I am personally equipped well enough to survive in an urban, free enterprise environment. This does not make me intelligent save by an extremely restrictive definition.
Some of the smartest people in the world were never wealthy. It is possible that some people spend a lot of time in their life thinking and doing important things, but not related to money. If a super intelligent person wants to be wealthy he can. But not everyone cares that much about money.
Offhand i know 5 wealthy people. Of them 3 were middle class until they had the balls to go into business for themselves (one refinaces mortgages & used to make around 80k, now he makes about $600k, another is a computer programmer, used to make 42k, now makes about 150k, one was a tech guy who is now an entrepreneur who makes around 800k, but has alot of overhead so his profit is probably 240k or so).
I guess my point is that personality traits like bravery, cunning and luck are more important than academic intellect when it comes to finances. I dont know why academic intellect is considered the epitome of accomplishment with kids.
There was a report on TV recently about a study that came out saying that “poor people are at least partially responsible for being poor”. They said there were 4 things that people did that contributed to their being poor.
[ul][li] dropped out of school.[/li][li] remained single.[/li][li] had a child out of wedlock.[/li][li] could not hold down a full-time job.[/ul][/li]There reason that I remember this report and all four points is that I have a daughter that scored 100%. She is very smart but uses it in the wrong manner. She was a foster child that we adopted and now that she is grown, she has re-established ties with her biological mother and sister, who also would score 100%. My feeling is that it is a cultural question.
burundi being willfully underemployed is different, but may also be cultural, but not the same as above. I would note however that you at least score 25%, but no worse than 50%.
I believe as others have said, that a big part of your success in life is a function of your role models. If your parents teach you to work hard and obey the law, you have an excellent chance of escaping poverty. What really dooms a lot ofpeople: the wholesale REJECTION of education! In many poor communities, children are conditioned to reject learning…take the black culture of “ebonics”. If you believe that ebonics is a cool way to speak, your success in business will most likely be limited. Again, children who refuse to master mathematics in school are in for a big disadvantage in adult life…poor math skills account for why the poordon’t unerstand compound interest, and frequently pay their bills via money orders (instead of having checking accounts!). I am constantly struck by how poor people don’t save…you willnote that these “rent to own” shops are commonly in poorer parts of town. When you “rent” a TV set, you wind up paying 3 times the price? If these people saved the money for 6-8 months, they could buy the set outright…instead, they become slaves.
“Ebonics” is COOL to speak. The perception that it’s inferior language makes it dangerous to speak in formal situations, but speaking it in general does not require a rejection of learning. I’m highly educated and I speak it.
(I just knew someone was going to go there with “black culture”, too. It’s a predicatable thing around here.)
I don’t believe poor people are stupid. Both of my parents came from relatively poor families. They were both the only people in their families to be able to go to college, my father because he was the youngest, my mother because she was the only one in the family who wanted to go. But they weren’t any more intelligent than their parents or their siblings; their hard work and a whole bunch of luck is what set them apart. Because they went to college, they were able to score good jobs, and as a result they had more choices in their life. Both parents were the only ones in their families to move out of their hometowns, hundreds of miles aways. They knew that if they stayed home, their children’s progress would be delayed. And they were right. Every time I visit my cousins in Indiana, it’s painfully obvious that my immediate family has had advantages that they haven’t.
As far as the value of giving poor children a liberal arts education like middle-class or rich kids, I think this is a good thing. Not all poor kids are going to go to vocational schools. Some of them will have what it takes to go to college. If you deny them equal education in grammar school, then you are in effect denying them the ability of raising themselves up by their bootstraps. If that’s the case, then you can’t blame the poor for being poor…the blame will fall on those who perpetuate inequality. So in a nutshell, it is good that this guy is advocating what he is. He’s helping poor people help themselves by saying they can achieve through education. Would the OP prefer he teach poor people to be satisfied with their position in life and keep begging for hand-outs?
