I understand, indeed, I feel, the temptation to want to get revenge on all the idiots I hated growing up, and who still mess with my life all the time. With that said, others in this thread have shown how that can have very counterproductive results at times.
I agree with what Tim Minchin had to say when he got his honorary doctorate.
I will have to add that no mater who you are there are things and items that you will remain an ignorant about, but the most frightening thing IMHO is what age and other factors can lead one to make terrible mistakes.
Aging can be a factor that does not care how smart you were before, but one thing I think is happening too is that the bad guys do figure the mechanisms that in our adult life allowed us to identify scams and other dangers; but the scammers and criminals are relentless, eventually they will figure out workarounds for the most common “common sense” concepts that we had when we were young and I think many will suffer and get very uneasy with life as we all will find how our smart ways to deal with the dangers now will be twisted or nasty workarounds will be developed against them.
We really need to have organizations that will be aware of the dangers as they will find them in the future and help us in our later years to deal with the evolving scammers and criminals.
Stupid and desperate are very often confused. Pay check loans are for stupid people. They are also for people in desperate need.
I don’t think our benchmarks for justice require a distinction.
So your concern is being taken advantage of?
The government being taken advantage of. Taxpayers fund it.
This already happens in family bankruptcies. People (some people, some times) go wild with credit cards, knowing that bankruptcy is coming and there’s no way out. Instead of slowing down as they approach the cliffs of doom…they speed up. Why not? Have a few good dinners, see a few movies, max out the cards…then go to bankruptcy filing.
It’s one of those things that’s hard to prove, and hard to regulate against without doing harm to more reasonable people who fall into bankruptcy without taking advantage of it in that way.
Yeah, good point.
I think we put too much stock in “common sense”. I think we do this because common sense fits nicely within a Fair World framework. If everyone is equipped with the same knowledge of how the world works, then everyone should know what’s dumb-shit behavior and what isn’t. So if you do something that’s dumb shit and you suffer for it, then you have no one else to blame but yourself. And you’ll need to suffer the consequences.
My problem with this logic is that it presumes suffering the consequences automatically makes a person smarter and less likely to screw up again. But even intelligent people don’t know when they are screwing up. How can learn your lesson when you don’t even know what the lesson is?
Nm
Everyone is stupid about something.
Maybe you’re stupid about how cars work. You buy a used car with a blown head gasket. Why didn’t you check the dipstick to see if there is water in the oil?
Maybe you’re stupid about exponents in math. You sign a loan contract that starts out with a 1% interest rate. The rate doubles each month that the loan is not paid in full. This is presented as an “incentive” for early payment. You don’t pay the loan off for 12 months. Why didn’t you do the math and determine that in the 12th month the interest rate will be 2048%?
Maybe you’re stupid about building construction and purchase a poorly constructed house.
You get the idea.
So, should there be some societal protections against doing stupid things? Sometimes, yes.
There is a group of people in the US who view the country primarily as a market. As capitalists, they want access to this market unfettered by government regulation. They believe that any private contract they can get someone to agree to should should be between them and the contracted party. So, any sucker is fair game.
Others, like me, view the country primarily as a society, with capitalism serving as one of the engines of society, but not its primary purpose.
In my view, the primary goal is the advancement of the society as a whole. Some of the achievements of an advanced society would be universal health care, basic
food and shelter–for all citizens.
In this regard, some other countries have achieved a more advanced civilization than the US.
**On providing basic living requirements for all **
I’m very much in favor of this. And they are attempting this in Switzerland, so it’s not some crackpot idea.
Some people object to the idea because there are some people who will sit around and do nothing.
There may be some number of people who would be content with a life consisting of doing absolutely nothing, all the time. I’ve never met any of these people. The “welfare queens” are generally a myth. I know of no reliable measurement of the number of potentially “do nothing” people in society. If you have such statistics, please provide them.
I hope this thread continues. It touches on some good topics for debate.
I’m in favor of regulations, limits on interest one can charge, rules against exploitation, etc. But at a certain point, you can’t bail out people for every mistake. If someone routinely overspends, then he or she simply has to learn to keep things within budget. It’s one thing to not know how to replace a car tire or use a smart phone. It’s another thing to buy a $10,000 car using loans when you’re already deeply in debt.
I say this, by the way, as someone who has a lot of personal experience with overspending and not staying under budget.
Or…what? What happens if they don’t learn that?
But I don’t think this about intelligence as much as common sense. Plenty of people know nothing about cars but know enough to bring a used car to their mechanic, or to have a inspector take a look through the house they want to buy. The question is really what to do about people who lack common sense–people who don’t know what they don’t know, so to speak. I’m not taking a position on this thread though, and I agree with you that it’s an interesting topic.
What should we do/how should we feel about the stupid?
We shouldn’t re-elect them to congress, and we should feel disgusted by them. But apparently we do re-elect them, and we like the ones in our own district.
I don’t see a contradiction between saying that there are plenty of people who make poor choices for a number of reasons, one of which may be a lack of intelligence (although I’ve known enough people with what we generally think of as intelligence who also make bad financial and personal decisions), and we can’t stop them from spending too much money on lottery tickets or video games or other dumb stuff, and also saying that we can regulate exploitative business practices (like payday lending or extreme pricing at “rent-to-own” stores).
I mean, what’s so terrible about usury laws? We’ve always had them. It’s just that lately we’ve carved out some exceptions, and as a result, some business people see an opportunity to exploit the poor. Or the stupid.
We can regulate that without turning into a nanny state.
Does anyone believe the problem is lack of ability to multiply?
You could have sat down with the prospective rent-to-owner, and said, “If you do this, you’ll end up paying eight times what this sofa is worth.”
And the response would be, “When can they deliver it?”
The issue is not lack of mathematical insight. It’s a conviction that no matter how poor you are, in America you’re entitled to nice things like sofas and iPads.
We have a wildly popular TV program where we laugh at people much smarter than normal disdaining normal people just in the way normal people disdain the dumb. But when the smart people do it it is arrogance. Interesting, no?
There are a lot of psychological factors about why people make bad financial decisions. A financial columnist for the Times wrote a book about how he got drowned in debt.
One good way of fixing this is regulation. If the rules about doing credit checks were enforced, a lot of “dumb” people who got bad loans never would have gotten them. Worried about someone buying $10,000 in lottery tickets? Don’t allow it. (Credit checks for too big purchases, perhaps?) There are lots of other examples.
I don’t think that’s quite it – I think it’s more unreasonable expectations and poor foresight. “Sure, I can pay for the second car – I’ll just pickup a few extra shifts.” But oops – they forgot about their uncle’s birthday next week, their kid gets really sick, the car gets broken into, they don’t get the extra shifts, etc. The difference between poor and middle class, I think, is the ability to absorb such unforeseen bad events without losing one’s home, transportation, medical care, etc., or resorting to payday loans at the last minute to make up the difference (which just postpones the pain).
I realize this is snarky and tongue in cheek. But I would suspect the average Congressman is significantly more intelligent than the average American. It’s hard to rise to that level of power through grueling elections, campaigning, answering questions, pulling strings, navigating the shark-infested waters of politics, swaying wealthy donors, etc. without possessing significant cunning and brains. Many have degrees from prestigious universities.
Are some malicious, conniving, evil or manipulative? Yes, of course. But the average IQ of our 535 Congressmen? I’d suspect it’s noticeably higher than 100.
You would think that is the case, but no.
As Jon Stewart shows with clips from a science, space and technology hearing it is the Republicans specially the ones with the problem. The scientist that had to deal with the majority of the reps had the Sisyphean task of pushing several “million pounds of idiot up a mountain”
I have seen virtually all republicans doing that in the past, and that is sadly just last month, by now if they had any intelligence they would already had realized that what they are doing is really gambling with the future of the world and the USA.