Yes, and for many others it isn't. They work very hard and are still screwed. To highlight and rail on one and not the other, particularly when there's far more evidence to support the latter, exposes your own prejudices.

Personal decisions are huge. I shouldn't have to explain this. If you have children that's a huge burden especially as an unmarried, single parent. In fact, that's probably the biggest predictor of poverty. Do you know how much raising a child costs? Around $250k from cradle to the time they're 18. Now lets just throw in 3 kids.

My approach is to examine the micro before we approach the macro.

I'm going by brookings institute here - a left wing institute.

Top 3 predictors of poverty:

1. Graduating from high school.

2. Waiting to get married until after 21 and do not have children till after being married.

3. Having a full-time job.

If you do all those three things, your chance of falling into poverty is just 2 percent. Meanwhile, you’ll have a 74 percent chance of being in the middle class.

https://www.jacksonville.com/article/20120127/OPINION/801258741

It's really quite a good article.

If only good jobs (whatever that even is) gets you coverage then that means poor people just get shafted (again), besides the lower wages they also have to pay more for healthcare because their coverage is worse or non-existent and they usually have worse lifestyle choices requiring more healthcare.

We have like 74 million people on medicare. Another maybe 6-7 million who are eligible but don't sign up. We also have another 20 million veterans who again get free, government healthcare. government involvement in healthcare is huge in the US. the government will subsidize you if you're low income. the ones who get shafted are the middle class who do earn pay but they get squeezed a little. everybody agrees that healthcare needs reform in the US the issue is how exactly to do it, but don't pretend like we're just on a private, free market system right now.

What happens after the confusions are dispelled? Does that speak to the veracity of the cleared ground, or is it simply a case of being better off to do whatever else is required than before? I'm always wary of leaving the implicit accounts our use of language has as the final word, when their analysis is intended only to be the first.

According to Wittgenstein the philosophical problems disappear when the confusions are dispelled.

I'm not sure if you are bilingual or not, but if you aren't -- trust me, a language isn't just a collection of words and grammar it's a worldview with its own implicit assumptions and ways of categorizing the world. Philosophical problems which arise in one language may not arise in another and other languages may give rise to philosophical problems that english speakers would consider ridiculous.

Who was he talking to when he said that? Whenever someone mentions whipping in conjunction with a winking face my mind can't help but go there.

it seems to me you believe we're not in fact living in a rigged economy and plutocracy, and that systemic biases either don't exist or are minimal.

When you say "rigged" I think casino games. I don't believe that there is a council of evil billionaires at the top who spend their time trying to keep poor people poor. I do believe that certain laws and regulations work against the poor though.

Obviously some people have advantages and others have disadvantages. Come to think of it, even if the system were 100% meritocratic I think a strong case could be made that it would still be unfair. After all, it's no one's fault if one were to have a learning disability or autism.

Remember when we were talking about having a productive conversation? I feel like this isn't it. I'm happy to steer the convo into my productive waters though.

Are you saying that people are poor because they are not financially responsible?

Not necessarily, but this is the case for some people.

No, Welfare queens and other outlier examples, which are used to justify cutting funding and a general hatred towards the poor, are rare. I put the entire context in -- in case it was an accident that you left it out.

This discussion isn't about welfare queens. I never mentioned that term or said that poor people are abusing the welfare system. I'm solely concerned with economic mobility and I cited data which stated that only 1 in 5 white people who grew up in the bottom 10% actually stayed as adults and 42% of blacks do. Sure, like winning the lottery.

Sure. What's your point?

Financial responsibility is first and foremost a personal responsibility.

I'm sure plenty of people do it, as I've stated before. Many more try very hard and fail to do so.

I just can't believe you when you say that the American dream is a myth or like winning the lottery when I grew up in a neighborhood where most people were maybe 1st or 2nd generation immigration who came over to the US with not much money and yet here we are in a decent neighborhood. You make out economic mobility to be a myth when I just don't think that's the case.

but when it comes to the American Dream of "if you just work hard enough, sky's the limit," we all have to become delusional.

It's not just about hard work. You're putting up an easy, naive target here that no one really believes.

Yeah, and those grapes they eat are probably sour anyway.

I'm being 100% honest I would not want the job.

"Probably right." I love this. I guess you're a true believer in the American dream. Fine. Don't let me disillusion you if it makes you happy. But in my view, it's a complete delusion

Then why has my family done it? Why did I grow up around people who also did it? Apparently none of us exist in your world.

Because this is very rare. You can always find outliers to justify your general attitude, but it ignores the wider and much more important data.

Escaping poverty is very rare? I don't think so.

"Recent research has uncovered striking racial differences in the likelihood of upward mobility (Corcoran & Matsudaira, 2005; Isaacs, 2007; Kearney, 2006; Mazumder, 2005). An analysis of data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) revealed that 42% of Blacks born in the bottom tenth of the income distribution remained in the same income bracket as adults. Only 17% of Whites showed this same pattern."

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4108157/

Even with this racial inequality you still have most blacks escaping this situation.

I'm not talking about going from poor to rich. Going from poor to lower middle class is a huge accomplishment.

I'm interested in longitudinal studies which follow individuals across time here.

"If."

That issue is retirement. Shouldn't be too hard to recognize. If someone is earning decent money and does not save any of it and wakes up at age 65 one day and is annoyed that they have to keep working then I'm sorry but you've made your own bed.

Well since you yourself are one of these "people," do you consider yourself helpless? OK then, neither to they. That's not what I'm suggesting. I'm dealing with facts, on which we presumably agree: one group of people do not have access to the same resources and do not get the same opportunities as another group of people. You, for example, will never be a general or a CEO. Never.

I would never want to be a general, have you ever seen one come to a military base? They have zero privacy. They need a caravan of security and other high ranking officers around them at all times. God, what a terrible life.

You're also probably right that I'll never be a CEO of some big company, but who cares about working at a big company? The beautiful thing about this economy is that you can be your own boss. It's entirely within the realm of possibility to start your own business where you can be your own CEO.

I'm also a bit of a mover and a shaker, by the way. My salary is not my only form of income. I'm a semi-professional poker player (live near a casino), pretty decent investor/trader, and churning credit cards has netted me a few extra grand here and there. But I suppose none of this stability "really" matters because I'll never be a fortune 500 CEO or a billionaire. Your attitude contributes to your problem. Wealth isn't made in a day, it's often made through generations. Just upping yourself by one class and being able to raise your children in that class is a huge accomplishment. It's sad that you don't see this.

Going from working class to middle class may be considered "upward mobility," I suppose. But, like I said, that's really an illusion. You have as much power in this country as myself or a janitor.

Okay, I'll have to tell some of my co-workers that their move out of poverty and section 8 housing and food stamps into the actual middle class is all just an "illusion." The home they own and the stability they now have means zero because they're not a billionaire able to influence politics and buy senators.

Do you tell overweight people who just ran their first 5k that their time wasn't great?

Even a 1% percenter will never have the wealth that Bloomberg does. How much actual political power do you think someone with, say, $10M has in the grand scheme of things? Tell it Martin Shkreli and Harvey Weinstein (who both had more than $10M).

I'm sure you feel proud about it, to the point where you can now look down on the people making less money than you or not taken care of by the government as you are, as simply weak and lazy and stupid. It's a very self-serving position: I got to where I am because of hard work and merit, and anyone else can as well if they weren't so lazy and didn't choose to be coddled.

Yes, on my free time I enjoy walking around in uniform and telling homeless people to "get a job" and minimum wage earners to "work harder." It's really great fun.

The military was a last ditch effort for me, so now I'm not some flag waving working class conservative. I honestly don't even care what people do or how much they earn, but if someone is going to do nothing to even attempt to get their situation in order and then blame the system on it I'm so done with them.

If someone is able to foresee a problem 40-50 years away and proceeds to ignore it and then finds themselves in dire straits, well, maybe look to yourself first before blaming the entire system.

Yes, there is risk involved there, in the sense that high-reward investment will involve a lot of short-term ups and downs along the way toward gradual long-term gains.

There is no gradual long term gain most of the time with riskier assets. This is especially the case the riskier you go - look at how many small cap altcoins (cryptocurrencies) just crash in value and go to 0. Same thing with penny stocks. Even if you invest in like 100 penny stocks there's absolutely no guarantee you're going to end up "winning big." This isn't how it works.

There is a likely long term gain with the S&P, but that is over like a 30 year time period. If you're going to go picking individual stocks or crypto you can lose a considerable amount of your investment. There is no long term prize for holding. There's only your belief that there is one.

In any case I still do invest in the S&P. I believe in the long-term value proposition and I would like for poorer families to build up an emergency fund and have that excess capital to where they can afford to take on some risk and put money in the stock market and pile it away for the long term. This is way different from telling them to invest in penny stocks or random cryptocurrencies though.

The real issue is if the ways to get out of povetry diminish or grow.

That's a good way to look at it.

In our meritocratic World education is the important way for upward social mobility. If there are no stipends, no way for even a very talented pupil to get into the best schools, then there is a huge problem. If the only route is joining the armed forces...that cannot be good.

I agree, joining the armed forces shouldn't be the go-to solution. My generation was often told growing up to get an education and you'll be fine. I'm a millennial by the way, and I don't think this vision imparted by our parents has really panned out. We're saddled with student debt and many of us have degrees which aren't particularly useful for the real world.

There are plenty of scholarships, by the way. There are also state schools which offer a heavily discounted price to in-state students (and these schools are often quite decent.) If you're looking at a private college it can be quite expensive (think around $50k/year USD if not more) and it's questionable how much it's worth it at this point especially if someone is going for, say, art history. Someone could be spending $200k over 4 years for an art history degree, and this often means going into debt.

Personally, I think people should work with their strengths. I have a few friends who are quieter guys and good students and they do fine as engineers. I know other who, while okay students, are much more charismatic and have been doing well as salespeople. School shouldn't break the bank. There's also trade school, but in practice many of the upper middle class wouldn't want to send their child there out of pride. It's totally a pride thing.

That doesn't make it "fine". However, if 70% of the population was drinking and driving I would think it ridiculous to think I am going to solve (even partially) that problem by saying, "hey, why don't all you people stop drunk driving and act right!"

I wouldn't expect me simply saying "hey, stop drunk driving!" to solve the problem, but it still is one's responsibility not to do that. Personal finance is more of a personal thing, and I don't know your situation, but for me it's been very relevant.

We can talk about vague, abstract notions like responsibility all day, but for me it was simply having an experience where in college I had a brush with poverty. I very clearly remember not having money for a sandwich and the guy behind the counter was nice enough to give it to me for free. My bank account was drained due to automatic charges which I simply didn't really care enough (or know how) to monitor and I kept wondering what happened to everything. I don't ever want to be in that situation again.

And what if they are born with flat feet, so the army doesn't want them?

Lucky for you, flat feet are no longer disqualifying. Even if a condition is disqualifying you can get a waiver (as I did.) The military is only one option. Will trade school disqualify you for having flat feet?

Will she find a proper job when she grows up, to pay the healthcare bill? And what if she is too lazy to do the work?

People with disabilities are in a different category. They can get government assistance and we can't expect them do the same things that abled people would do. One of the people I went to school with has Williams Syndrome which means he has an IQ of maybe around 60ish. He's very friendly and he does work part time at a community center or something along those lines. Obviously we can't hold the same expectations for these people as someone else who is able.

To argue this is all merit-based, simply a matter of proper work ethic or motivation, is simply not true.

It's not all merit based and it's not all based on hard work. But you know what? Hard work couldn't hurt.

Class matters.

Absolutely.

The idea that you can "move upwards" is an illusion.

Then why do I - someone who is enlisted military - work around plenty of people who were born into poverty and are now middle class and able to afford homes? Some service members own several homes. This is just not true.

You know there are plenty of examples of people who simply don't get the opportunities or resources that other people do.

People are just a helpless bunch, aren't they?

But each play costs $1,000.

I've mentioned this before: There is no minimum cost to enter stocks or cryptocurrency. You could throw $5 into an extremely high risk one.

Investing in start ups is a different game, I'll agree with you there.

You're treating investment like it's a blackjack table with a $20k minimum or something and despite being a good deal a loss means losing everything. This isn't how normal investments operate. Maybe this is how start-up investment is.... I don't know. I don't invest in start ups. I do know that venture capitalism definitely does require expertise and remember my start up fact from last post: Something like 90% of start ups go broke within the first few years. You could easily invest in 10 or 20 start ups and they all fail. It's not statistically an inevitability that all of the start ups you invest in will earn you money in the long-run. You could just go broke (and plenty of VCs do lose money.)

I am not defending the current financial system either. I hate the accredited investor system which gives higher net worth individuals investment access to riskier, early-stage investments deemed "too risky" for normal folks. I think the rationale here is paternalism, but in any case I'm against it.

I don't even care about reforming the system anymore; it's beyond redemption. Burn it down. It's outrageous that banks and other companies charge so much for remittances.

That's why I'm into crypto, if you can't tell. We're building our own system. You're welcome to join us. Plenty of risk and no minimums, I guarantee it.

A clear example of the rich getting richer and poor getting poorer is found in predatory lending, which pretty much all banks are involved with, btw. With low-risk, someone with 10k to spare could get a high return. Low-income and desperate borrowers pay a ridiculously high-interest rate.

Where is this low risk high return for $10k?

Since the discussion is about whether the rules should be changed, your back-stepping doesn't make much sense in the context of this thread.

You asked why the taxpayer would want more money in their pocket. I gave my answer: Freedom.

That's not how the steps we just walked through work out.

If someone has $100 in the S&P and someone else has $1,000,000 in the S&P who do you think suffered more pain this week? Who do you think had the bigger loss? It's all about exposure. If you're taking on more risk you'll reap bigger rewards and suffered bigger losses.

If someone only has upside risk and no personal downside risk something is very, very wrong. I'm thinking here of bankers in 2008.

First of all, your math still wouldn't add up to less than millions for the security you're talking about.

I'm not saying you have complete financial independence at that level, but you have a really nice cushion and more freedom than people who are living paycheck to paycheck. If someone has $250k of liquid assets and their monthly expenses are $4k they could literally spend years doing nothing.

But that aside, it's striking to me that your idea of "freedom" comes with such a narrow view of how one ought to live.

My version of freedom (financial independence) allows to spend and use that money however you want. I'm not telling you that you should do anything. Sit in your house and smoke weed all day for all I care. Go travel. But if you want - and only if you're actually interested in having this freedom - you should tend to try to be fiscally responsible.

A poor person who spends $30/week on starbucks coffee is harming their financial future. A rich person who does the same is not. Again, not my rules, just the reality of the game we're in.

You might talk about how sure, one can take other risks, yada yada, but then you fall back on the "right" choices people have to make in order to survive in your world.

This isn't my world. I don't make the rules. If you want to spend all your money on time shares or expensive cars or whatever I don't care, but don't go railing about how evil capitalism is when you come up short paying the bills or find that you can't retire as early as you thought you could.

Okay great. And you said earlier that more risk comes with greater rewards. Combine those two things then: the more wealth you have, the more risk you can afford to take, and so the greater rewards you can reap. Mentioning that risk is a factor in the middle there doesn't change the basic connection of more wealth to greater rewards... and less wealth to greater costs, conversely. Which was my original point. The involvement of risk doesn't negate any of that.

you can associate greater wealth with greater numerical gains just like you can associate greater wealth with greater numerical loss. it's two sides of the same coin and to ignore one side isn't right. at the end of the day though it's up to the portfolio owner how much risk they're is prepared to take on. i know plenty of well off people who take very little risk.

i don't necessarily associate less wealth to greater costs, but i do acknowledge that poverty has costs. if by costs you mean investment losses this is definitely not the case.

You do know that you are here praising the virtues of the government as an employer, the role of the public sector.

Yes, I've been employed by them for over 5 years now. I work alongside plenty of Americans who come from pretty considerable poverty. You'll never see me advocating America dismantle its state or its military.

There are costs though. There's a loss of freedom. You may find yourself dependent on the system and the paycheck (but not necessarily so, I have seen financially responsible people avoid this.) Some of the medical care is suspect. I'm 100% transparent about my experience in the military.

Someone's first responsibility to themselves. I'll 100% stand by someone joining the military to get out of poverty.

The more wealth you have, the more risk you can afford to take.

Thank you, now you're speaking my language. I agree!

If there is some gamble you can take where for 49% of the time you lose everything and 51% of the time you win a million times what you put in, and you've got enough cash to take that bet over and over again thousands of times, losing as much as you need to to get that big win, then you're virtually guaranteed to come out ahead. But if you can only afford to lose once and then you don't have anything to gamble with at all anymore, that's an awful bet.

This bet is insanely good. In fact, you could be losing 99% of the time and winning 1% but its still a bet you should absolutely be taking if that pay out is 1,000,000x. That said if there was that 99% chance of ruin you should not be throwing your entire portfolio at it whether that portfolio is large or small.

The mistake you're making here is that you're seemingly supposing that the poor (or middle class person, maybe?) must throw their entire portfolio at this investment. If the poor person only had 1k to invest and if they lose they go broke, they could only allocate, say, 5% or 10% of their portfolio to riskier investments which promise higher rewards. You don't need to buy a whole stock or a whole bitcoin.

1,000,000x returns are kind of unheard of though.... for the sake of discussion lets just say a riskier investment could return 10x or 100x and have a high risk of ruin. For such investments whether you're dealing with a $100 portfolio or a $10,000,000 portfolio you should generally only allocate a smaller % of your total portfolio.

tl;dr: You're making it sound like we're at a roulette table where the table minimum is like $10k when this is not the case.

A huge chunk of my net worth is in stocks. I lost thousands of dollars overnight, several days in a row, this week. And I don't care, because I don't need that money immediately, I can afford to wait for the market to recover, and the drop wasn't even enough to undo the unearned gains I've made from having that money invested for just a few years now.

That's a good mentality.

While someone who really needed that money soon... probably shouldn't have had it somewhere risky like stocks, and so wouldn't have been making those kinds of returns on it if they were doing the smart thing and not risking it, and would have just lost something they can't afford to lose if they had been desperate and reckless enough to risk it anyway.

Yes, the poor are generally not able to take advantage of the stock market which is a shame even if it does sometimes lose money. This is where some like Dave Ramsey or a financial advisor would come in and take a good hard look at what this person is doing and what their life circumstances are and how these can be improved. It is unfortunate though that those without money cannot take advantage of the market. There's a billion questions I could ask about this though: Is this person working? Are they addicted to drugs? Are they financially irresponsible? What kind of lifestyle choices have they made that have got them here? Every situation is unique. Maybe they're in the process of training or schooling for a better job. Nobody feels bad for med students who will be graduating soon.

Individual people and families are no different in that respect. Poverty costs you money on an ongoing basis. Wealth gains you money on an ongoing basis.

Poverty is expensive; I get that. I get that there are added costs there. You'll never find me defending modern banking practices which charge overdraft fees which disproportionately target the poor. Yet, you still see plenty of people overcome poverty. I know you saw my last post.

Wealth does not automatically generate more wealth though and I don't know where this idea comes from. It certainly can sometimes, but it's not automatic. Who do you think got hit the hardest these past few days with the stock market? The poor don't really have money in stocks, the rich got soaked with the recent stock market crash. Certainly if we're talking investment we're talking risk. If we're talking business we're also talking a huge amount of risk: most start ups fail. It's really no easy task to do even if you have decent starting capital. I think something like 90% of start ups fail within the first few years.

I'm much more comfortable talking about investment here because it's something I do regularly and read up about. I guarantee you that wealth invested does not automatically mean more wealth. The more risk you're willing to take on the higher the prospective returns.

One thing you consistently have a hard time grasping is risk and you speak in huge generalities (as is characteristic of you) when you just say that wealth generates more wealth. It might generate you more wealth; it can also crash and you can lose money like you never thought was possible.

It's an enormous, nigh-impossible uphill battle to get from the poverty most people are born into up to a truly middle class position (where returns on investment cancel out servicing debts, so your changes in wealth are truly down to your own actions)

You can literally join the military from a poor family and become middle class. By middle class I am going by income levels and lifestyle (home ownership is high among members of the armed forces), which is how middle class is generally defined.

And THE FACT that MOST people are NOT financially responsible doesn't affect that opinion at all?

Not at all. It would be like if drunk driving rates were to skyrocket in this country and you saw me getting into my car drunk; could I just tell you: "well MOST people drive drunk, it's fine!"

You can literally educate yourself for free on this topic. There's a billion resources and it's vastly relevant to your life if you're not already rich and you're concerned about your financial well-being.

You seem to support Social Security, which exists exactly because the government realized that people would NOT be financially responsible unless they are forced.

As a rule I don't really believe in paternalism and I feel that money could be better invested elsewhere. I don't want to turn this into a discussion about social security though. You will (hopefully) be getting paid it out though.

It is not about him being a perfect example. It is about the fact that he is FAR more responsible than most.

I honestly don't even know about this. I've already had this discussion with him and given him several suggestions. I gave him a podcast to listen to about the topic of real estate investment and he refused to listen to it. I don't know how his financial responsibility compares to the rest of the country. He's doing somethings right and somethings he could be doing better.

Uh, they would never teach that in school because it would slow the economy as people buy less stuff...right?

Yeah, maybe, I don't know. I don't know why schools don't teach certain subjects, but regardless its still something you should be familiar with.

One cannot learn about X unless X is a part of one's life. I think that you grossly underestimate the sheer differences in everyday thought of those who've been born into struggle, and those who've not.

Do poor people have access to the internet? Can they watch Dave Ramsey? Is there a library near them? I don't know, but given economics is invariably thread into life and always a factor you'd think people would be a bit more interested in it. I just don't buy the argument that poor people can't possibly educate themselves on fiscal responsibility. I've seen plenty of them do it. I work with plenty of them.

I would bet the farm that wealthy people spend far far more money on frivolous items than poor people do. Fiscal responsibility you say???

Yes, because they can actually afford to and it's just not a problem for them. Rich people have other problems (I'd be happy to discuss these; the rich still have things that can ruin them.) Fiscal responsibility can still be a problem for rich people if they overspend, they would just have to overspend on big ticket items. Fiscal responsibility when it comes to everyday items (coffee, groceries, etc.) is a much more relevant issue for the poor or middle class.

And the fact that the greatest predictor of a child’s future wealth is the wealth of their parents doesn’t contradict that at all?

Prediction isn't fate, and you're ultimately responsible for yourself. I hate to say this, but if all else fails just join the military (preferably Air Force). I work with a ton of people from poor backgrounds who thanks to their job will be middle class.

EDIT: I should also mention that there is no risk of dying in most Air Force jobs these days. My field doesn't even get deployed.

I have little sympathy for people who can see a problem coming, oh, 40-50 years in the future and not do anything about it. If you don't take care of your life that's not my problem. Get a side hustle. Get a better job. Train as a welder or an electrician. Move to a cheaper area. It's not someone's fault for being into poverty, but it is their fault if they die poor. Plenty of people don't care to try to advance. Not my problem.

I would estimate that no more than 40% of Americans retire with "and then some". What do you think the percentage is?

Have they been paying into social security (I hope so). Have they been paying into a 401k? How about a roth ira? I don't have statistics on this at the moment. If someone retires with 0 in savings that's not the fault of capitalism or the evil system (there are some rare possible exceptions....)

Lets be very clear what I'm saying here: I am not saying that everything is hunky dory and that life is totally fair. This isn't an argument about capitalism, all I am saying is that financial responsibility is your responsibility first and foremost. If you don't take ownership of it, it will take ownership of you.

There are very few extremely financially responsible people out there like @Pfhorrest. (someone who can retire and then some off of a median income). If most people are NOT financially responsible it seems unfair (and wrong?) to suggest that everyone should be.

I've already had a talk like this with Pfhorrest and I refuse to hold him up as a perfect example of personal fiscal responsibility. I've already had this discussion with him and I don't feel like rehashing it. He's doing somethings fine but he can certainly improve.

Everyone should absolutely be financially responsible just like everyone shouldn't drink and drive... this holds true even if some people have a really hard time with it. Fiscal responsibility is a basic requirement of adulthood and it's a shame they don't really teach it in school. They only exception would be if you're extremely wealthy.

I'm not sure you have a good grasp on how long money will stretch in this economy...

I'm entirely aware. I'm just a single guy with no kids in a medium cost of living area. I'm entirely familiar with my monthly expenses. Obviously if you're a single mom with 3-4 kids it's a completely different ball game. Children can absolutely drive someone into poverty; they're massively expensive.

You don't need to be a billionaire. Think much, much smaller. You don't even need a million to start feeling the effects.

You mean in the hands of your employer, the market, and the corporations from which you buy the goods for your "freedom and security."

If we're talking savings and investment then I can pretty much go with where ever I want. I can choose to risk it in the market or not. I could keep it all in a savings account or my mattress or a safe. I could bury it.

With enough money you don't need to rely on an employer.

Thinking it's all in your own hands and only yours is pretty naive, no matter which system you choose.

I take risks. I don't determine the outcome of these risks, but I choose to take them. I deal as best as I can with the hand that I am dealt.

When Europeans have adequate health care and education provided to ALL of their citizens that helps them attain freedom and security.

Am I right? Or are you? Or are we both right from some perspective? Obviously, it must be the last one, which makes statements like this entirely worthless...right?

Personally, I would pretty much always go for financial independence over having slim savings despite good public services. I understand public services are good, but the freedom provided when you have enough money to retire and then some is much preferable IMO. I favor placing my own financial future first and foremost into my own hands as opposed to hoping the government with its services can provide for me.

So far your contribution is at the level of a five-year-old. Good job! - if you're five. is there anything you can articulate that any of us can respond to?

He's confused, and it's a confusing topic - and this is coming from someone who has taken an upper level philosophy course on the topic years ago. If it can confuse people who have studied philosophy for years he's well within his right to be confused here.

However, I have never understood why Wittgenstein would be a genius. I have never seen anything Wittgenstein wrote, reused at all, by anyone, and in any other context. Seriously, I have never seen anybody doing anything even remotely useful with his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus or his posthumously published notes.

You can divide wittgenstein into "late wittgenstein" and "early wittgenstein." Early wittgenstein is tractatus, while late wittgenstein is philosophical investigations and I believe his essay "on certainty." philosophical investigations is a total reversal of tractatus (I have read the former but not the latter.) philosophical investigations is basically a critique on a platonic/a correspondence theory of language which, as wittgenstein believes, gives rise to philosophical problems (most notably metaphysical ones.) by shifting how we conceive of language, according to wittgenstein, many of these philosophical problem disappear (but certainly not all of them - for instance obviously ethics is still an issue regardless.)

If money is good because of the other things it provides, it's not an end in itself, first of all.

You are technically right here, but in society money is what will actually provide these things and come to think of it I can't think of any other ways of attaining freedom and security. Money is intimately connected with the two.

Second, the freedom and security of any working adult should be inherently guaranteed and not be dependent on their relative wealth.

It's nice that you believe that but we're talking about the world as it is. When american taxpayers have more money in their pockets after taxes that helps them attain freedom and security.

Biden has shot up in the polls and he's now ahead of Bernie on the betting sites. Total insanity. It's such a generational thing too - my parents (mid to late 50s) like Biden because he's more middle of the road and he'll do what the establishment tells him unlike Bernie who they consider too far left and in their opinion is likely to be less cooperative. It's like the total opposite of what I hear you hear on reddit and other social media sites mostly run by young people.

I'm starting to think there's a deep generational divide. I don't even think I know any younger people who support Biden.

Meanwhile I'm just sitting over here as someone who's right of center and watching the left duke it out.

You and I, and hopefully others, who show up for this conversation, on this forum, with the assumption that many people are acting irrationally, against their interests, can then have a more fruitful conversation -- cooperatively trying to figure out that question. If we get too stuck on words, the project can't get off the ground. I don't think it's wrong to engage in the philosophy, of course, especially given this is a philosophy forum, but given we're in a political thread it has the potential to slow things down to a crawl.

Yes, I'd like the discussion to progress so I try to stay concise with my answers. The reason we can have a fruitful conversation is for a few reasons: a) We're hopefully both hoping to discuss the issue and flush out the other person's ideas as opposed to challenging them on every aspect and just hoping to beat them (i.e. we are engaging in good faith.) Another reason we're able to have the conversation is that we both share common assumptions.

You've touched, I think, on the heart of the issue. But again, I don't accept the idea that because neither you nor I have a foolproof way of convincing people to change their minds or that they're being irrational, that this somehow makes us wrong in our assessment that they are being irrational (in the sense I meant above).

Ok, my issue is more when people use "rationality" as a sledgehammer which ties in with my next comment.

The question in the latter case becomes, Why do people believe weird things?

Well, I start with the idea that people are inherently situated (i.e. we're not disembodied minds capable of viewing the world perfectly rationally except in rare circumstances.) I believe that we're molded by our own unique psychological characteristics to a considerable extent, and for that reason I am extremely wary about me - with my own weird psychological quirks and weird experiences - laying down that phrase "irrational" on others when rationality, by its very nature, is universal. It would basically be me claiming that I can stand outside my own body and experiences so it's a very strong claim.

Some people just love things that I don't. I recently talked to a guy that loved drag racing. Is that irrational given the risk? You tell me (I personally think it's insane but I don't know the kind of pleasure he gets from it.) Personally, I love poker and I've been playing for a while which also entails a degree of risk. Am I irrational? I had a friend who grew up poor his entire life and had finally attained some degree of financial stability blow his savings on an expensive car. Am I - who grew up in a very different environment - going to label his action "irrational?" Yes, financially, I think we would both agree that the action was irrational but from his perspective owning a nice car finally means one "made it" or had attained a certain status - something that I wouldn't be conscious of owing to my class upbringing. He wasn't only considering the financial implications of the action when he bought it. When decisions start cutting across domains things can get very muddy.

If you have a more full proof, all-encompassing method of determining which goals are rational then let me know.

The answer to "are more people starving now and why?" doesn't depend much on how you define starving, it depends on how many people don't have enough food or sufficiently limited access to it.

Quick question, is starving a feeling or it an actual physiological process? Is it different from being hungry? At what point does hunger turn into starvation? If someone with plenty of access to food is just too lazy or depressed to eat and skip a few meals have then are they starving? Could someone living in an area with a shortage of food have adjusted to the conditions and no longer have the constant sensation of hunger? Moreover, is the data really giving us the 100% honest picture of their situation?

What decisions?

Say, a decision to vote for or support a certain candidate.

We can argue about why they have this goal, as I want to do and in which there's interesting research about,

You seem to be advocating for a different position (or at least very much expanding) on what you were saying earlier. Here you say:

If you decide on a goal and to your best ability, given the available evidence, make a choice which you've concluded is in service of that goal, then you're being rational.

So, in the case of a proponent of traditional marriage he votes for a candidate who supports that and donates to that cause he'd be rational by that definition, but now you're saying that's not enough and that those goals are in question.

I feel like you're on solid ground with your first view. It basically takes the form "If X, then Y" with maybe Y having support of empirical data or logic. What you're supporting here is Kant's hypothetical imperative. Don't question the goal, only the means. Unless maybe the goal is in service to some higher goal. It might not be in the conservative's case though; some things (or some value) could be seen as ends in themselves.

The manufactured irrationality of their hierarchy. Meaning sacrificing all other values, which are in themselves (or collectively) of greater importance and greater benefit, for one value -- like transgender bathroom rights or traditional marriage or anything like that -- because you "feel" like it, is not only a mistake but an irrational choice.

You're talking about weighing values here, right? If you look at moral psychology liberals tend to highly value care and fairness while conservatives tend to place relatively equal weight on care, fairness, loyalty, sanctity, and respecting authority (this is from Haidt's research.)

Frankly, I don't see any easy way to resolve this. I mean don't get me wrong there there are insane religious extremists who would really highly value, say, sanctity and in group loyalty but I have no idea how I would go about convincing them that it's "rational" to adopt a more balanced view when their beliefs are tied up in their scriptures and weird psychological quirks. I just don't know.

I would tend not to use the word "irrational" to describe the 9/11 hijackers. They had a goal and they accomplished it well.

The fact that even their choices made for their stated goals often have the opposite effect.

This is fair. It ties back to the hypothetical imperative mentioned earlier. If your goal is A, and B has been empirically shown to be detrimental to A then choosing to go with B is irrational all else being equal.