The biggest privilege rich people have is to be extremely stupid on purpose.
The biggest privilege rich people have is to be extremely stupid on purpose.
When you don't have enough money, you have no choice but to be smarter and more resourceful. You have to learn, you have to look for other alternatives, be aware of where you are going, where you step when walking and, if you slip, to get up and take note of your mistakes. You can't afford to be stupid or look stupid, otherwise your life, which is already hard, will get worse.
But when you are rich? It doesn't fucking matter at all. You can make the biggest fuck up that a human being can do in his whole life; be deceived and swindled for amounts equivalent to a person's 5-year salary, over and over again; you can believe all the fakenews and pseudosciences that humanity has created; you can screw up as many times as you want... You will still be rich, you will still be opulent, you will still be able to make more mistakes.
While all of us are one accident or a serious illness away from ending up in economic ruin, the rich don't stop being rich even by dying.
Obvious? Yes, but it doesn't hurt to remember.
I would go broader and say that the privilege of wealth is freedom from consequences.
Freedom from consequences and unlimited continues. They can try and fail as many times as they like.
And then they convince themselves it was their perseverence and gumption that resulted in all their success, which enables them to look down on anyone who isn't successful, because clearly they just lack perseverence and gumption.
You nailed it!
I feel you. It's unfair but it doesn't have to be. If we made a law mandating the recuperation of all earnings exceeding, idk, 10/20/X times yearly min wage, we could curb these inequalities or at least make it easier for everyone to live without the fear of imminent poverty. And that's just a bandaid fix for today's society!
I know PLENTY of poor people who are stupid as fuck. Money may play a role, but it is not a major one. Try visiting rural Kentucky sometime.
Ya but their stupidity transforms into those pesky consequences
As I said to the other guy:
What you fail to realize is that if you are stupid or poor enough, consequences have no meaning or effect. There's not a lot to be done to someone who lives in a 60-year-old single-wide trailer with no electricity, drinking well water drawn 30 feet from an oozing pile of trash, who can't spell their own name.
I have already said it in other answers, I repeat it again:
-
I'm referring to the PRIVILEGE that the rich have of being able to be stupid without major or even outright any consequences.
-
Obviously, by pure statistics, there will be MILLIONS of stupid poor people.
I read those responses; what you fail to realize is that if you are stupid or poor enough, consequences have no meaning or effect. There's not a lot to be done to someone who lives in a 60-year-old single-wide trailer with no electricity, drinking well water drawn 30 feet from an oozing pile of trash, who can't spell their own name.
-
Sorry to say, but given that wealthy people are a minority and stupid people are not, it follows that they do not correlate.
Wealth is not an indication of intelligence. It's more likely an indication of how exploitative you or your ancestors have been.
Rich people and poor people do not have the same incentives to be resourceful.
I didn't say it was an indication of intelligence. Rather the opposite, I said that wealth and intelligence have no correlation.
-
I didn't say that rich people ARE stupid but CAN BE stupid without the consequences that most of us face. That's is what we call PRIVILEGE
-
How many rich people you know that are actually geniuses? And how many rich people have you heard who have done the stupidest thing possible? How is the relation between those two?
-
That's not really how statistics work.
From the first episode of The Boondocks, the pivotal moment for main character Huey when he realizes dropping inconvenient truths on the rich won't upset them in the slightest:
Huey: "Ruin the party? They love me. These people aren't worried about us. They're not worried about anything. They're rich. No matter what happens, these people just keep applauding."
They're just chosen among many. We stand no chance.I had an opposing shower thought the other day so I'm going to play devil's advocate on this one.
I think in a world of rational, good-faith actors (which I'm not arguing we live in), this is both by-design, and optimal at society scale.
Think about those things you're good at, and the things you're not so good at. I'm really good with computers, my time is most efficiently spent troubleshooting and building technology stacks. This skillset is in demand enough that I make a comfortable living doing it.
I'm comfortable enough that I have time to learn other skills when needed, but not comfortable enough to hire out all the otherwise commodity tasks I need done. A leak in the roof, a sink that needs replacing, some cat6 through the walls, leveling a floor before replacing broken tile from the 80's... You get the idea. I can do drywall and other general contractor work but I'm not great at it. It takes me longer to end up with a worse end product than a professional, and I don't enjoy doing it.
Every Saturday I spend doing drywall could, at society-scale, be much more efficiently spent building a k8s cluster or helping a scientist build software for research. Just like the guy doing my drywall should have a me on the other end of a phone when he needs a new laptop, or his mother gets malware.
When people hit "rich" the unspoken meaning is supposed to be that their time is valuable enough that society deems it more useful to spend it outside of commodity tasks. That seems like a good fundamental design... say what you will about its current real-world implementation.
No, you're confusing being stupid with being ignorant. THEY'RE NOT THE SAME THING AT ALL. All stupid people are ignorant, but not all ignorant people are stupid.
An ignorant person can be wise if they are aware of their own ignorance and asks for help or assistance; but an ignorant person becomes stupid the moment they forget that they're ignorant and takes care of matters beyond their capabilities.
A poor person is condemned to be constantly aware of their own ignorance, since they don't have the purchasing power or the necessary influence to compensate; the rich, on the other hand, is convinced that their economic success also implies intellectual success, and there is no one to contradict them, because they are the one who puts the money, so they are the one who makes the decisions.
There are rich people who are wise when, for example, they hire other people to solve their blind spots, and obviously there are stupid poor people, millions of them, purely for statistics.
But is this the best and most efficient way for rational beings to organize themselves? Let me be REALLY skeptical about that.
That argument only works to explain and support the existence of millionaires and multimillionaires. With millions of dollars you can hire out most menial tasks easily. Especially if you're still living in a reasonable home.
It falls apart when you reach excessive levels of wealth. Your first few million buys you a lot of time to specialize, but your $101st million buys you less. Even moreso when you get to billions.
What you described is the division of labour, which has nothing to do with what OP is talking about. Of course woodcutters, generally speaking, don't need to know quantum mechanics; of course engineers aren't generally well versed in military history, etc. But "people generally only know their chosen subjects in detail" isn't groundbreaking, nor is it what OP said.
I dunno man, just look at ol' rudie guiliani and mike lindell (the pillow guy). They're both broke as shit, ruined their lives. Now all they have left is grift