Here’s Why You’re Broke, According to Wealthy Americans Who Skim My Articles

 

The view from the top is judgmental.

Ever wonder why you work all the time, but never seem to have enough money to actually do anything but… work?

Apparently, you complain too much.

That’s the opinion of many wealthy Americans, those in the top ten percent who’ve managed to “work their way” into financial security. They believe the American dream is alive and well. They believe if you’re not a millionaire, or well on your way to becoming one, then it’s your fault. They think you made poor decisions, or that you’re lazy and entitled.

They think you deserve poverty.

It’s no surprise that empathy is on the decline, and has been since the 1980s. In fact, it fell by 48 percent between 1979 and 2009. As Jamil Zaki says, we find ourselves living in “a culture that feels increasingly cruel, callous, and disconnected.” This trend is perfectly illustrated in a well known experiment run at the University of California. You know, the one where psychologists watched students play Monopoly after giving some players more money and extra dice... Those players became real assholes, and they even started bragging about their “success strategies.” In one version of the study, the player who starts out with extra advantages has the audacity to start moving their opponents’ piece and taunting them.

I’ve learned a lot about what a certain slice of America truly thinks, by reading their responses to my stories on inequality and toxic individualism over the last several months. They came out of the wood works to comment on one recent story about the American dream, which referenced several books on the topic. The comments reveal a lot about what can happen to someone after they become successful.

If you’ve ever wondered who votes to maintain the status quo, or what they could possibly be thinking, this is for you.

Here we go…

You should’ve started a business.

Without fail, there’s always one older white gentlemen who reads one of my pieces and tries to slam me with his personal success story.

Here’s the most recent one:

Jessica, You in fact are the problem…

I never finished college, I quit in my senior year as my first business was starting to make money. 15 years later Motorola bought another one of my startups and they paid for me to finish my undergraduate and obtain my MBA. I became fascinated with business and contract law but was fired a 1/2 year short of my JD with an uncanny ability of reading briefs and financial reports upside down and in seconds… This was 22 years ago… My wife and I started an ISP as a side hustle and were exploring early virtualization and cloud computer platforms. That company was our most successful and there were days in the beginning we were below our last dollar.

It’s amusing how this person starts with the phrase “I never finished college,” then narrates how a company paid for him not only to finish college but also pursue multiple master’s degrees.

Anyway…

This comment goes on for a few more paragraphs to talk about the virtues of entrepreneurship. You can call it the Steve Jobs approach, and there’s a lot of people who believe in it, because it happened to them. Obviously, there are always successful entrepreneurs for whom life turned out well despite all the debt and risk they took on. They’ll neglect to tell you that the failure rate for startups is roughly 90 percent.

To them, that doesn’t matter. You should just make it into the 10 percent that succeed. (Apparently, the ability to read upside down helps.) In other words, be exceptional. If you’re not super smart, if you can’t find a company willing to pay for your degrees, then it’s your fault. By their logic, the fact that some people succeed means everyone can succeed.

They did, why can’t you?

You obviously sabotaged yourself.

Here’s an excerpt from someone who graduated in 2010 with a degree in engineering. They believe our problem is entitlement:

I couldn’t help but notice the number of missed opportunities [when I was in school]. People in certain income categories, usually minorities, were often given free rides, only to go and smash themselves into a po, figuratively speaking. They’d go into some useless “easy” major… waft around and then flunk out… Students that went into reasonably marketable majors and made an honest effort to not be mediocre tended to do fine…

People just assume that you can graduate college, pull out a new car or two, a new wardrobe, buy a new house in the trendy part of town in a trendy city… [Older folks] were often buying $40k, 1500 sq ft homes in blank suburbs, not $500K townhouses in the trend parts of trendy cities.

The comment goes on for a while.

You get the idea…

This person thinks a 1500 square foot home costs $40,000. You’ll also note the racism buried in their observation that mostly “poor minority students” were the ones wasting their “free rides.” Most importantly, this attitude endorses meritocracy — the idea that financial inequality exists because a lot of us are just mediocre. This view has been dismantled numerous times, and revealed as little more than an engine for injustice.

They don’t care; it sounds good.

A meritocracy rewards a few individuals and tells them they’re better than everyone else, ignoring circumstances. It flatters their ego, so they’re unlikely to let go of this ideology. The only thing I imagine that would dislodge someone’s belief in meritocracy would be for them to experience unfairness firsthand, or to finally encounter obstacles they can’t surmount on their own. Of course, some of those people do exactly what they criticize everyone else for when they don’t get their way.

They cast blame.

You just don’t want to work.

There’s a variation on the argument about our entitlement that insists corporations aren’t evil (at least not all of them). This view asserts that CEOs are generally benevolent stewards of capitalism, who only want to reward us for working hard. After all, that’s what they say.

Here’s one recent comment:

But *what* is keeping us poor? (Not “poorer” since even the poor are in better shape than ever before). Is it evil corporations, or benevolent politicians spoon-feeding people just enough to rob them of initiative to “get more?” Corporations, in my experience, want to hire the *best* people they can find for their money. Sure, there are the Amazons who want to cycle through warehouse workers as fast as possible because it fits their profit model, but most businesses want to invest in people because it’s cost-effective to do so…

My parents didn’t choose a career they liked, they chose what would make money. F*ck higher ed. We have such a strong need for tradespeople, and there is good opportunity for those willing to work for it. The American Dream is alive and well. Ask your local legal immigrant. For some reason, it has become the “American Expectation,” and will fail as such.

This is basically the “nobody wants to work” argument, an insistence that there are always good-paying jobs out there, because they’ve personally never had a problem supporting themselves.

As a bonus, there’s an anti-intellectual sentiment here. Everyone should’ve ditched college to become a plumber. Of course, he’s right to a certain extent. Those who learn a trade typically manage to find work — mainly because they’re in a sellers’ market. If everyone did what this guy recommends, then plumbers and electricians would no longer be able to command higher pay, because everyone would have that skill.

That’s how our capitalist society operates. Our wages aren’t determined by anything but market price, along with biases and assumptions about what someone’s work is “worth.” Daycare workers and teachers contribute a huge amount to society, and the economy. So do nurses. It’s all hard work that requires specialized training. And yet, because teachers and daycare workers and nurses are primarily women, we get paid a fraction of what plumbers and electricians do. Our society places a premium on work done by men, and therefore seen as more valuable.

I’m also not so sure that “the poor” are better off than ever. On top of stories about National Guard members who can’t afford to feed their families, I also talk to people who make less than $40,000 year while working full time jobs, and they can barely buy food. Sometimes, they can’t even afford that. They don’t seek medical treatment for injuries. They don’t have working appliances. There’s people in the comment sections of my articles who say they hope to die when they’re too old to work anymore, because they’re so scared of what’ll happen to them after that.

Wealthy Americans might acknowledge the existence of companies who want to exploit workers, but the solution is simply to find someone who wants to reward your hard work, and to learn a trade. They would never consider compelling companies to pay a living wage.

It goes against their beliefs.

You should’ve invested in the stock market.

Another type of American thinks the answer to poverty is investing in the stock market, which is a fairly typical view.

One person’s exact words:

If you invested $100 in the market in 2007, before the Great Recession, you’d have $354 today in 2021 — a return of over 250%. The market may be squeezed and gamed by the wealthy but if you have even a tiny bit of savings you can afford to put in, it’s generally a good bet.

To the wealthy, it doesn’t matter that a majority of us don’t even have a few thousand dollars in savings to cover emergencies. In fact, only 39 percent of Americans even have a thousand dollars on hand. In other words, more than 60 percent of us would be bankrupted by a trip to the hospital, or a car breaking down. So I think most Americans can forget about using the stock market as a means of social mobility.

Nonetheless, the stock market becomes an easy, automatic response to any arguments about inequality. That’s because it used to work at some point, decades ago. So white men, who represent the vast majority of shareholders, will continue doling out this advice as a justification.

According to them, we should just put money we don’t have into the market, and then wait 15 years.

Problem solved.

You want to own things.

There’s another type of American who believes our problem is that we foolishly want to own things and pass down wealth.

Take a look:

I love your writing! I shared one of your pieces on FB yesterday. Your success proves it always sells to pander to the economically illiterate. I consider myself part of the “American elite.” I own nothing. If I was the wealthy elite what would it change for me? I don’t want a mega yacht or a mansion.

This is the neo-feudalism defense.

Owning nothing apparently makes you free, and happier. It doesn’t matter if you’re trying to raise a family, or want to live in a good school district. We should all simply give up our desires to own any kind of property. We should become a nation of renters, because land lords and property managers will take such good care of us and never raise our rents.

Right?

The truth is that politicians have spent the last several decades designing America to benefit home owners. If you want a good school for your children, or access to healthy food, or proximity to safe parks and trails, you have very little choice but to buy a home in the suburbs. I know this because I’ve spent most of my life renting in downtown apartments. Unless you can afford to spend a thousand dollars or more, you wind up with pretty miserable experiences — as I’ve written about. You get cramped living spaces. You get noisy neighbors. You get traffic at all hours. You get crime. You get under-funded schools. You get food deserts. In short, the rental market is often just another engine of inequality, where the majority of property managers exploit those who can’t afford better housing.

So according to the neo-feudalists, we should simply accept all of this, and train ourselves to be happy.

Easy…

Consider these arguments educational.

These responses teach us a lot about Americans with money, and what they think about those who don’t have much.

They’re myopic, in the sense that they rely almost completely on their own narrow experiences — usually from a decade or two ago. They’re quick to brag about their own success, and to cherry pick data that supports their foregone conclusions. They’ll tell you the poverty rate is the lowest it’s been in decades, without acknowledge that full-time workers making less than $40,000 a year often deal with food insecurity. They’ll tell you the home ownership rate is 67 percent, leaving out the fact that home ownership for millennials and Gen Xers remains 8 points lower than baby boomers at the same point in their lives, and will drop further over the next ten years as the cost of living continues to rise and wages remain flat.

The vast majority of the people who still believe in the American dream are looking at the past, not the future. They’re looking at their peers in the top 10 or 20 percent, and not everyone else.

They simply don’t see the 60 percent of Americans who can’t afford to pay for a basic emergency. They don’t see the rising tide of young adults who’ve decided they won’t buy homes or start families, because it’s simply too expensive. They don’t see the 52 percent of us who have to move back in with their parents, a trend that’s accelerating.

They don’t want to.

These are the people who defend the American dream. Of course, the truth is a little bit darker. They were simply given an extra pair of dice and more startup money. Now they’re laughing in your face, and moving your piece around the board for you. It’s the American way.

These people are straight up bullies, and what they need more than anything is a hard punch in their pocket books. They need to be reminded that all their “hard won success” was supported by an infrastructure that no longer exists for the vast majority of Americans.

Let’s give it to them.