[barbazoo]

> People thinking that "poor is a mindset" are lacking in that.

I have never even considered people thinking like that. Is that real? Early in life I realized that the biggest factor of how you end up seems to be luck, where you're born, what's in your genes, how did parents raise you. Later in life I realized that most of the rest is mental health which you also don't have the greatest influence over the first 2 decades of your life or so.

[JohnMakin]

I’d say a large percentage of americans do. It’s burned into the cultural mindset at a very young age.

[Terr_]

Culture is important, but it's widespread enough that there's probably a biological basis. Humans are wired to hate the idea of "good/bad things just happen", we're always creating stories about causation even when they might not be very accurate stories.

Consider how a game of flipping a coin seems to draw everyone—even people who took probability and statistics classes—into imagining "hot streaks" or "now I'm overdue for the other one."

[JohnMakin]

if you want to go down a rabbit hole, lots of its roots stem from protestantism, especially calvinism. that cultural influence is not unique to the us, but i don’t really subscribe to any evolutionary behavior explanations to attitudes like this, personally

[matt_kantor]

Right. At least when I was growing up we were all constantly told stuff like "you can accomplish anything if you set your mind to it". The corollary is that if you aren't able to accomplish something, it's because you didn't set your mind to it.

[pavel_lishin]

You can see it elsewhere in the comments on this post!

[dugidugout]

I was also of the naive impression we had collectively moved from this thinking and it was more so just a difficult problem to attack inherently. The comments here are very sobering.

[mrguyorama]

Never underestimate stupidity or ignorance. Especially when that ignorance directly benefits someone rich.

[duskdozer]

I envy your (former?) optimism

[fullshark]

There's a comment here making exactly that claim.

[tstrimple]

How have you managed to literally never meet a conservative?