[fortran77]

> Fewer and fewer people can make a decent living with traditional work.

I don't think it's that "fewer people can make a living". It's just that we have too many amoral people who won't work.

It's a shame the New Yorker article didn't talk much about the true victims here: the innocent truck drivers.

[Throaway199999]

Thats bs...it says right in the article that the payout for a trailer truck accident can be a million usd. Pretty sure that is a major attraction to the 25% of NO that lives in poverty.

[gottorf]

The traits in a person that lead them to a life of perpetual poverty are the same traits that make this type of "lottery" winning seem desirable.

[Throaway199999]

HAHAHAHA

So, how about the dozens of lawyers and doctors in the story? You know, the ones who made 90% of the money and never got charged? The ones who set the whole thing up because they knew they could convince desperate & uneducated people? The ones who orchestrated a murder (the thing that finally got two of them caught)?

What're their "traits?" Did you even read the article?

[brookst]

Traits like ethics? Yes, that was my point.

[gottorf]

I'm talking about traits like high time preference and poor impulse control.

Ethics make people live in poverty? That would be news to a lot of people.

[brookst]

It’s a really good article if you read it. The people who got rich were not the poor people.

[gottorf]

We must be talking at odds here. I'm neither claiming that being ethical is a sufficient condition to getting rich, nor that the ethics of the poor people described in the article played a significant part in their being and remaining poor. The article seems replete with unethical behavior at every level of wealth.

> the American shift from “a hard day’s work for fair pay” to what I’m calling the lottery economy

My point is that people with high time preference and low impulse control, who naturally will tend to be poorer than people without those traits, will also naturally be more drawn to the "lottery economy", whether or not bad actors exist who will take advantage of that. Just look at who buys literal lottery tickets!

[Thegn]

‘Pride is all very well, but a sausage is a sausage,’ he said.

- Terry Pratchett

The poor have ethics just like the rest of us. They just can’t afford to keep it.

[bombcar]

Pratchett goes into it more when talking about the “proud” poor - which is a real subset of the population.

You can see an example in the rural poor who refuse to take “government cheese”.