| > I'm not sure why someone would find it so hard to believe that the poor, especially the long-term poor, have character traits that are not conducive to lifting themselves out of poverty. This is real close to just “poor people deserve to be poor”. > On that same vein, there is no particular evidence needed to convince someone that people who share the characteristics with me of not being very tall or particularly athletic have a terribly poor chance of making it in the NBA. Ah, but here you’re talking about physical traits. What physical traits make someone poor? We don’t say everyone who fails to make it to the NBA fails because they are lazy. > Back to the American setting, "heavy hitters" of the lottery spend about $2500/yr I only skimmed the article, but this seems to all be made up. They say “we estimate” multiple times with no clarity on how they make these estimations. None of their estimations seem to even matter to their thesis that buying lottery tickets is a poor financial strategy, which is maybe why they don’t put much rigor into their estimates. The economist adults says adults in the poorest zip codes spend an average of $600 on lottery tickets. I don’t know know that balances out to households nor whether it’s 90% spending $667 or 25% spending $2400 each. https://archive.is/kY7U6 Your investment math also seems pretty far off. Those numbers appear to assume a 15% return from the S&P 500, a number I’ve never heard a financial advisor recommend. > The same personality traits that make someone prefer buying scratchers instead of investing for their future are the ones that keep them poor. I would have thought this to be self-evident. Interestingly there are a number of other “self evident” causes of poverty depending on who you ask. Lottery tickets being disproportionately purchased by poor people also does not mean all poor people buy lottery tickets. If that article you quote is reasonably correct and the poor ticket-buying household is spending 2500 on tickets, that means there are a lot of poor non-ticket-buying households in order for the numbers to work out. Why are those people poor? |
No, I'm saying that there are reasons why some people stay poor. My further implication is that it isn't for the most part because society is keeping them down.
> Your investment math also seems pretty far off. Those numbers appear to assume a 15% return from the S&P 500, a number I’ve never heard a financial advisor recommend.
It was based on an initial $100 investment followed by a monthly $200 investment into the S&P 500 (as an alternative destination for the $2500/year claimed by that study that some high spenders put that much into the lottery) applied over the actual past 10 years of performance[0].
Prudent financial advisors would of course tell you not to count on 15% CAGR forever, but my example was based on real results that anyone could have obtained by consistently buying boring index funds instead of lottery tickets! There's no trickery here.
> that means there are a lot of poor non-ticket-buying households in order for the numbers to work out. Why are those people poor?
In discussions about the poor, we all should distinguish between those who happen to be poor at any given moment, and those who are poor their whole lives, or even over generations. My comments about the character traits of the poor only apply to the latter.
[0]: https://testfol.io/