[bestdaytostart]

Being poor does suck. However, being rich does not prevent your life from sucking. All the money in the world won't prevent you or a loved one from passing due to an untreatable illness. All the money in the world won't buy you friends or genuine respect. It can't buy you love (though it can buy you sex).

Furthermore, you don't need to be rich to avoid the hardship of being poor, you just have to make a sufficient amount to afford quality housing, food, health insurance, and minor luxuries.

[chrismonsanto]

I was poor, and now I'm moderately well off. You are really underselling how much it sucks to be poor.

> All the money in the world won't prevent you or a loved one from passing due to an untreatable illness.

Death of a family member is much more likely to happen if you are poor. Too bad you can't afford that unreasonably expensive surgery.

> All the money in the world won't buy you friends or genuine respect.

This is such a first world concern. Boo hoo. Also, yes, money does buy friends. When my family went bankrupt most of our friends turned their backs on us. This is a common occurrence. Ask a homeless person what happened to their "friends" when push came to shove.

> It can't buy you love (though it can buy you sex).

Not being poor is more important than finding love. If you want love, have some kids, and love them.

> Furthermore, you don't need to be rich to avoid the hardship of being poor, you just have to make a sufficient amount to afford quality housing, food, health insurance, and minor luxuries.

Please do not underestimate how hard it is for those who are actually poor to "make a sufficient amount."

This seems like a good enough time as any to point out that there are like six empty houses for every homeless person in America. Or, in techie terms, "you thought domain squatting was bad..."

[mtdewcmu]

You make some good points.Things you learn through hard life experience always have value. At least, I value them, because even if they don't have a lesson I can use, they are among the most interesting and true stories a person can tell you. Normally, life makes lousy stories, not least because we aren't able to tell the stories properly, because we're not fully paying attention. When you are living out your worst nightmare in reality, you are suddenly about twice as awake and twice as alive as you ordinarily are, and your awareness narrows and focuses on the here and now, and everything that happens is endowed with much greater importance than usual. Everything becomes serious, and you're probably going to have insights and make observations that beyond your usual capacity for such things, because all the BS is gone and you don't have to stop goofing around and get serious before you can clear your head, because you are serious.

These moments of clarity probably won't end up being worth enough to justify the misery of the ordeal that prompted them, and I'm not sure living through something terrible makes you stronger. It's probably more likely to do psychological damage that makes you weaker. But the experience itself is not something you can buy, and while the stories you gain are usually no compensation to you, they are the kinds of stories that can be of great value to other people.

[thenomad]

"Death of a family member is much more likely to happen if you are poor. Too bad you can't afford that unreasonably expensive surgery."

This applies in the US, rather less so in many other countries. (UK resident here.)

[DanBC]

Even with free healthcare there is a gap between lifespan for rich and poor people in the UK. Rich people tend to make better use of healthcare and know what questions to ask.

Here's some newspaper articles giving some confusingly different numbers.

Poor people die sooner, and also live longer with a disability (17 years) http://www.theguardian.com/society/2010/feb/10/equality-pove...

Ditto, 20 years http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/10699077/Rich-will-...

Life expectancy gap for London is 25 years and growing http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/a-25-year-gap-be...

Life expectancy differences between rich and poor getting better http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/a-25-year-gap-be...

[thenomad]

Fair point - as the other commenter says, just because you have free healthcare doesn't mean you have the confidence to use it, the knowledge to know what to ask, the access to exercise facilities or (and this is probably the cause of a lot of these statistics) the funds to afford a good, well-balanced diet.

[Retric]

Diet and Stress have little to do with healthcare and generally have a lot to do with when and how you die.

[selmnoo]

> It can't buy you love

Not to be a smartass here, but that's probably false. Money buys you social recognition, something that is an important part of your mate valuation. Rich folks will generally have a better time finding 'love' than the poor. The richer you are, the better your chances, more or less.

Money really is very important in the modern day. I wish it weren't this way -- I don't want to be doing selfish things, but sadly this just is the way it is.

[abalashov]

Agreed. However, in a day and age where (in the Western world, anyway) women no longer need men overtly for financial support, social recognition as mating currency is just that--social recognition. It can be, and very often is, orthogonal to wealth. Witness all the young women in love with crappy DJs, self-styled pseudo-unemployed hipsters, no-name sidewalk band heroes, stoners, and a variety of Bohemians that a conservative dad would call losers or starving artists--er, artistes.

Financial and career success is definitely one way to up your mate value, though it has more resonance once women get out of their twenties. It's not the only way. When you're young, particularly, it may not even be the best way. Vide all the fairly intelligent guys with steady, well-paying jobs (very much so, by the standards of median American household income) that nobody pays attention to, really. The broke dudes that know how to put out their plumage and leverage some other, more conspicuous cultural archetype get much more play.

I'm not a washed-up, embittered MRA or PUA guy, btw. Just playing Devil's Advocate. :-)

[Retric]

There are far more women than well off men.

The real issue for most men is time. A 20 something working 60 hour weeks spends far less time 'playing the game' than a DJ etc. Also, relationships take time if your doing a start-up 'on the side' it's going to play hell with most relationships.

[mtdewcmu]

Unfortunately, despite not being rich, the poor don't have a monopoly on love. The way reality works is that, if you're able to make yourself rich, something obviously must be working out for you in your life. That thing that helped you get rich also tends to help you get love, and other things. If you're poor, your life plainly isn't working out too well, so you probably won't have success at love, either.

There's something called the Matthew Effect that isn't too well known, but it has a wikipedia page. Basically, things just get more unfair over time.

[slavik81]

For the curious, this is the Matthew Effect: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_effect

[mtdewcmu]

I think this effect is underrated and explains a lot, for instance all the statistical correlations between good things and other good things, and, on the flip side, bad things and other bad things. For instance, why being a smoker correlates with an increased risk of having a back injury (I heard that). Or how not having a college degree increases your risk of early death from all causes. I don't know if the Matthew Effect itself has an adequate explanation, but it ties together a lot of results that otherwise seem to suggest bizarre causal relationships between unrelated things. They're all spurious correlations and the predictable consequence of the Matthew Effect.

[andrewflnr]

Even you put 'love' in quotes :). We all know that money can buy social recognition. What's usually meant by "money can't buy love" is that the 'love' buyable with money is not really what you're looking for.

[cgriswald]

Money <em>can't</em> by love, and if it could, it would not be the kind of love anyone wants. But money does provide greater opportunities for finding love; although it is saddle with the burden of also having to separate out the women who "love" instead of love.

[cryptophile]

It has always been like that. Women have never "fallen in love" with men who are not sufficiently socially successful. There is nothing new under the sun in that respect.

But then again, "socially successful" is a very relative thing. You will find that women "fall in love" with you all the time in third-world countries, even if you are only on unemployment benefits back home where women may snub you over that.

Furthermore, the appearance of success is probably much more important to women than any real success. The ability to pretend that they caught a fish who could have money, is often enough.

[tluyben2]

A guy who is (outwardly) self confident will get women (or guys for that matter) no matter what. Ugly, poor, anti-social, doesn't matter. Sure, if you want to have a large amount of one-night-stands with 'just 18s' in clubs expensive clothes and a fat wallet help next to that confidence, but we were talking about love here.

[nostrademons]

I've sometimes heard this put as "Money can't buy happiness...but it helps!"