Coming now: poor people with poorer judgement

There has been a lot of discussion in recent months about all the consumers and businesses who are now having financial problems due, largely, to their bad judgement. The hardware chain that goes out of business, putting several hundred people out of work, because their business model depends on weekly infusions of short term credit. The family who "bought" a home far bigger than they could afford and are now unable to pay their mortgage/figuring out that commuting costs are not a trivial concern/are just now figuring out that heating a three thousand square foot house takes a hell of a lot of scratch. Not to mention people who are just now "realizing" that Lincoln Navigators and their behemoth cousins aren't practical vehicles for much of anything.

Now, I'm sorry, but none of the stories I've seen about examples of the new hard times have succeeded in getting me to think of these people as anything but idiots getting their comeuppance. In many cases, idiots with a vast sense of entitlement and an active contempt for reason. I don't doubt that these blameless sufferers are out there and I'll agree that some of the employees of businesses that have gone under are entirely blameless, but as for families, well, I'm sorry that so many children have to suffer for the anti-intellectual and self-indulgent behaviors of their parents.

Anyway, I do have a more specific point to make. Much though these people annoy me no end, I have spent enough time studying corporate behavior in recent decades to be fully aware that, to a certain extent, these are learned behaviors. Ones that have been deeply inculcated. As my friend Sara pointed out when we talked about this last night, these people have, in large part, been less convinced of their ways of doing things than they have been imprinted with them.

If you stop and think about it, we have an entire society who have been trained into the learned helplessness of sitcom fifties housewives. They have been trained to believe that almost every problem is best addressed by spending money. They believe that, so to speak, they should do the vacuuming in high heels and pearls; that being thin and well-groomed and amiable are far more important than actually being competent. That somebody else should do the thinking for them. That they should all do their best to be June Cleaver but without the housekeeping skills. And I'm telling you that what we've seen so far is nothing to the years of disasters we've got coming because however bad their material circumstances now, many of them are going to try to spend their way out of poverty and, in a few years, when the last of their assets are gone and they've all used up the favors of relatives and friends, we will have millions of people who will not only be in utter penury, they'll be embittered and hostile because, as they perceive it, they will have been punished for doing what they were "told" to do and their primary conclusion about all of this will not be that they need to change how they think and act but that what "has been done to them" has been fundamentally "unfair".

These are, as I've been saying for years now, a generation of permanent children. You can see it in everything from the television they watch to the primary colors and comfort foods of their surroundings. And they are the kind of people who, realizing that they can't make their mortgage payment, will think that it's entirely rational to "do what they need to relieve their stress" by getting seventy dollar pedicures.

These are people for whom even their DIY shows are largely aspirational, paid for by travel agencies and cookware companies, designed to convince them that the only way to cook that special dish is with this unique pan and four kinds of specialty ingredients, down to boutique salt.

Implicit in much of the media coverage of people losing their homes is the assumption that they can be taken at their word when they say that they're planning to buckle down, get serious, and make the right choice to get back on their feet. Frankly, I don't believe it. I think that many of them would never have gotten into this if they could have thought their way out of a wet paper bag. And you don't undo terrible reasoning skills in a week. I think that the articles talking about families doing things like selling their daughter's bike at a yard sale for three dollars are going to turn out to be more indicative. In the next six months or so we will continue to see a hell of a lot of people eating the seed corn. And then complaining that it's unfair that they have nothing to eat.

You heard it here first.

-Rustin

Comments

[Eivind]

That's always part of the problem. Whenever circumstances are such that some people are in trouble, in general a large portion of those in trouble will always to some degree be guilty of getting themselves into trouble.

Put bluntly, choosing to help groups in trouble always tends to mean choosing to help some people who are in trouble because they themselves made stupid choices.

Which offcourse can feel unfair to those who are "rewarded" for making more sensible choices by receiving no help at all.

This dilemma is nothing new though, and not limited to finance. We also, for example, pay more for healthcare of individuals who have choosen an unhealthy lifestyle, for example.

[Rustin H. Wright]

Oh, I entirely agree. How could it not be enraging for people who *have* acted responsibly to see others get bought out of their poor behavior AND then have it all billed, so to speak to those who never did anything wrong?

I agree with you about that factor. But if you read further down you'll find that my point was not that but to bring up that the same people who are crashing now will keep crashing for quite a while to come. I didn't post that entry to talk about blame or unfairness. I posted it to talk about the all too high likelihood that, in some ways that defy evident expectations, it's going to get even worse from here.