"Why do the poor stay poor and the rich get richer?"

[Spartan_Warrior]

Looks like the joke's on me! I thought your use of the word "stability" was peculiar, TBH, but otherwise, no, I didn't catch that you were... demonstrating Orwellian diction-entrapment? Or what have you. That doesn't mean I bought what you were selling, though, for the record. Naturally, talking about merit and our system being the best and "everyone having a shot in principle" fits my worldview much better, perhaps only, with the pun assumed. Guess I must be middle class. Who knew?

[jacob]

@SW - Yeah, sorry, but you walked right into that. Now I didn't even expect that to happen, so no entrapment intended. But I had to respond before my original point was dismissed as a pun (I didn't realize it when I wrote it.). You just missed all the fnords.

This is why I've changed my mind about education (another word that means different things to different classes). For a long time (during most of the ERE blog era), I kinda went along with the Good Will Hunting quote that a college education is the equivalent of a library card and 50 cents in late fees. I've changed my mind on that since then. At least for some people going to college, it's a chance to change their lenses (as in "mind blown"/never thought what way... not to be confused with "never thought about it that way"). I had similar opinions on travel until I realized that for those who've never left their State [of birth] more than once, travel really is a great way to gather some more lenses.

Edit: I should be clearer here. That's not just going to "some college" and it's definitely NOT about getting a laserprinted diploma. Going to college should primarily be an exercise in meeting people from other classes (that includes professors and their ways of thinking!). This is the valuable social experience---compare to getting drunk/naked with people from your own class during a $50,000/semester student loan resort hotel experience complete with climbing walls and interactive edutainment lessons. The same goes for travelling. In terms of perspectives: If the goal is to "see" Italy, Spain, Portugal, Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands inside of 2 months along with your fellow tourists, it's useless from the perspective of expanding perspective. Much better to live outside the US in some place for long enough to see the US from some _rooted_ perspective.

In my experience, most people are rather devoid of lenses, save the one they grew up with. This, incidentally, is also why the system is stable. Note, I'm not saying that the current system is bad. I rather enjoy that we don't have ongoing revolutions, progroms, or other kinds of mass instability. Maybe it's the best we can hope for wrt a human society. (I do somewhat display my middleclass origins---I'm not sure where I belong anymore---but my affinity for stability is definitely rooted in M-class)

Also see, http://earlyretirementextreme.com/what-is-freedom.html

PS: Diction is just a matter of fortunate convenience, e.g. that the middle class actually think of themselves as "investors" when they have Fidelity et al. DCA'ing 15% of their paycheck into a predictable rebalanced asset allocation on day 25 or 27 of every single month. The [different] frameworks are the important ones. Don't dismiss vocabulary as a straw man.

[BRUTE]

brute is pleased to learn that jacob has come around on "travel" - maybe another vocabulary straw man victim, as many people (middle class?) equate it to cruise ship tours and visiting all of Europe in 7 days.

brute wouldn't say that only having the "starting lens" makes individuals more prone to crave stability.

in brute's experience, collecting more lenses makes individuals a)more interesting, and b)more cynical. they learn that what people believe in any given place at any given time is ridiculous when removed from that context, but very important to them there and then.

individuals with enough lens-span (i.e. not just many lenses, but enough different ones) become somewhat nihilistic/deterministic/fatalistic, but in a good sense. in a "nothing matters, let's take our time finishing lunch" type of sense. they also become a bit lonely. it's hard to identify with humans that just can't imagine anything greater than a friday night football game vs. that scumbag rival team from one town over.

brute is also convinced that it's impossible to really appreciate one's native lens/country/culture in an adult way unless one has seen it from afar through another lens. humans that love their home town more than anything else, but merely because they've never left it, always strike brute as naive and childlike. not in a bad way, but it's hard to take the claim serious when they haven't tried anything new, ever.

"education" has traditionally been a way to collect lenses, but so has travel of the way jacob has described.

[Dragline]

Sometimes I wonder if what really ails America is that many if not most Americans are unwilling to just pick up and move the way their ancestors did when their lives weren't working out the way they wanted or hoped.

Loyalty to birthplace/origin just seems like a foolish consistency.

[BRUTE]

Loyalty to birthplace/origin just seems like a foolish consistency.

loyalty to anything

[Spartan_Warrior]

@Jacob: TB(B)H, and stepping back a bit, from my perspective these class definition arguments typically seem like an attempt to redefine yourself and/or ERErs as outside the middle class at all costs. Never mind that IMO desperate attempts to leave or dissociate from the middle class is about as middle class as it gets. (See: The "American Dream" ) The gist of the argument then seems to be that I'm too middle class (or my lenses are too middle class) to understand what really defines the wealthy (and, implicitly, why ERE is not middle class?). Which is a little insulting, not because I'm middle class, but because I feel I could indeed grasp a well-stated argument or definition.

To be fair, I in no way dispute that I am middle class, so nothing to prove there. Likewise, I don't claim any affinity for the wealthy nor any up-close-and-personal empirical understanding of their worldview, so I do not dispute that I lack that particular lens. I doubt that means I am beyond understanding it! Yet I am still not fully understanding your definition of the wealthy, and particularly your insistence that the distinguishing factor has nothing to do with money. I understand that you think my difficulty with this is a middle class difficulty. Yes! Help me see through a different lens.

Thought experiment: If Donald Trump somehow lost all his assets AND his social/political/family/friend connections--say he was forced into witness protection or fleeing Mexican cartels (hah) and had to start a new life and identity from scratch--but he would still retain all his knowledge/information/skills. Would he still be wealthy because he has that information/knowledge/skills despite having no assets and no sociopolitical connections/influence/access?

I say... no! That's not to say anything of his capacity to rejoin the wealthy class. It could become a "riches to rags and back to riches" story (and admittedly probably easier than your average "rags to riches" story), but for now it's just "riches to rags". At that moment in time, Mr. Trump (or whatever his new name is) would no longer be among the rich, IMO.

But it seems, by your definition of the wealthy whose distinguishing factor and primary capital is information, you would say he is still part of that class because he still has the same information? Right? If so, how does that information work to retain his class position? If not, what am I (or you) missing here? Accounting for future possibilities? A different conception of "information"? (Are you using the "wealthy class" definition...?)

P.S. I feel kind of skeevy even stating this explicitly, but I am of course in no way trying to insult you, because being middle class is not an insult. I am also not trying to diminish you or your accomplishments by defining the middle class in such a way that it would include you. For the record, even by my definitions, from my knowledge of your wealth and connections (and information/skills), you are among those ERE/FIRE people whom I would consider closest to or most plausibly capable of breaching the wealthy class in your lifetime. If that matters to you. (FYI, it seems to.)

[Spartan_Warrior]

To further clarify my own position when it comes to ERE-the-philosophy (as opposed to "the people of the ERE forum"), I don't really see it as being linked to any particular class. You stated it includes elements/values from all the classes. I can get on board with that. Personally, I would say "ERE" is a group of concepts or life philosophy that can be utilized by all three classes, particularly in the broader web of goals sense. But the concept of "early retirement" itself seems definitionally middle class to me as retirement is a middle class concept.

[wood]

@Jacob: TB(B)H, and stepping back a bit, from my perspective these class definition arguments typically seem like an attempt to redefine yourself and/or ERErs as outside the middle class at all costs.

To me, the take away is that some people are able to see things through different lenses and others are (unconciously) not.

[BRUTE]

maybe it's a case of scrutinizing one's own (class/historical/family) background most. brute certainly exhibits this phenomenon.

there's little chance jacob will "fall back" into poor thinking or wealthy thinking. but he could always fall back into middle class thinking, so he's more vigilant there?

brute's personal view is that one cannot "breach the wealthy class" (and maybe not even from the poor to the middle class). because being wealthy, to brute, kind of implies not even knowing that money is finite. a wealthy human growing up never even really knows that money is a finite resource. their life is limited by other finite resources - respect, friendship, power, status, what have you. and the middle class-upbringing person can't discard his own childhood and growing up, which forms many of their personal beliefs and world views.

[Riggerjack]

S_w

You want to invest in water, but see your problem aslack of capital. This is a middle class look at the problem.

Another view: I want to invest in water, but I don't want to use my money. Identifying the investment, structuring the deal to allow other investors to gain mild returns incropland, while having a huge upside in water rights when water gets scarce. Keeping a percentage for yourself. No cash needed, knowing how, and who is vital.

Still another view: your short play investing in Clintons and uranium paid off, and you now want a long, stable play for most of your returns. Knowing the guy in the above example allows you to be one of those investors.

You have 2 big middle class hurdles to get over: thinking money is the deciding factor in either of the above deals, and thinking money influencing power structure is somehow "wrong".

Until you can think of these things without your instinctual reactions kicking in to judge them,you will struggle with Jacob's definitions.

In your Trump example, you are taking his money, and at least half of his wealth. Who he knows, and how he knows them, and what he knows are the majority of his wealth. The money just let's him be successful despite being a total douche bag.

[jacob]

@SW - Read this https://www.amazon.com/Class-Through-Am ... 0671792253 ... it's pretty dated but it should illustrate how classes differ with more detail than a single person can learn in a couple of decades.

I get the impression that you still think of class as some kind of ordinal ranking system with one being above the other, etc. Better to see classes as different kingdoms. Different kingdoms have different values and customs. They have different ways of doing things. They speak different languages. These differences are subtle but it will be apparent to those already living there whether someone recently moved in; is just visiting; or have lived there all their life. Conversely, the differences when coming in from the outside will NOT be readily apparent.

It's very similar to real countries. Different countries will have different habits and customs. Americans don't use knife&fork the same way as Europeans for example. You even find it inside the US---culturally speaking, different areas will have different values and ways of thinking. See https://www.amazon.com/American-Nations ... 143122029/ ... a Californian won't settle [or even see] conflicts the same way as someone from the Appalachian region, for example. It tends to take a few years of full time living in an area before one starts noticing how one is different.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_stages_of_competence ... in terms of class [these kingdoms], most exist is a stage of unconscious incompetence when it comes to classes. Nontourist travel is useful to bring people into a state of conscious incompetence as in "Hey, people in this country consistently act or behave differently than people in my country." Even getting to this stage is a tall order. It's hard to really notice such differences because one doesn't know what one is looking for. Conscious competence takes even longer. I've lived in the US for 12 years now, but correctly performing the "How are you?" greeting still trips me up. You're not fully integrated until reaching the unconscious competence that the "natives" posses. That goes for both nations and classes.

(As for the college example; what someone not from the middle class might notice is that the supreme values are intellectualism and universalism and all that other stuff (loyalty, family, standing up, ...) doesn't matter to the college group---that'd be the professional middle class. Going to college is like traveling to "professional middle class"-land for a few years.)

You can move to another kingdom but that's not immediately going to make fit in and be one of them. You're not going to instantly change someone's cultural makeup by giving them a new passport. You're not going to change someone's class by transferring $50M in or out of their bank account. Someone, say from the underclass, winning the Powerball is not immediately going to start acting or thinking like a wealthy person. They're not going to instantly develop a strong opinion on the capital gains tax. If they're from the middle class they're not instantly going to switch everything out of their Vanguard index religion and into a checking account having suddenly understood that ROI no longer matters for their personal accounts---that money is now a resource like air which will never run out. Rather they're going to act according with their underclass understanding of money and spend the money on luxury cars and bling. Conversely, let Trump go bankrupt for the fifth time. He's not suddenly going to switch to thinking or speaking like a college graduate while deciding that his best strategy will be to apply for a position as a store manager at the local home improvement center in order to "build up his FICO score". In particular, he would not try to regain his wealth like a middle class person tries to become wealthy---by diligently saving in index funds and negotiating better salaries.

Retirement is a good example of how different classes' lenses. Remember much debating there was whether ERE was _real_ retirement back in the "happy" blogging days of 2010? That was mainly the middle class resisting because ERE violated a bunch of their unspoken rules about what proper retirement is. Conversely, when presenting it as FU money, the upper class (1%) immediately grokked the concept. What's notable was that they did not have rules about how old you had to be or how much money you had to have. What counted was the attitude of having enough to fund yourself for life---even if it was only $7000/year. That's two very different lenses. For the underclass, RE or FU doesn't even exist from a money perspective. The underclass is rather oblivious to the very idea that money can be used to make money.

When I submit that ERE is not the middleclass, I'm merely suggesting that it's its own little kingdom. Several of you have made comments about being increasingly unable to relate to other people's problems and interests. That's a sign that you're relocating class-wise. Your lenses are changing.

[7Wannabe5]

Jacob said: and that my Kevin-Bacon numbers both in the direction of the supreme top whether it's politics, finance, academia, not art though, ...

Yeah, you keep forgetting about the Bohemian Class Otherwise, I mostly agree with you. I would note that education, depending on how it is defined, can serve as either the very best lens changing device, or a thorough monocular stabilization system. Some of my personal lens shifting devices were reading widely and voraciously with little filter, exploring the small niches of nature within and the storm drain system underneath the suburban neighborhoods of my youth, hitchhiking across the metropolitan area to associate with sexy boys from the wrong side of the tracks (inclusive of the fact that I am currently dating a Trump supporter, and I was party to an Islamic Marriage contract -lol), and running my own business.

@Spartan Warrior: As I noted previously, I likely have the lowest net financial worth among individuals who regularly contribute to this forum. I am a moderately attractive 51 year old female from a Midwestern Middle-Class background. At this moment in time, one of the men who is very much seeking my social company grew up on a hard-scrabble farm, watches Fox News, and now has a net worth of over $50,000,000, and another grew up on an estate where he could ride his horse wherever he liked in the company of the son of Sir Edmund Hillary, and currently runs a social justice non-profit. One thing the three of us have in common might be that we either don't care about money, or we do care about money in the same way, which is a different way than the way that most people care about money, which is also somewhat like the different way many of the people who participate in this forum do and don't care about money. Money almost certainly has the greatest marginal utility for somebody who is not able to meet basic survival needs, but it also has great marginal utility for anybody seeking mobility from lower middle-class to upper-middle-class. Therefore, individuals who are currently experiencing the same marginal utility from money may have more of a common perspective than individuals who currently have the same net worth. So, a Bohemian artist manically obsessed with completing a sculpture in alignment with his vision, a multi-millionaire who can't possibly spend his interest income as fast as it accumulates, a mother whose child is dying from a disease no amount of money can cure, a monk in solitary meditation at the top of a mountain, the adult child of an extremely wealthy abusive alcoholic, and/or a country doctor who passionately loves her work and has simple tastes, may all have a very low marginal utility for money in the moment, and this may inform perspective more than altitude.

[BRUTE]

Americans don't use knife&fork the same way as Europeans for example.

huh. what's the difference? brute imagines there's not that many ways to use knives and forks.

[7Wannabe5]

@BRUTE: There are many variations. The knife may be used only for cutting, or it may move food across the plate, or it may be used as spear. The fork may be held with tines up or down, in primary hand or secondary, or not used at all. For instance, Iranians only recently adopted the fork, and often only use knife and spoon.

[jacob]

@brute - http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lisa-mirz ... 94518.html ... the American transfer of the fork to the right hand being the most obvious difference that holds even for people w/o any table manners.

[FBeyer]

Heh. GF and I were called out immediately by a guy in Phil's Fishmarket who could tell we were Europeans from the way we ate
He literally just walked up to our table, smiled at us and said: so, what part of Europe are you from?

[BRUTE]

wow. brute wasn't aware what a pleb he is at the table

[jacob]

wow. brute wasn't aware what a pleb he is at the table

A deep metaphor for many things pertaining to this thread.

[BRUTE]

not sure if triggered by this thread, but brute just ate some steak and observed himself using the fork with his left hand most of the time. sometimes, he'd switch to the right. usually when he'd cut up a whole bunch of pieces and wasn't going to use the knife for a while. brute's fork & knife tactics are relatively pragmatic, it seems. no sense switching the fork around every 2 seconds.

[enigmaT120]

Yeah. I like to use the knife in my right hand, but if I'm doing that I just eat left handed.