alt Hacker NewsYou are privileged enough to be ABLE to make good decisions. Some people are victims of the boots theory of economics and better choices aren't actually an option.
Lifting yourself by your bootstraps only works if you can afford boots in the first place.
Pratchet said:
"The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. ... A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. ... But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet. This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socio-economic unfairness." [0]
You make dangerous assumptions about me in order to justify your preexisting view of poverty and socioeconomic mobility.
My background is very poor. Food stamps, raised by single mom, whole nine yards. For most of my 20s I existed in the very same cycle of bad financial decisions that many other poor people engage in.
My situation had approximately a 0% chance of changing until the behavior changed. That doesn't mean behavioral changes are always enough, but they are the absolute bare minimum and an excellent starting point.
People I still know in bad situations refuse to acknowledge this and refuse to critically examine their decisions. They do nothing but avoid, avoid, avoid and hope for a miraculous windfall.