When I took a social psychology class long ago, they mentioned that the most significant cultural difference between Canadians and Americans was that Americans take overconfidence as a sign of competence whereas Canadians perceive it as an attempt to intimidate or take advantage of someone.
Seems to apply to this article as well. Maybe 'high-class' overconfident people become more convincing as wealth disparity widens due to the magic sauce they must obviously possess to be so rich in the first place. It's like Gob's bragging from Arrested Development: "The guy in the $4,000 suit is holding the elevator for a guy who doesn’t make that in three months. Come on!"
I'm having a hard time finding a paper about the US/Canada difference now though, so maybe I'm wrong.
Anecdote from when I was in China. My friend and I were walking down the street in Jinan (a big city though not one of the Major Chinese cities - think Pittsburgh in the US) when a yellow Ferrari fishtailed around the corner, squealing its tires and speeding away down the street. My immediate reaction - which I imagine to be the average American reaction - was "what an asshole". However, the Chinese around us on the street had quite a different reaction: "wow what a cool guy/car". Not really sure what this means about the perceptions of displays of status between the two cultures, but it's something that has stuck with me ever since.
When you see someone driving a nice car, you rarely think, “Wow, the guy driving that car is cool.” Instead, you think, “Wow, if I had that car people would think I’m cool.” Subconscious or not, this is how people think.
The paradox of wealth is that people tend to want it to signal to others that they should be liked and admired. But in reality those other people bypass admiring you, not because they don’t think wealth is admirable, but because they use your wealth solely as a benchmark for their own desire to be liked and admired.
Anecdotal, but I don't think I've ever thought anything specific about the owners of cars I think are cool. If I see someone driving a nice car, I think "That's a nice car".
Ha, not quite. My main computer at home is actually an almost-10 year old Macbook Air -- and I'll run that thing until I have to bury it. (I don't do much serious work at home these days.) I've flirted with upgrading, but the only reason is it won't run current Docker and that will eventually bug me enough to pull the trigger, but not this week!
Work is a totally different story, but not bought by me, and also spec'd to utility, not extravagance.
until recently mine was a $70 i5 compaq elite (w/ssd and ram and vidya). And yes, I do drive a 25 year old $1000 car on the daily (only upgrade was a tow hitch), jealous?
it seems like you're happy with the price you paid for the stuff you got. that's great!
I know I wrote my comment in a "haha gotcha" style but my main point is that most people with disposable income have areas where they splurge, and areas where they save. maybe it's not the car or the computer, but I bet you own at least one item that your peers would think you spent too much money on.
instead of shitting on people who spend money on stuff we don't personally value, or imply they only did it to show off how rich they are, why not just assume they bought it because they enjoy it?
I'm not trying to shit on anyone, just lucky to live in an area of abundance where $200 can go a very long way if you do your homework and don't internalize status/marketing expectations.
Indeed if it weren't for people pursuing the new shiny, I'd have to pay at least 10x for the same utility. But as it is I'm glad to re-purpose/reuse. I have no delusions that I'm not a scavenger in this economic realm. Though I do appreciate a solid "grandpa" car that seats 6 and can tow a few thousand pounds and can still get 30mpg on the highway.
Not remotely. You can buy a truly fast car-- 200mph fast-- for under $20,000 pretty easily. If you're willing to wrench on it you can get sub-4 seconds to 60 for under $15,000. That kind of performance would have been supercar territory not too long ago, and would certainly count as nice cars today. At below $100,000 I could name a dozen cars that offer a combination of great looks and incredible performance.
Arch Linux is popular with users who will endure some discomfort and manual work to get a powerful and satisfying experience. I thought it would be funny to baselessly assert a connection.
Welllll I did run Gentoo some years ago, so... not that baseless :). But you really don't have to work hard to get a quite nice (but not world-beating) car for $20k.
You are being downvoted because nice != fast so it comes off as a bit off topic.
My original comment was pointing out the disparity between a nice car and a nice laptop. Even a 20k car is at least 5x the cost of a top of the line laptop.
Ok. Your claim was a few hundred thousand dollar difference; I suppose we could quibble about what constitutes a nice car, but >$100,000 buys you a Z-06 or a Jaguar XJ. It's quite the exaggeration, unless your tastes run very extreme. To which I say: the only nice computer is a Cray :).
To get to 200 mph, you're probably gonna need about 600 horsepower, give or take depending on aerodynamics. How are you finding 600 horsepower for under $20K?
A Mercedes SL55 AMG sans limiter will hit 200mph at roughly 500HP, and it's pretty easy to pick one of the 2007s with the fixed top for around $20k. If you go down to the 2003s you have plenty of options going down into the $15k range and they're almost as fast. They're also, to my eyes, pretty good looking and very comfortable-- although I'm pretty sure I wouldn't want to go around any sharp corners at those speeds.
You can also get a similar era V10 M5 or M6 for about the same cash and those will go like crazy. Again, to my eyes, good looking cars.
If you're patient and haggle well you can probably pick up a viper SRT-10, although you might be waiting a while; I see some around $24k but no lower without salvage titles.
I could go on, but you get my point. There are a ton of cars out there that really are pretty incredible for not a lot of money.
> A Mercedes SL55 AMG sans limiter will hit 200mph at roughly 500HP, and it's pretty easy to pick one of the 2007s with the fixed top for around $20k.
Huh, you're right. Actually, more than right. If I don't mind travelling across the country, I can get a 2005 SL55 AMG for $7,500. That car was 6 figures at release, though. That's a LOT of value to lose!
> They're also, to my eyes, pretty good looking
I will disagree there. I think they look boring as all hell. Obviously, this is entirely subjective.
> There are a ton of cars out there that really are pretty incredible for not a lot of money.
I might dispute "incredible" here, for two reasons. First, surprisingly cheap high-performance cars are so frequently from luxury brands that don't consider long-term reliability to be luxury features. Also, despite the SL55 AMG being able to hit 200 MPH, it weighs more than most SUVs, and so has a pitiful 0-60 time of 4.5 seconds. I admit I'm moving the goal posts a bit here, but quick acceleration is more important to me than top speed. I can't use 200 mph on my daily commute, but I can use a 0-60 speed on the on-ramp, or whenever I need to accelerate quickly to pass someone.
I mean, I guess I'm not sure where to go with this. You won't put down better than 4s to 60 daily driving any more than you would put down 200mph in the same circumstances, because you'll have a V10 roaring at you the whole time and literally everyone on the street will be sending hateful thoughts your way.
But if 0-60 is most important, I'd look at things like that SRT-10 (which makes it in 3.7s stock) or maybe even soup up a CTS-V, which can hit it in 3.3 with some work. Granted both of those, with modifications, will probably wind up closer to $25k than $20-- but who knows, you might get lucky.
Despite that, I maintain my original position: these are far, far beyond just being "nice" cars, and unless you can get a nice computer system for less than negative $80,000 there is no way to get such a system for even one hundred thousand dollars less than these cars, let alone several hundred thousand.
0-60 in 4.5 seconds is a really good time, especially in 2005. it only seems pitiful because street cars are ridiculously overpowered at the high end these days.
my hot hatch can do it in six seconds, and even that is a bit too much to use unless the road is wide open with no traffic.
Many people buy exotics as investments and loans end up smaller than the 'equity' in their 1960s ferrari, or even modern special edition lambo. Just because your kia is a quickly depreciating asset does not generalize to all cars.
Oh, I agree. I work with a guy who has his eye on a used Ferrari, and if he takes good care of it, it will hold or increase in value. He buys them at the bottom of the bathtub curve.
However, 99.9% of luxury cars are not exotics. You will rarely see them on the road as they depreciate too much if you drive them daily.
Exactly. It's not the right time to abuse money like that. No one deserves such a car as long as children are still starving and people who create our goods can't even afford a cup of rice a day.
I couldn't look at myself in the mirror if I'd rather buy such an overpriced car then helping those in need.
A while ago, my wife and I were in the mood for dumplings so we headed to a nearby shopping center here in Southern California with a lot of Asian shops and restaurants and not enough parking spots. It's popular among locals and visiting tourists, including nouveau riche from mainland China.
It's a Sunday, it's lunch time, and it's packed. After going up and down a couple rows, I get lucky and see the reverse lights on a minivan light up just as I'm approaching the end of a crowded row. So I stop and wait.
While I'm waiting, I look in my rear-view mirror and notice this very new (no plates) white BMW aggressively weaving around other other cars stopped in the lane waiting for something to open up. Just as the spot clears, the white BMW races around me to take the spot. I'm stunned. I'm not a violent person nor even a particular strong person and haven't been in a fistfight since elementary school. But I'm ready for bloodshed. I lay on the horn.
A young handsome fashionably dressed Chinese guy wearing sunglasses exits the car on the driver's side. His attractive young fashionably dressed wife, also wearing sunglasses, gets out on the passenger side. She pulls out their young son, also well dressed and wearing sunglasses. Obliviously, they start walking toward the dumping joint where we're planning to eat.
I turn to my wife, incredulous: "Can you believe this? Did you see that asshole?" I'm not Chinese. My wife is.
"Asshole?" she replied. "In China, that guy would be a hero."
She didn't seem particularly upset by the turn of events. So I just laughed, put my vendetta in the hands of karma, and went in search of another parking spot.
Same in India. Wealth is seen as a status symbol. The cultures value it, and whoever has more is considered to be high status.
Its not hard to see why though. In industrializing countries with a lot of income inequality, wealth is rare, and anyone who has that is seen as either getting it through hard work, or getting it via their parents' hard work.
BTW, Americans are hardly better, see all the yatches and private jets that corporate executives own.
>Its not hard to see why though. In industrializing countries with a lot of income inequality, wealth is rare, and anyone who has that is seen as either getting it through hard work, or getting it via their parents' hard work.
I see it more that in these societies, the difference in quality of life between being rich or poor can literally make the difference between living or dying. In those conditions, the first thing you probably care about when assessing a potential partner or friend is whether they have clean shelter and know where their next meal is coming from, so the signaling value of money is extremely high. Whether they have excellent taste in music is a long way down the list.
In most developed societies, the difference between being lower middle class or upper middle class is relatively minor, and gives people the luxury to consider conspicuous displays of wealth to be crass, and to choose partners based on more subtle characteristics, like their ability to write funny comments.
On a similar vein, wealth often also brings protection against the State which often abuses its own citizens (e.g. corrupt Government and police officers). This does happen in the US as well (e.g. violence against African Americans) but not to the same extent.
It brings protection in general. Protection against sickness, famine, servitude, and so on. The more present these threats are, the more valuable the signaling power of money becomes.
In a world where most people are infected by a zombie virus, it might become very important to be able to signal that you're not infected. In this world, the fact that I'm not infected by a zombie virus is literally one of the least interesting things about me and will rarely warrant even a passing mention.
Likewise, to me, your t-shirt that just says the word GUCCI in massive letters tells me that you have rich parents and no aesthetic sense. In other circumstances, to other people, it might signal that their quality of life could be improved many times over by being with this person.
The irony becomes that these signals of disposable wealth can be so coveted that in certain places, people's priorities will shift such that they'll sacrifice all areas of their lives, eat nothing but the cheapest instant noodles, and spend a year's savings on, say, a Louis Vuitton wallet which, sadly, they'll no longer have any money to put in.
We were in Rwanda recently to go gorilla trekking. We were told by our guide that in the villages the status symbol that shows you are a person of means is a bicycle.
I've just came back from a road trip in the US, and what struck me compared to Europe is that people didn't have luxurious cars (apart from a bunch of asian kids cruising Yellowstone in obnoxious sport cars). Big SUV were commonplace, but I didn't see as many people showing off luxurious cars as I do in Europe. I don't really know if there is any truth from this subjective observation but it made me thinking. It goes against the common stereotype saying that it's totally fine to boast one's wealth in the US, whereas Europeans are more shy regarding money matters. This isn't my experience.
In Europe cars are very heavily subsidized by the government. In Belgium for instance it is very common to get payed part of your salary under the for of a car (replaced every 4 years) and fuel card, exempt from taxes both for the company as well as for the employee (the result of decades the automobile lobby being very close to the governments).
This results in significant more of German luxury cars, especially BMW, Mercedes and Audi, being quite common, as well as being the most jammed up country on the planet.
So while it looks like fancy flaunting, the BMW 5, Audi 6 or Mercedes E is very common will not turn many eyes here.
> It goes against the common stereotype saying that it's totally fine to boast one's wealth in the US, whereas Europeans are more shy regarding money matters. This isn't my experience.
Up until the early 2000's, this was the case in the US.
If I had to pick a local reason for this, it's because rap music videos since the 90s featured brown people in obviously fancy cars, so obviously fancy cars equals nouveau riche or drug dealer.
And people love to correct others about their bags or shoes when others misidentify them as a more affordable imitation of an exclusion designer, and then get to tell them who and how much it cost and how it is so worth it for the "quality".
What? I’m sorry but, no. Also, car ownership depends on the region. In Los Angeles in many parts of the city you can’t throw a rock without hitting a Mercedes or BMW.
When it comes to wealth specifically, I've always noticed this about American culture.
They have this myth of the ultra rich everyday man, who despite their immense wealth and power, are just as relatable and humble as the rest of us. They wear blue jeans and you see them joking with the cashier, even though they could buy the supermarket chain.
In many other cultures that would be the epitome of hypocrisy. It's perceived as cheap and an outright lie. Being rich actually obligates you to look rich. It's expected. You can be kind, you can be generous, you can be helpful, but don't hide that you're rich.
Although it might be more pronounced in Asia, even in Europe the rich don't try as hard to be relatable as in America. Somehow Americans find displays of wealth almost offensive.
Another anecdote, my Russian, very Dutchified colleague and friend bought a very expensive and nice watch with many survival/hiking functions (compass, altitude meter etc.). The watch was unobtrusive and minimalistic (and black). We both though it was very functional and a sign of good taste and an eye for quality. His Russian family though did not understand how he could have spend that amount of money on a watch that was not "expensive looking".
I’m not so sure you have it right. If that happened to an American child or teenager they would think it was awesome. An adult would not be so amused especially if their child was standing there.
I’d think they were an asshole. BMW drivers are assholes, I know I used to drive one.
On Youtube, Daily Driven Exotics is one of the largest automotive channels and I would suppose you would consider all the antics you see on that channel to be quite obnoxious. Plenty of Americans consider everything they see of that channel as "wow what a cool guy/car".
Burning rubber to show off in a busy city, attracting attention from everyone, is different than a YouTube channel that caters to people who would seek out that content specifically. Of course people who watch car videos think “wow what a cool guy/car” more often than the general population.
If I thought I could get away with it I would lay rubber leaving every stop. It has nothing to do with what other people think and everything to do with me having fun.
>my immediate reaction - which I imagine to be the average American reaction - was "what an asshole". However, the Chinese around us on the street had quite a different reaction: "wow what a cool guy/car"
Is "good for him he's enjoying what his nice car has to offer" not an option?
By driving his car uncontrolled on a public way surrounded by people? Nope not an option. He's flaunting his wealth by putting other people at risk. That makes him an asshole. Just because you happen to like bullies and assholes didn't make that any less true. On a race track or deserted road? Maybe that's kind of fun and cool, you're generally only putting yourself at risk.
But that kind of dangerous behaviour is what any cool guy / protagonist does in pretty much every action (and not even just action) movie. And people don't usually see those characters as bullies or assholes.
The line between 'cool' and 'asshole' is very slim and depends on your assumptions about the individual in question, their character and motivations.
Yes, and actions movies are silly entertainment for teenagers. Hopefully adults don't actually think the tropes found in action movies should reflect the real society.
Possibly, but only if he were driving in a way that was respectful of other people's safety and well being. Driving recklessly is usually pretty heavily correlated with a disregard for others and a feeling of superiority/being above the rules.
Don't see many Ferrari's, but I can tell you a Prius driver is almost certainly an asshole. They are either Top Gear driving or Hypermiling, either way its at least a nuisance and sometimes a menace.
from my anecdotal experience, it seems like the brand of car that assholes drive is determined mainly by the median income of the locale. in poor areas, assholes drive shitty old hondas. in rich areas, they drive bmws and mercedes. in california, you are quite right; they drive priuses.
I'm saying that there are assholes everywhere and they drive the car they can afford. the California part is kind of a joke, but also somewhat true in my experience.
Confirmation bias here, but I find this fascinating. I'm Canadian living in the US, and see these overconfident people who are incompetent in the industry and it drives me banana, but across several previous jobs (again, in the US), everyone seemed completely oblivious to it and thought these people were awesome (they were absolutely not).
In one case, I watched a high executive tank a company into the ground (provably, with numbers to back it up that it was as a direct result of their own decisions) and got promoted 3 times for it. Eventually left their job and took an even higher position at another, bigger company.
This isn't uncommon... Sadly. This is what happens when politics in a company is more important than deliverables the customers pay for. It's generally a sign the company is in a death spiral.
> the most significant cultural difference between Canadians and Americans was that Americans take overconfidence as a sign of competence whereas Canadians perceive it as an attempt to intimidate or take advantage of someone.
Interesting...
I'm an American, but apparently more Canadian in attitude about this. I've always taken overconfidence (or, worse, braggadocio) as a sign of incompetence.
My anecdotal experience agrees with your point. I'm a Brazilian living in UK, and have worked for 2 different big American companies (Dell Computers and Ford Motors). It's very obvious that, comparing to both Brazilian and British cultures, Americans appear to value confidence far more, to the point of coming across as bullish when you're not familiar with it.
I can anecdotally confirm the American side. My manager values confidence to the point where he sees it as the number one signal for actual competence. I started acting more confident and aggressive to appease him, and realized that everyone else has already been doing it all along.
How is that sustainable? Does the scheme lack a feedback loop of sorts or why doesn't he (or the stereotypical American people of similar attitude) realise that the overconfident-looking people aren't necessarily that competent? I mean, competence is a hard quality: you immediately know who's lacking it when you see someone who really, truly has competence. You can only fake it till so far.
Honestly, most managers are not constantly evaluating their team. They have other work to do. I think employees tend to believe that the only thing on their managers mind is them when in reality it's the furthest thing from their mind.
unless you collect data points over a relatively long period of time, it's hard to assess the competence of a developer. you might have one person on a team who works on bugs in ascending order of difficulty and closes many tickets every day. you might have another who works on high-priority difficult bugs, but takes several days on each one.
either person could be a valuable member of the team, but how do you say which one is more competent in a quick glance?
In my experience as an American (32 years) most Americans fight hard for the rich. If you tell someone: "Their rich because their parents were rich." you will almost always be met with resistance and it usually comes from an individual of a lower class. I don't know why it is but that's just how it is. It was amazing to see so many poor people voting for Trump and then when you tell them a few facts about Trump and how completely opposite his life has been to theirs they not only resist it but in some cases get very angry.
There was a book written along these lines a few years ago [1]. We've had an election just here in Australia and there is definitely evidence of the same thing now occurring here.
[1]https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01EEQ9BSW
Presumably you mean Justin. His father, Pierre, was supremely confident and for good reason. He was in a class by himself as an intellectual and politician.
Distrust of overconfident people is a skill that needs to be taught. A class on this might include film clips of famous con men and failures, from Bernie Madoff to Shai Agassi.
Here's Bernie Madoff, after he was a crook but before he was caught.[1]
Here's Shai Agassi, before Better Place went bust spending about half a billion on their battery swap system and putting about 30 cars on the road.[2]
It can be done, but it's not worth it. Battery swapping was a bet against more battery capacity and faster charging.
Even industrial battery swapping, for forklifts, straddle carriers, AGVs, and such, which was once popular, seems to be on the way out. The machines can get through a workday on one charge now, then charge up while parked. Five years ago there were videos of clever battery swap machines.[1] Not so much now.
A BS detection class would be interesting. It's too easy to look at videos of famous liars like Madoff or Bill Clinton and say its easy to tell they are lying because of their body language, in hindsight.
I would love to videos of non famous people telling lies about themselves and try to see if I could spot the liars at greater than average percentages.
Maybe that's an idea for a fun website....
Of course event this course wouldn't help you when the liars actually believe their own bullshit, which seems to be fairly common among the most successful fraudsters.
this might not be quite what you're looking for, but the Calling Bullshit site/course [0] is pretty great. It's not about reading body language, but instead about finding issues in arguments as laid out in the media, scientific literate, and elsewhere. Really, really excellent examples, including some very recent ones.
Humans have extremely skewed perception of risks and rewards. As such, "more confidence" doesn't necessarily mean "overconfidence", but might actually mean "less underconfidence". For example, talking to strangers and/or crowds carries almost no actual risks, and has a lot of potential benefits. On the other hand, driving is quite risky, but we don't think twice about it...
But psychologically, most people have their perception anchored to the average behavior, so things that are actually rational (meeting strangers) appears as "overconfidence" and things that are actually quite reckless (driving, not exercising, eating sugar, drinking alcohol) we think of as "normal".
Public speaking holds a high risk of embarrassment in front of a crowd (although it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy). It’s telling that humans care more about risk to their image than risk to their bodies, as a major difference from most other less social species.
I had an interview experience not too long after I finished college. I don't remember the specifics, but it was for an entry level administrative assistant role. I had plenty of experience in retail, customer service, event planning and working at the front desk of my college - so totally relevant stuff.
The interviewer asked me why I was so confident. And why I had the nerve to want to dig into the terms of the job (salary, growth opportunities and the like - I was a late stage candidate).
Full disclosure - I can't think of a time where I have been perceived as arrogant at all. I am generally well-liked and personable.
The interviewer seemed to have some sort of implicit bias - I think she really didn't think that black people should be confident in a professional environment. I can't imagine that she would have taken similar offense to a white guy asking those sorts of questions.
> The interviewer seemed to have some sort of implicit bias - I think she really didn't think that black people should be confident in a professional environment. I can't imagine that she would have taken similar offense to a white guy asking those sorts of questions.
Well that's your bias though right. I mean maybe she was just intimidated, stupid, and/or human...
I just came out of a situation where a guy on the train was looking at me with the most disgusted look possible. To the point where I was checking myself in the reflection to see if I had a booger or something. Being white I have to assume he was just a weird dude.
I honestly can't imagine what life is like in the shoes of a minority, but I wonder how often false positives show up. I mean you are assuming the other person is a racist, which is a heavy accusation.
I faced similar attitudes in interviews early in my career. It has nothing to do with skin color, and all to do with prejudices about people without much career experience.
In one case, one interviewer basically told me that I lied about how much I made in an internship. (I didn't lie.)
Now that I'm on the other side of the table, I can tell you that the hardest interviews to run are for recent college graduates. It requires a lot of "would I know this back then" thinking.
I interview plenty of recent graduates, most of whom come off as "over-confident", to their credit, they most definitely have great pedigrees and compare well with their peers and will likely be great additions. However, they down-the-line have no clue what they are talking about, or how to do the job they are applying for...regardless of gender/race/etc.
It's entirely possible she didn't think that way. But prior to and after that experience I did have people (outside of an interview context) that explicitly told me I should not have my level of confidence due to their perceived racial expectations. So I could be overly sensitive to the whole thing.
>“We may also need to punish overconfident behavior more than we do,” she said.
Who is "we?" Maybe overconfident behavior is adaptive in a world where risk-taking works out enough of the time. Not all overconfidence takes the form of "I rationally know I can't do it but I'll try anyway," it is often closer to, "I rationally don't know whether or not I can do it, but I'll assume that I can and press on."
When faced with a task, there's a difference between believing that you can eventually learn and work it out given time and effort, and believing that you're already capable of doing it. What's frustrating is when the only people who are given the opportunity to fail over and over again and eventually get it right are the ones who never recognize that they can, do, and have failed.
I think it’s very often not adaptive. Eg some parents are very confident in their ability to conduct medical research in their spare time, and the result is measles outbreaks.
Those parent's aren't "conducting medical research," they are believing what they are hearing from sources they trust more than medical researchers (their own friends and families). In fact, it would take more self-confidence in their ability to do research in order for them to learn the information necessary to step back from their community evaluate the risks on their own.
Survivor bias combined with a very large initial sample size leads to it looking like risk-taking works out most of the time regardless of the actual odds. This makes it very hard to figure out whether that risk-taking is really adaptive or not.
> Not all overconfidence takes the form of "I rationally know I can't do it but I'll try anyway," it is often closer to, "I rationally don't know whether or not I can do it, but I'll assume that I can and press on."
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
When you will still be wealthy regardless of the outcome of any decision you make, you can try more things and take more risks. This fosters as confidence. If you are competent in your risk-taking, it shows up. If you are not, it manifests as overconfidence.
Wealth does not create overconfidence; it only reveals it.
I would argue the other way around: The more wealthy you are...
- the less competent you need to be. You have more capital to do the work for you.
- the less you are affected from random problems, as you can spread your risk.
If you are in the lower echelon, one miss-step or random event outside of your control can bring you in a position where it is much harder to recover from.
Your claims do not disagree with my claims that you are replying to. It's true that if you are poor, any misstep you make is more likely to make for a truly bad outcome.
Can you share some evidence for that claim? It doesn't seem intuitively true to me, but I could be convinced that higher risk-tolerance tends to be rewarded. I'd be curious to hear more about where your idea comes from.
My argument is the flip side of (and generalization of) the usual claim that poor people are discouraged to try anything entrepeneurial.
Another competing claim could be that rich people are honestly less competent than poor people. I could easily argue against that one; IQ and conscientiousness are highly positively correlated with income, based on numerous sociological studies. People who dispute this fact have an agenda.
At least in my sphere of influence, the word "poor" has changed from "has nothing to lose" to "is in a position in which they have already lost quite a bit".
For example, I and many of my colleagues are battling large amounts of student loan debt; if we were truly starting from 0 and had absolutely nothing, pursuing entrepreneurship would be at worst 0 gain and wasted time, but at best a successful endeavor.
Realistically, however, many of the young and poor are starting from a disadvantaged state where in reality, taking a large risk is dissuaded by the risk of defaulting on student loan payments or shredded credit scores.
What I'm getting at is, many people would love to be truly poor rather than in the pit, and being in the pit brings a lot more risk to the average person (who otherwise might have the drive or skills to really make something worthwhile)
> the word "poor" has changed from "has nothing to lose" to "is in a position in which they have already lost quite a bit"
I'm not sure that I understand the distinction you're making here. Yes, one path to being poor is losing what you have. But in the end, such people are just as poor as those who never had anything in the first place. They both have nothing (more) to lose.
> many of the young and poor are starting from a disadvantaged state where in reality, taking a large risk is dissuaded by the risk of defaulting on student loan payments or shredded credit scores.
Most poor people are living in a trap of debt -- that tends to go hand-in-hand with being poor, as is having shredded credit scores.
My distinction is that, for many, being poor isn't starting from the bottom, but rather being in the hole. While they both have nothing to lose, someone starting from the bottom has a lot more to gain given they aren't paying into the trap of debt, and debt is very prolific given that student loan debt has been on the rise.
> someone starting from the bottom has a lot more to gain given they aren't paying into the trap of debt
It's very hard to find a poor person who isn't saddled with debt, whether they have student loans or not. Being poor is very expensive, after all.
That said, I don't think a person's monetary wealth can be measured by their income alone. It has to be measured in net terms: assets (including income) minus overhead and debts owed. A lot of people who consider themselves wealthy are actually poor and living on borrowed (i.e., somebody else's) wealth.
I've had a weird ride in my lifetime from upper-middle class => poor => lower middle-class => finally working my way back to upper. From that perspective, I wouldn't agree with either statement.
I wouldn't say I was ever discouraged from entrepreneurship, even at my lowest. But it did make the math a hell of a lot harder. When you're poor, there's always something more you can lose. Choosing between investing in your business or what you eat that week is a difficult decision.
What I would say is that those circumstances give you the motivation to find the clever, efficient solutions, and to make wiser, less risk-adverse decisions. I never wanted a startup that burned money just to get acquired. I wanted one that could make me real money from the very beginning.
Being poor raises the bar on the quality of the business you intend to create, because failure is worse for you than anyone else.
> I never wanted a startup that burned money just to get acquired. I wanted one that could make me real money from the very beginning.
I agree!
Although many years back my preferred business model became developing a business so that I can sell it whole-hog to somebody else, that has never meant that I was OK with burning money (or even using other people's money in the first place).
Coming from a place of poverty is probably why I am extremely reluctant to actually go into debt for a business. My preferred method is to live lean and bootstrap up.
Before I consider selling a business, I want it to be a real, profitable business that is standing on its own. If it's not that, then I don't have anything to sell.
This works great for folks who are young and healthy or live in a country with a strong safety net. But as far as the US goes, there are many people who would love to take a shot at starting a business or changing careers, but can't afford to give up the health insurance that is tied to their current job.
Competence is the ability to do something (a goal) successfully or efficiently.
IQ measures the ability to perform abstract reasoning tasks successfully. Conscientiousness measures the willingness and desire to perform one's duties well. Additionally, among people that earned their wealth, the fact that they are wealthy demonstrates that they achieved their goal of becoming wealthy. These all indicate competence to me. Wealth, in general, can also be imagined as a state where one's needs are met, which is (for people that earned their wealth) almost always closely related to having achieved certain goals.
I would have a hard time imagining an argument that rejects these claims and also demonstrates that wealth and competence do not correlate positively.
Bear in mind that this is talking about populations as a whole- correlations are something we can tease out via sociological studies, and experiments are few and far between. There are facts about human nature that we will never prove conclusively, but to be an effective agent in the world, you should try to learn things about people that cannot be proven. Being too afraid to generalize the wealthy as competent causes yourself to miss an personal actionable moral lesson about goal-oriented behavior. It is entirely possible to make this judgement, and learn from it, without demonizing the poor as incometent or subhuman.
> I would have a hard time imagining an argument that rejects these claims and also demonstrates that wealth and competence do not correlate positively.
The line of reasoning makes sense. My only doubt comes from my own personal observations: I've never personally noticed a correlation between income and IQ.
> Does your sample's wealth distribution match the population's?
It's hard to say -- I'm basing this on my lifetime experience. Across that time span, the bulk of the people I knew have ranged (at various times) from "dirt poor" to "the 1%".
Memory can be a tricky thing, of course, and I'm naturally speaking subjectively (and therefore not with statistical significance), but I never noticed a smaller percentage of high IQ people in the dirt poor group, nor a greater percentage in the wealthy group.
The breakdown has always seems pretty constant across socioeconomic levels to me.
But it also depends on what you count as "intelligence". I have noticed that the higher you get on the socioeconomic ladder, the more "socially intelligent" people tend to be. But specifying IQ as a measuring stick excludes most of the other forms of intelligence, including social intelligence.
I was hoping that you had a paper that didn't appear there, as the authoritative ones I see there seem to indicate that there is a minor correlation at best.
Yeah, I saw those plots. I didn't personally find them startling, though. To me, they show a weak correlation (that is stronger as you go lower in income, as you note).
That's an incredibly strong correlation by social science standards (seriously, one number correlates that well with something as complicated and path-dependent as income?), which is also weak enough to be completely useless for an individual trying to make decisions. There is no contradiction, because social science is incredibly hard.
Oh yeah, it's minor for sure. Personally, I believe it's more of a "being wealthy means you do better on IQ tests" effect than "IQ measures how much money you will make."
I was mainly getting that point out of the way so the poster I was replying to wouldn't get hung up on my evil liberal agenda.
Considering my characterization of my own point earlier,
>Being too afraid to generalize the wealthy as competent causes yourself to miss an personal actionable moral lesson about goal-oriented behavior. It is entirely possible to make this judgement, and learn from it, without demonizing the poor as incometent or subhuman.
I wouldn't call your viewpoint evil, but I'd like you to characterize where I'm arguing from in your own words. Seems like you think I've jumped into the looney bin.
Putting too much emphasis on IQ is a bit distasteful, because people can't change their IQ very much. But conscientiousness is worth advocating for. To me, it seems like the left-leaning opinion is so afraid to make judgements between people's measurable differences that they want to immediately shame people for recognizing those differences.
> Putting too much emphasis on IQ is a bit distasteful
I wouldn't say "distasteful". I'd say "inaccurate". It's not clear what, exactly, IQ actually measures and it's up for debate if it measures intelligence in any meaningful way.
I feel like it stands to reason that, were a person who could be a successful entrepreneur given all the resources/time necessary to start a business, they would have a higher chance of trying at the very least. There's all sorts of people who are stuck making wages to provide their family and can't afford to take a risk. Those without the means who do end up taking the risk can fall quite hard.
From what I've personally seen the people who get away with incompetence the most are high-charisma people. I've countless times seen people with a certain "reality distortion field" kind of charisma spew utterly inane nonsense in front seasoned professionals who really do know better and they just nod and swallow it. Charisma seems to bypass the rational mind completely. It tells the brain stem "the person speaking is an alpha primate" and the neocortex switches off.
The inverse is also true. People with low charisma can say incredibly wise, rational, and insightful things and they're often ignored.
IMHO a lot of what is wrong with our world can be explained by this. At the same time it also creates a contrarian opportunity to benefit by calling bullshit on charismatic charlatans and paying attention to quieter people who know what they're talking about.
That's plausible. A good explanation would be that in general consequences back then were a lot more lethal. So the guy who was overconfident beyond their abilities and rushed into battle, or into a hunting situation, or a conflict with a neighbor, would probably end up dead pretty quickly.
So if they were expressing confidence, and still around, it would likely be pretty directly correlated with actual ability.
It's a bit of a just-so story but it has some resonance to it.
That makes sense but maybe we don't need that explanation. It could really be possible that the best-designed decision making robot would use confidence as a heuristic. It would fail in the same ways we fail, but it would probably perform worse in general if you removed that bias.
Lot of comments are saying confidence, not overconfidence. Very different things. Confidence is great, in both you and others you are "entrusting" somehow. The problem is lack of competence.
What is the definition of overconfidence. I'd argue being less competent than your confidence warrants. Where as if you're competent then being confident is "correct". The difference is whether someone is competent or not. Not if they are confident or not.
The problem is not confidence. It's peoples in ability to gauge competence / using confidence as an indicator of competence. Which is what the OA says, but many comments here are diverging from that and going off on tangents about confidence.
It's because the browser disables certain features (I believe FileSystem API) which makes it easier to fingerprint.
One workaround is to clear storage in devtools (Application tab) whenever visiting NYTimes and smile that you're messing with their analytics and tracking data.
I think that the article didn't do a good job of explaining why a person's overconfidence is "interpreted by strangers as competence." Maybe there are many dimensions to competence and a deficit in one area of competence might be made up for by a surplus in another area. Maybe "High-Class" is a multivariate description that often includes high social competence that gives other people an impression of generalized competence. As examples: 1. Oppenheimer's poisoned apple and 2. Having a towel.
This paper was published in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. That's interesting for two reasons. The first is that it's a rather well regarded journal with a very high impact rate. The other is because it's one of the journals that's driven the replication crisis plaguing psychology. [1]
In particular the journal this was published in was found to have an overall replication rate of 23%. Another way of putting this is that if you assumed anything you read in this journal was not true, you'd be vastly more accurately informed (nearly a 4:1 rate!) than somebody who genuinely believed what was published in the journal.
Anyhow, back to your regularly scheduled series of anecdotal accounts validating confirmation bias.
A quote from George Foreman about longshoremen. What is real wealth?:
Mr. Foreman, who stared down financial collapse as an adult despite a troubled, impoverished childhood, said he knew real wealth when he saw it. “If you’re confident, you’re wealthy,” he says. “I’ve seen guys who work on a ship channel and they get to a certain point and they’re confident. You can look in their faces, they’re longshoremen, and they have this confidence about them...I’ve seen a lot of guys with millions and they don’t have any confidence,” he says. “So they’re not wealthy.”
For me, knowledge is wealth - it's the universal currency and has a long shelf life. If you strip away all worldly possessions of any two people, the person with more knowledge is wealthier. The best part is that you can't simply trade money for knowledge - you have to work for it no matter how rich you are.
Bill Gates could dump a billion dollars into a world class Japanese course and still struggle to attain fluency if he doesn't work at it with his own sweat and mental energy.
In other words, true wealth in my opinion is the ability to generate value if your brain/soul were dropped in a random homeless person's body in a random era. Something tells me Paris Hilton wouldn't fare as well as Leonardo DaVinci.
>> In other words, true wealth in my opinion is the ability to generate value if your brain/soul were dropped in a random homeless person's body in a random era. Something tells me Paris Hilton wouldn't fare as well as Leonardo DaVinci.
If that random era is in the _past_, that's far from being true. Knowledge doesn't mean much if that random homeless person's body belongs to an identifiable group that is discriminated against by that era's society.
I meant more along the lines of: "what if you had to start over with a new identity with nothing but your knowledge? How far could you get?" I'm guessing a lot of currently rich people wouldn't fare well because they inherited the money and have very little knowledge or skills.
Pretty high chance everyone is poor then because you'll be born poor in India, China, or sub-Saharan Africa half of the time and just not get the chance.
On the other hand, Gates could absolutely hire an interpreter. You can't trade money for /personal/ knowledge but you can trade it for the time and effort of someone else who knows things.
Right but that won't help him if he crashes into the pacific in his private jet and is picked up by a Japanese cargo ship with no English speakers aboard.
A lot of people (myself included) believe that there is life after death and that you can't bring your money and possessions with you. But you can bring your knowledge with you. That's why I believe it's pointless to amass too much money in this life; it's better to amass knowledge, which you can take with you.
> That's why I believe it's pointless to amass too much money in this life; it's better to amass knowledge, which you can take with you.
I agree with your conclusion, although I arrive there by a different route. I happen to believe that there is no afterlife (well, "believe" is too strong -- I just see no reason to suspect that an afterlife exists).
However, I do believe that gaining and processing knowledge is better than amassing money, because increasing the body of knowledge is what tends to make the world better for future generations.
I believe the article is confusing chutzpah for overconfidence. Most wealthy high - class people are business owners. If you can't project confidence to the point of being overconfident, you can't be attracting people, investments for your next venture. Look at the entrepreneur class vs the salaried class? Wealthy people teach their kids to be supremely confident, while poor people teach their kids to be doubting Thomases!
Can you please not break the site guidelines, regardless of how arbitrary or annoying another comment is or you feel it is? Maybe it doesn't deserve better, but the community deserves better.
I think the takeaway here is that people that talk a lot and think they know it all ultimately have more opportunities for success, and are less impeded by their limitations than their peers so the odds favor them over the long run. That personality trait is handed down from parents to children through breeding, most likely intentionally.
The article mentions that this is only the case if the person is well off to start with since they can mess up without many consequences so it isn't nearly as damaging to have overconfidence.
I think part of it can be explained or attributed to a life of people "catering" to you. Higher social class will in a lot of circles mean that a lot of people look up to you or wants to be your friend. One way of doing that is always giving the higher social status peer a lot of praise for anything he/she does.
If you always receive a lot of praise for anything you do, no matter the actual significance of it, then naturally your own perception of your skills inflates unproportionally to reality.
Some of the baseline assumptions and conclusions are off in my opinion.
Specifically, it was never addressed if individuals had an inflated view of their own skills or their ability to complete a given task.
Regardless of an individuals skill in reference to a given task (listed as average among high-class individuals post testing), due to their wealth, high-class individuals absolutely have a greater ability to accomplish any given task as they have demonstrably greater social access and a larger pool of resources to throw at any given problem.
Confidence is not a flat gauge of raw ability but also availability of resources to accomplish a given task.
Using the "Parks and Rec" example, Bobby Newport utilizes his wealth to hire Jennifer Barkley, an elite political campaign manager.
I'm from the UK where British politics is dysfunctional and rotten to the core. Politics is overstuffed with wealthy "upper class" individuals of breathtaking incompetence and a nasty, dishonest, duplicitous nature. Yet, despite that, if you have a well-spoken, articulate voice and accent, the public will perceive you as competent and sensible no matter what bollocks you spout. Depressing.
> I'm from the UK where British politics is dysfunctional and rotten to the core.
Oh God, it’s a disaster to watch. The Tories are repeatedly kicking themselves in the balls publicly and Labour is run by someone who has almost no support from MPs and who comes third after “Don’t know” in the rankings of potential prime ministers.
Are you talking about Corbyn? The guy with broad support despite an unremitting smear campaign from every single corner of the media from The Grauniad to the Beeb, never mind the tabloids? The guy who has been astonishingly effective standing up to the Maybots and revitalised Labour?
I'm very curious what poll you're referring to there that has him after "don't know".
That he has “broad support“, that he has “been astonishingly effective”, and that he has “revitalised Labour”. I wish all those things were true.
Unrelated: while YouGov is indeed online, it chooses which people to send the surveys to and has long-term profiles on each of them, so unlike a silly Twitter poll it has decent statistical relevance and the biases seem to be persistent, well quantified, and generally accounted for — you shouldn’t dismiss it just because you don’t like what it’s saying.
Getting tankies to crawl out of the woodwork isn't quite the same as revitalizing a democratic socialist party. You can get a certain number of people immediately on your side in left politics just by saying something to the left of all previous electoral candidates for high office -- see, Bernie Sanders in the United States.
Now, I support Sanders and quite like Corbyn minus the Brexit and the antisemitism issues, but they both face a similar challenge: their core support bases aren't actually ideologically coherent, let alone aligned entirely behind the candidates' programs. Lots of leftists basically treat Sanders or Corbyn as beloved old conservative uncles, while insisting that nobody with Sanders' or Corbyn's actual (social democratic to democratic socialist) politics should encouraged within Left politics.
Could he, though? In most of the surveys I’ve seen, all options are only supported by a minority, including stopping it. Only a few surveys report that any particular outcome has >50% support, and most of those only just.
British politics seem to have a few psychoses, like the "special relationship" or the fact that it's now a mostly negligible island, not some world reigning imperialist superpower.
A special relationship that's meant little since Suez, except during the Thatcher-Reagan years as they got on so well personally. Every PM since has tried to talk it up, whilst knowing their place full well. See Blair, the faithful poodle.
The rose-tinted mourning of the loss of empire and former superpower status (see this week's universally negative reviews of Rees-Mogg's jingoistic "history" book) amongst some in Britain is a good part of why many have such a negative view of Europe. Many don't feel part of it, but merely next to it, looking down. It's this that the Daily Heil keep talking up. A mindset which is really hard to understand, but it seems like they think that exiting will put us back as global superpower, trading with the world, and... err.
This from a Britain that sells off everything significant and worthy of pride we've ever done, or simply ruins it, and only just remains a blue-water navy. I'm not quite sure how this magic is ever meant to happen. :)
Staying a part of Europe makes far more sense to me, but after Brexit it will be really hard for those euroskeptics to continue to believe we count for much. The reality of our being a post-imperial insignificant little island might start to sink in, especially if the city decides to bugger off. Ironically, in the long run, we might end up better for that.
People who achieve success were often initially derided as delusional, overconfident, etc. Overconfidence, in other words, gave them the impetus to try, and it's amazing how trying gets results in achieving the impossible.
On the other side, I see time after time competent people giving up at the very first (and often trivial) obstacle.
> We may also need to punish overconfident behavior more than we do
This smacks more of a desire to tear down people one is envious of than a recipe for improving society.
I find it odd how Americans try to convince themselves there are a lot of ways to be high class. A doctor might have slightly better standing than a plumber but ask yourself this, who would be served first in a restaurant, the doctor, the plumber, or the millionaire who just drove in on a Ferrari with a model on each arm?
Millionaire in a Ferrari with a model on each arm to me indicates foreign oligarch or guy who somehow got rich recently, probably through a scam or something. Frankly my radar more picks up relaxed, civically active people with immaculately maintained 30 year old European cars who keep mentioning swimming and boating.
> There are more American millionaires than you imagine.
Mainly because the word means less-and-less wealth over time, due to inflation. The millionaires of 1959 were easily 6 times wealthier than the millionaires of 2019.
Whoops, I think I intended to write ~1969 to get it to 50 years (and was using a different estimator) but regardless of exact measure, the trend is clear: "Millionaire" has been undergoing continual debasement ever since it was coined around the 1820s, and means objectively different things within different generations.
Seems to apply to this article as well. Maybe 'high-class' overconfident people become more convincing as wealth disparity widens due to the magic sauce they must obviously possess to be so rich in the first place. It's like Gob's bragging from Arrested Development: "The guy in the $4,000 suit is holding the elevator for a guy who doesn’t make that in three months. Come on!"
I'm having a hard time finding a paper about the US/Canada difference now though, so maybe I'm wrong.