" Poverty ", a term that sounds weary and terrifying, has always been a stumbling block to prevent human progress. In many works of social theory in the past, poor people have been labeled as lazy, uninspiring, unimpressive, contented with the status quo, low culture, stubborn, and superstitious.
In fact, laziness is not a poor person. On the contrary, it is us who still believe that the poor are just because of laziness and low culture... A person who has never been abroad, stays in a comfortable high-rise building every day, sipping fragrance of Coffee, and then pats his head to judge the factors that lead to poverty. Is it really incredible? In fact, the problems faced by the poor are far more complex than we think.
If I say:
The more you work overtime, it means that you will make less money and be exploited more later, do you believe it?
Stable work is not the best choice for the rise of the poor. We need to take appropriate risks. What do you think?
Most of the poor do not want their children to become entrepreneurs. Do they enjoy poverty?
1. Poorly limit your thinking to restrain your ability
When you are trapped in a poor environment, the distressed environment will weaken your expectations for the future, and at the same time create an uneasy mentality, prompting you to pay more attention to your immediate gains and losses and local interests than ordinary people , thus constraining your thinking and shrinking your world. This is the kidnapping of the poor people's realistic thinking, so they will be "hanged" by the reality. Therefore, I always make absurd decisions that make me look incredible.
The subjective limitation is: poverty and hunger divert their attention .
The objective limitation is: the distressed environment prevents them from touching the larger world at all .
To summarize two points:
Survival crisis -the poor will be very cautious in making any choice, and even plan carefully, because a wrong decision will make them face hunger pain or debt.
Hunger -When we are extremely hungry, hunger will force us to concentrate on food-related issues, ignoring things other than food (for example: development plans/saving capital/organized planting/searching for reasons, etc.).So: poverty to a certain level will cause boredom .
Because of the heavy burden of life, they have stronger ideas than the rich to reduce their current boring life. The more busy they are, the more boring they want to get rid of boredom.
Therefore, in the case of not having enough food, they still choose to buy a TV first instead of nutritious food. This is the theory that "TV is more important than food" mentioned in the article.
It seems that their “poorness” is not only lack of money, but also the joy of life, so they lose the motivation to look forward to the future.
Therefore, the more specific we focus, the more limited our thinking.
In such a living environment with poor conditions, closed information, high incidence of diseases, and lack of resources, if the country does not have good policy guidance and strong support from the society, it can be said that this kind of "poorness" restricts everything you have. To put it simply: you can't even think of the "derailed" picture, you say how to achieve it in reality.
Looking back at the present:
In the past few years, the phrase "the poor use iPhone, the rich use Huawei" has been circulating on the Internet. I believe this is also because 8 years ago, too many rich people used iPhones
(a low-key way of showing off their wealth), which led to those who could not afford it at the time. , Forming a strong desire for demand-thinking "If you have money, you must buy an iPhone, because that is a symbol of compulsion, class, and kidney." When I got the iPhone, there was an explosion of more kidney-like hormones. Sense .
But he never expected: Exchange the kidney for an apple, but it is just a deceptive Internet marketing advertisement with equal value and scarcity. The most regrettable thing is that most people who believe in this advertisement are often grassroots civilians with low education and insights.
I think that many white-collar workers now switch to Huawei mobile phones, not because the performance of Huawei mobile phones has surpassed Apple, nor is it just cheaper. I summarize 3 reasons:
1. Now too many people (the poor) use iPhone to become an arcade machine and cannot show their individuality;
2. Using Huawei is cost-effective and can highlight their low-key nationalism;
3. The most important thing they do is to save money, indeed They do not lack this little money, not lack of money, but a habit—it is their habit of thinking to accumulate wealth and create wealth at the minimum cost.
2. The infinite loop of lack of education and cognitive limitation
Subjective reasons: insufficient attention to education -survey found: the poorer the area, the less willing to spend the current money on children's education . They view their children’s education as buying lottery tickets, and they don’t recognize it as an investment because they don’t know whether the children will be able to return them when they grow up.
They believe that if a child is in the age group where he can work and earn money, but still spends money to go to school, it is a two-way loss. If he fails to find a job after graduation, the loss is more than doubled. (In China, many outstanding entrepreneurs are children from poor rural families who counterattack by studying...)
In fact, investing in education is the best and fairest way to get the poor out of their plight. Unfortunately, many families don't know or approve it.
Therefore, the lack of emphasis on education has led to a high dropout rate, so the general culture is low, resulting in prejudices passed on from generation to generation, limited cognition passed on from generation to generation, and the belief that reading is useless from generation to generation.
Suddenly I remembered that Teacher Ma often said: "You don’t have to be too high in culture, it’s good enough." In fact, if you are not a 211 college, Alibaba campus recruitment will not even have the chance to throw your resume in the Alibaba trash can. Have. (In today's China, many outstanding entrepreneurs are children from poor rural families who counterattack by studying...)
Objective reason: There is no good educational resources -in fact, some countries implement free compulsory education, but because of the lack of teacher resources and lack of supervision mechanism, and the teachers in many public schools are limited, rigid and boring classrooms cause children to study pain Shadows.
Secondly, the teacher does the farm work at home during the busy farming season and does not go to class, then the bear child will skip class.
At this moment, I think of my fourth-grade Chinese teacher. Every time he goes to class, "Classmates, open the vocabulary list, copy every new word 20 times, and the get out of class leader will help me collect it." Then he went to his wife’s small shop to help me sell it. I went for breakfast, and my shadow is still alive today.
Therefore, during college, if a teacher's teaching skills can hypnotize more than 80% of the population in the class, I have the urge to go and smoke him.
The above two reasons lead to:
Parents mistakenly believe that public schools with free compulsory education are not good, and private schools with fees are their ideal choice. But in the end, the high tuition fees caused them to give up the idea of letting their children go to school. In this way, the poorer they are, the less willing they are to invest in education → low culture → limited cognition → bias in understanding →
In the end, the wrong decision was made: those who refused and neglected assistance, for example, those who were persuaded to get free vaccines, as long as they saw that the vaccine was still ill, even if the probability was 1 in 1000, they would arbitrarily decide the vaccine." Useless theory", even considered deceptive and harmful.
Therefore, even if they are not willing to fight for free vaccines, they close themselves up and refuse all effective scientific aid.
In the end, whether they are sick or hungry, they will realize that there is little hope for survival. They directly give up the last struggle and hard work, and pin their only hope on the belief that there are many loopholes (similar to today, many people still think that the accident rate of airplanes> trains).
So: more terrible than being poor is the lack of education and cognitive limitations
Looking back at the present:
Reading is the cheapest way for us to grow
——When we are trapped in a poor environment, our efforts are in vain in the wrong direction. You are just trying to be poor and there will be no qualitative changes.
So: sometimes in the face of poverty, hard work is just the beginning, which is equivalent to the start button of a car. Deciding whether to arrive at the destination on time depends on the direction of travel + continuous power and the chosen path.
In the face of poverty, I think there is a way to let the mind jump out of the walls of despair, even though the body has to lie in it, that is reading . The world in which we poor people live is too small. Reading is the cheapest way for us to “go out” to understand the big world and obtain abundant resources. (ps: I am not sure whether the high/low education level can be completely separated from the class, but compared with those who have the reading habit, the mind has already drawn the boundaries)
At the moment, this is also the fairest way I personally think, because reading regardless of age, gender, class, situation, wealth, status, everyone has the same opportunities and rights. The premise is that you have to know words. This is the meaning of education.
I believe that countless rural children in China have passed the college entrance examination to reverse their destiny instead of real estate speculation.
Teacher Yu Minhong (the founder of New Oriental) once said that "China's college entrance examination is the fairest way to compete in the current society, and it is also the best way for our rural children to get out of the mountains."
3. Will only avoid the consequences and not cut off the source
The poor pay more than the rich
——Most people in poverty-stricken areas do not have social insurance (five social insurance and one housing fund), which will cause people to worry too much about the future (such as: pension/education/illness/distress/death). This invisible life pressure will distract them. As a result, they have high internal consumption and low efficiency, so they are forced to choose measures that are not conducive to increasing wealth and changing their predicament.
For example, in this year’s epidemic, the wealthy can temporarily not go to work, do business, or go out... But we poor people cannot, because we have no money to repay the mortgage if we don’t go to work, car loans/closed companies will face bankruptcy/no job opportunities if we don’t go out, the bet is that we have to pay the price of risking greater risks than them.
The article "The Nature of Poverty" mentions that every woman in Ethiopia gives birth to 6.12 children, which is 51 times as poor as the United States, and the total fertility rate in the United States is only 2.05.
They want to have more children to increase the labor force and make up for the high mortality rate caused by the disease; have
more children to protect themselves from the risk of old-age care ➡️This will lead to higher living costs;
let the children drop out of school to save money ➡️The culture of the endless cycle is low, and the culture is low. Knowing the limitations;
borrowing usury to hold a rich wedding or funeral ➡️resulting in repaying being squeezed by the high interest of the rich for life and becoming a slave;
marrying one's own daughter nearby to improve mutual assistance in life ➡️killed the daughter's only chance to get out of the cold;
they They often spend money on expensive treatments, but give up cheap preventive measures;
Do not face the problem directly, avoidance seems to be a kind of "exercise mode" for them . I don't know if they will increase happiness in this way, but if they continue to do so, the difficulties they face will not be substantially changed.
What I didn't expect was that in Udaipur, India, some mothers prepared a dowry for their 8-year-old daughter 10 years in advance, ignoring the cost of personal energy and time.
The cost of dealing with risks for the poor is much greater than for the rich.
Looking back at the present:
Contrast with the rich : having fewer children → reducing living expenses → giving children better conditions (better education) → entering a higher class → raising the time value of one's own unit → obtaining guaranteed living material conditions.
Poor vs. Rich: The poor pay attention to the event itself, and then take various measures that are not conducive to getting rich at all costs to save the continuous cycle ♻️ defeat.
The rich pay attention to the cause of the incident, and then cut off from the source or take preventive measures. (During the new crown epidemic, I was in my hometown, and it was obvious that rural people paid much less attention to protective measures than people in first- and second-tier cities. They never thought that a 2 yuan mask might cost their lives)
4. Compared with the rich, the poor are not patient enough
The reason why the poor are impatient is that they always fear the future : in a difficult life situation, as long as the benefits are considered uncertain in the future, they will be full of fear.
For example: Doing business is afraid of losses, investment education cannot see timely returns, buying insurance is no return consumption, etc.
Therefore, their money is basically safe, even if they know that insurance can reduce the risk of future life, they still choose to give up.
Because buying insurance needs to spend their current money, they will feel pain and regret because they cannot immediately enjoy the value of buying insurance.
The reason is: when they see everything too far away, it is difficult to motivate them to fight against the distress situation and think about change. Therefore, it is them who can see the benefits in front of them, or they can actually enjoy them. Favor -it is one's own to spend it. In Xiao Shenyang's words, it is "worry that people die and the money is not spent."
The article "The Essence of Poverty" mentioned: their money is eagerly used to buy delicious food, TV sets, bicycles, refrigerators, brand clothes, etc., and give up those benefits in the future insurance, children's education, fertilizer, small carts (doing For small business).
He didn't know that he was actually using a seemingly money-saving and expensive measure to bet that they might face the risk of poverty .
In terms of economic thinking, who is the most anxious will pay for the current price.
5. Not used to saving money and not considering investment
The poor always "live" with the hard-earned money he earns even worse than himself
You might say that when you fall into the "poverty trap" mentioned in the article (the area on the left of point A1 in the figure below), it is not easy to survive. Where is the extra money, how to save money if there is no money, let alone investment. This sentence only said that for some "no money, so don't save money", they can actually save money.
What is strange is that the survey found that when the per capita income in poverty-stricken areas is lower, the sales of non-consumer goods increase instead, indicating that when they are poorer, they have stronger consumption ideas than the rich, and consumption is not necessary for life.
Such as buying snacks, cigarettes, tea, refrigerators, televisions, etc. And in Africa, for the sake of face, they spend a lot of money to hold grand weddings and even organize funerals no matter how difficult the day is.
You can hardly imagine that in Udaipur, India and many poor families in Africa, a funeral costs more than 1/4 of their annual income. Some families have a funeral that directly plunges them into an economic crisis for several years and bears debts for a lifetime.
Explain that their non-essential living expenses are actually very expensive. In fact, they can save this part of the money and use it to grow their wealth.
The main reason is that the pain of controlling their own savings is far greater for the poor than for the rich.
The rich save money as surplus, so it has little effect on themselves.
But the poor are not. They have to make trade-offs when they want to save money. For example, they cannot smoke today/cannot eat large meals/cannot eat desserts/cannot buy TV sets, etc. These are severely weakening their enthusiasm for work. For them, this decision is very uncomfortable.
Therefore, in the end they will choose to spend happily , which leads to no accumulation of wealth, no accumulation, no investment, no planning for the future, and no hedging measures.
When faced with an urgent need for money, they either borrowed loan sharks or chose to do cheap jobs to increase their income.
In fact, the poor should learn to save money and invest, because like everyone else, they have a present and a future, instead of being squeezed by the rich, they should share the social progress brought to them by the rich. Benefits.
What they didn't consider was: if they don't save money or invest, they will always be poor.
The final conclusion is: it seems that the obstacles to saving money are not all from external pressure, part of the reason lies in the person's own psychological factors, or it has gradually become a habit.
6. Lack of formal borrowing leads to being squeezed by usury
No formal institution is willing to lend money to the poor, because their default rate for borrowing money is much higher than that of the rich . Therefore, only loan sharks (informal institutions) are willing to lend money to them, and in the end, high interest squeezes them out of breath.
Going home for the New Year this year, to write this article, I deliberately sought out an uncle who borrowed private usury and opened a brick and tile factory that went bankrupt and learned:
The loan shark was called "Golden Savings Club". At that time, the monthly interest was 10% to 13%, and the annual interest was close to 150% after the compound interest effect. He borrowed 30,000 to 40,000 yuan that year. In about 3 years, the principal and interest and the need to repay 130,000 yuan Around, I was shocked (up till now, what is the difference between this and grabbing money).
Therefore, after the poor borrowed loan sharks, a slight mistake would wipe out everything. Therefore, high interest rates make most poor people, even with good investment intentions, without good psychological quality, can only see opportunities to lose again and again.
An example from the article "The Essence of Poverty": Take farmers in western Kenya. They know that fertilization can increase their harvests by about 2 times, but the government distributes fertilizers in the early stage. They are forced to sell them at a low price for emergency assistance. Waiting for the fertilization season, fertilizer prices will increase. They have no money to buy agricultural fertilizers, so they can only borrow usury or directly not fertilize, so only 25% of farmers use chemical fertilizers to grow crops every year.
In fact, a small number of the poor can actually obtain low-interest loans through the formal process of the bank, but the approval process is more complicated and demanding than the rich. As a result, their time cost is too high, which invisibly increases their life costs and risks.
Therefore, they have also given up formal low-interest loans and turned to usury institutions that are easy to approve. (Who is going to tell you today, take an ID card and borrow 100,000 at will, your product, your fine product)
Therefore, loan shark is either the last straw to crush the poor or the devil who sucks their blood .
The result is: whether it is high interest or excessive spending, they will use cheap labor day after day to make up for this wrong choice. Then I work hard every day, but the beneficiaries are loan sharks (the rich).
Therefore, no matter how hard they work, the poor can only live happily and pray not to get sick or encounter natural disasters.
My cousin inspired me:
In 2016, my cousin said something that shocked me at the time: he bought an OPPO phone worth 3,500 yuan in installments in a physical store. Now that he paid it off, he did the calculations and realized that the total price was enough to buy iPhone 6s. Up.
In many cases, being poor is not because we cannot make money, but because our hard-earned money is too easy to be earned by others.
I really like this joke on the Internet:
Who made Jack Ma's wealth today? You are not allowed to say that it is a girlfriend or a
fucking child ; Wang Jianlinle? You are not allowed to say that it is his father;
Ma Huatengle ? His son, his father or the whole family.......
Today’s pervasive invisible "loan usury": installment payment by borrowing Huabaibaitiao credit card cash.... take care!
7. Poor national institutions are even worse for the poor
The lack of a good supervision mechanism has led to zf corruption, bribery and misuse of public funds. During the ruling period, some gj leaders formulated political strategies not to serve the public, but to seek the best interests of the rulers.
For example:
those businessmen (rich people) who take bribes are considering more favorable policies for themselves, and the opposite is unfavorable workers (the poor), because most of the poor work for the rich.
For example: refraining from purchasing social security or insurance for employees, concealing harmful working environment, compulsory cheap overtime, or even compulsory overtime;
Zf did not implement poverty alleviation work on the poor, but helped many zfgy to become rich. Ten thousand are omitted here...
They did not expect that their selfish behavior misled the world's poverty alleviation organizations and charities, and conveyed the wrong status quo. Cause charitable organizations to change the direction of aid, reduce their poverty alleviation work, invisibly reduce the opportunities for the poor to get help.
Looking back at the present:
Today, the priority control of A-share information is the top financial leaders, so all those who are stuck are retail investors. There are “10 retail investors who speculate A shares, 7 losses, 2 balances, and 1 profit” circulating on the Internet. Those 7 are “Live Leifeng” who contribute to the rich who stay in the CBD every day...
8. Stable thinking is part of creating poverty
Poverty is very detrimental to the poor who want to counterattack, because the division of classes will make the poor at the bottom of the pyramid very competitive, so the labor value of the poor is cheaper.
When you stay in a group of people who make money by increasing working hours, you will find that your unit time cost will become lower and lower. The more tired you are, the poorer you will be.
Therefore, working cheap temporary workers and working overtime is just the beginning of stabilizing poverty. This rhythm will only keep you steadily poor .
It is difficult for them to change to the status quo, because there is almost no opportunity to contact the people above the pyramid. As mentioned earlier, they are also unable to obtain formal insurance, banking services and other cheap financial channels.
Therefore, these poor people generally have a strange idea: Most of them don't want their children to become entrepreneurs. The ideal is to hope that they have a stable job.
The "Essence of Poverty" article survey found that more than 93% of the poor in Udaipur, India, long for their children to have stable jobs (such as government personnel/teachers/doctors, etc.).
This also shows that the poor are afraid, impatient, do not save money, do not invest, and do not pay attention to education. Part of the reason is that they do not consider long-term benefits because they do not have a stable source of income at the moment.
Therefore, only when they have a stable life can they eliminate the daily uncertainty in their brains, so that they can be patient to make longer-term considerations.
In fact, stable work seems to be only a boundary between the middle class and the poor, but it is not the best choice for the rise of the poor .
Personal understanding and summary:
- The poor are basically part-time thinking —only by increasing labor and working hours can they make more money. They did not expect that this is just the beginning of increased exploitation.
- The rich are businessmen thinking -they firmly believe that choosing the right direction is more important than working hard.
- In many cases, the reason why we are poor is not only because we cannot make money , but because our hard-earned money is too easy to be earned by others. So when you are in the poverty trap, you need to be patient: buy less non-essential goods and accumulate more money, less loans and more investment, less fantasy and more action, less vanity and more attempts, less complaints and more summaries , step by step out of the poverty trap point A , And then there will be a period of rapid rise AB, step by step out of poverty.
Hello everyone, I am gaolhjy.
An Internet person who has switched to a traditional industry. Engaged in Android development in the early stage, and now technology management.
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