This bit resonated.
It makes me so terribly sad that in a society such as ours the wealthy keep creating new means to harm the less lucky.
That aside, Alan Kholer has also opined in the past that our economics policy is based on disdain.
I know many will read my financial experiences and see failure. I haven’t failed; I succeeded when the odds were totally stacked against me. I made good what life threw at me. I survived … with my values intact.
I can only agree.
lol okay
… How is income related to the number of children?
Do you get paid for being unfuckable?
Wealth generation is partially tied to your expenditure. Having 7 children will massively increase this over the course of your life. Additionally, parents may be forced to make financial sacrifices in their careers to better raise their children.
When you choose to have children, you are accepting that you may be limiting your ability to generate wealh. This is particularly true when you make this choice 7 times In a row.
Sure whatever if you become a parasite but very, very, few people ever realistically get the choice to do so. Like long before you even have to decide between embracing evil and getting shares/property/whatever you need food, clothes, shelter, and medicine. It’s completely luck.
If you get that chance early, or if you are an heir or whatever to fortune kids are easy. If not kids are hard.
Having children is in no way related to the luckness of it.
But the argument being made here is not about whether raising children is easy or difficult; it’s about whether “money is luck”. Your life choices affect how much money you have. That is a fundamental truth.
Are you being bad faith or genuinely confused here?
You’ll need to be more specific with your questioning.
Do we agree that choices are not free? That the set of choices available to someone is determined by precededing moments, a chain of which extends back well beyond anything a person could be held not merely responsible for but indeed capable of having any influence over at all?
You seem to be misunderstanding the point I am making. I am not arguing that the only thing that dictates wealth are the decisions of the individual. I am arguing that the decisions of the individual contribute to their wealth. Maybe you see the world from a determinist mindset, but I certainly don’t. There are always choices we can make about how we choose to live. Sometimes these require sacrifices, such as the choice to not have 7 children.
I guarantee that every millionaire has more outgoing expenses without counting anything spent on their children than a large family does.
The woman in the article is clearly not a millionaire. so I’m not sure what your point is here.
You were scorning the mother for “wasting” money on having kids, but millionaires “waste” more money on their expenditure than having kids would do.
Also, having 7 kids does not mean you can’t be a millionaire, as millionaires are statistically actually more likely to have more kids than average.
Hatred of large families is largely manufactured by the media residue of hating on “Octomum” - a woman who had octuplets during the global recession of 2007-8 as a way of blaming the common folk for not having good sense (despite the fact it was a result of pure chance) and not because banks couldn’t stop themselves from doing multiple crimes every single day.
Finally, Elon Musk has 11 kids.
Again, what is your point here? I was not “scorning the mother for wasting money on having kids”; I was mocking her inability to see her life choices as directly impacting her ability to obtain wealth. She claims “money is about luck, nothing else” but acknowledges herself that her decisions have affected her financial situation:
Whether incredibly wealthy people have multiple kids has no relevance to whether having any children, let alone 7, impacts your financial situation.
Having a disability is absolutely “luck” as is potentially having kids. No birth control is 100% effective.
You can’t have a disabled child without first choosing to have a child.
Are you really pretending this woman accidentally found herself pregnant on 7 occasions? And that on each occasion, she accidentally had the child without ever making a choice to keep it instead of pursuing an abortion? And that nowhere, throughout any of these 7 births, was she ever in control of her life to the extent that she could have made choices that led her down an entirely different path?
Luck does have a part to play, but so do the choices you make.
If you are not already wealthy, every time to you choose to have a child you erode your financial standing to some degree, that’s just a fact. Do this seven times and you are going to have some issues.
To compound matters, one or more of her kids have some kind of disability, and disabilities are not a cheap thing to manage in this country. I don’t know if it’s the first child or the last child, but unless it was the last I definitely would have stopped after that knowing the enormous amount of resources it would require to support the child.
To put her entire situation down to luck only really comes across as denying personal responsibility.
Whatever your starting point in life, every choice you make will move you closer to your goals or further away from them. The article no doubt is missing a lot of information, since the journalist failed to analyze the situation critically, but it really does seem a lot of choices were made that would have compounded financial problems.