Money is about luck, nothing else. I have seven children...
lol okay
this post was submitted on 05 Jun 2024
41 points (95.6% liked)
Australian Politics
1271 readers
13 users here now
A place to discuss Australia Politics.
Rules
This community is run under the rules of aussie.zone.
Recommended and Related Communities
Be sure to check out and subscribe to our related communities on aussie.zone:
- Australia (general)
- Australian News
- World News (from an Australian Perspective)
- Aussie Environment
- Ask an Australian
- AusFinance
- Pictures
- AusLegal
- Aussie Frugal Living
- Cars (Australia)
- Coffee
- Chat
- Aussie Zone Meta
- bapcsalesaustralia
- Food Australia
Plus other communities for sport and major cities.
https://aussie.zone/communities
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
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.
... 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.
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:
I have seven children: two adults and five kids. We are a sole-income family. My children live with disability and my partner had to leave the workforce to provide full-time care for our kids. ...because of my experience with poverty, having kids early, and with HECS debt, I've never had the opportunity to save.
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.
No birth control is 100% effective.
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?
why is having kids wasting money, but a medical procedure such as abortion not a waste of money? what value is generated from the abortion?
I feel like you're arguing for the sake of arguing. Nothing you're saying makes sense beyond being contrite.
no I'm arguing against the eugenics-based thought-terminating cliche that "poor people are poor because they have children" which is a nonsense.
How is it nonsense? You have a certain earning potential. If you choose to have 7 children, you both limit your earning potential due to the time investment of breeding and the need to spread your available income over more dependants. This isn't some class warfare shit. Rich people can afford to have more children because they're rich. We don't start on a level playing field. There are exceptions of course but they are exactly that - exceptions.
Firstly, I have never said children are a "waste" of money, I have only said that raising them impacts one's financial situation.
As for how the two are different: an abortion is a standalone cost. A child is an ongoing cost lasting at least 18 years, quite possibly much longer if one aspires to be a supportive parent.
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.
If you get that chance early, or if you are an heir or whatever to fortune kids are easy. If not kids are hard.
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.
But 7 children doesn't influence your geographical location, the quality of your education, your skin colour, the quality of your parents' education, your familial wealth, your health, the stability of your home life, your gender, your health, the job opportunities upon attaining your majority etc etc etc. It is negligible and largely downstream of the good luck required to be well off and does nothing to undermine wealth being all luck.
But 7 children doesn’t influence your geographical location, the quality of your education, your skin colour, the quality of your parents’ education, your familial wealth, your health, the stability of your home life, your gender, your health, the job opportunities upon attaining your majority etc etc etc.
I never said it did. Please refer to my previous reply:
I am not arguing that the only thing that dictates wealth are the decisions of the individual.
What determines what choices you want to make? What determines your ability to exercise agency? what determines your values?
You're looking at people who sit around a table, get dealt a hand of cards, have randomly assigned levels of skill and then after everyone has played their hands you're trying to argue luck wasn't what determined how people scored...
Again, please refer to that same comment. I have already addressed the determinist view. If you think you have zero control over your life and everything was set in stone before you were even born, good for you. To me, that is a nihilistic, fatalistic and defeatist approach to life that will only further entrench any inherent disadvantage one suffers.
ahhhhhhhhhh you're so obtuse.
The ability and desire for people to make certain choices, whether or not you think those choices are deterministic, is fucking determined before you even properly exist.
you cannot play a 4 if don't have one in hand no matter how much you might wish to. Accepting that is not coming down for or against determinism. Are you thick?
You've just made a determinist argument and then immediately claimed that this does not indicate you believe in determinism. I'm not sure I can help you here; some education and introspection is sorely needed on your part.
🙄 There are positions between radical freedom and behaviourism.
If I break your legs you can't choose to walk, whether or not you have a self causing free will.
I feel massive contempt for people who think themselves so clever that if they don't see nuance in an argument it means the other party is wrong.
If I break your legs you can’t choose to walk, whether or not you have a self causing free will.
The discussion is about wealth, not walking. If you break my legs that may inhibit my ability to work in certain fields, but it does not completely prevent me from obtaining money.
Sigh, right wing trolls are all the damn same.
"Anyone who disagrees with me on a single issue is a right wing troll!"
No, just people who interact in bad faith why spouting right wing talking points 😘
Please explain how I have interacted "in bad faith". I've argued my position pretty clearly, without resulting to the ad-hominem attacks you seem to rely on.
no
This is the best summary I could come up with:
For Pay Day, Dr Allen shares the secrets of survival, the shame that comes with living in poverty, and how "having no money grants the privilege of seeing the world differently".
I was so ashamed that I didn't ask for help from anyone and was stuck at the library nearby the health centre for over eight hours until my pay came into my bank account, and I could afford the couple of dollars for a bus ride home.
This makes us vulnerable to financial shocks, like the car breaking down, but because of my experience with poverty, having kids early, and with HECS debt, I've never had the opportunity to save.
Poverty grants perspective that can never be bought … If a privileged person behaves like a jerk, trust your instincts and value yourself — they're not worth your time.
When the 2020 Canberra hailstorm resulted in thousands of cars destined for metal melting, I picked up a beautiful 2007 Tarago really cheap.
Dr Liz Allen is an award-winning demographer at the Australian National University's POLIS Centre for Social Policy Research.
The original article contains 1,380 words, the summary contains 181 words. Saved 87%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
She seems to have a lot of negative stories she tells herself about money. Luck definitely plays a part in things, but it's not everything. I think with her attitude things are unlikely to change for her, unfortunately.