50 ms·

Price shocks in formative years scar consumption for life

286 points by NickRandom 4y ago

bitcurious 4y ago
My grandparents didn’t go hungry this year (after Russia’s invasion) because they had a cellar full of preserves. For them, it was part of a tradition of hunger, a “never waste food” mentality reinforced by WWII, and Holodomor prior, and WWI prior, and the experience of being serfs prior to that.
- kgwgk 4y ago
  > WWI prior, and the experience of being serfs prior to that They may be quite old!
  - nostromo 4y ago
    > it was part of a tradition
    - kgwgk 4y ago
      it was a joke, anyway
- 2-718-281-828 4y ago
  In the spirit of the article or at least the title one might say your grandparent's regular food wasting attitude has been scarred by WWII.
seunosewa 4y ago
Is it fair to conclude that fossil fuel price shocks are good for the planet? If everyone experiences them early then we will all reduce our carbon footprint for life and slow global warming?
- jrumbut 4y ago
  The article addresses that a bit. The effect is small and they are still driving everywhere alone (instead of public transport) so the authors say that electric vehicles are the only way out.
- ffggvv 4y ago
  what if i told you a lot of fossil fuels go into producing electric cars, which then drives up the price of them making them out of reach for the avg person
  - throitallaway 4y ago
    I'm sorry, but are you saying that the high price of EVs is due to fossil fuel prices? EVs were far out of reach of the average person well before fuel prices ticked up. They're priced high because they're based on relatively new technology and processes.
    - ffggvv 4y ago
      no i’m saying high energy prices make them even more expensive
- duffyjp 4y ago
  I 100% welcome higher gas prices. Americans are so wasteful it's ridiculous. It'll hurt if you're currently in an inefficient car but once you get a hybrid / EV you won't care. I don't even look at the price filling up my Prius. SUVs that look like school buses and people commuting to an office job in full size trucks is madness.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - paulywog 4y ago
    I'm in the automotive industry and the biggest fan of EVs in general. I was even home-building an EV before I moved to the city. I think we still have a lot to figure out with our charging infrastructure, in cities where often it's hard just to park. I want an EV badly, but it'd be a constant struggle to keep it charged. There's also an issue with car companies generally not making the cars I want anymore, though I understand this is a me problem. There's not a nice plug-in hybrid small convertible, even if I could charge it.
mmaunder 4y ago
Notable that the gas price doubled in 3 years. We’re almost at that point today. https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=pet&s=emm_epm0_pte_nus_dpg&f=m https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=pet&s=e...
giantg2 4y ago
I had a grandfather who lived through the depression. He never threw away anything that could possibly be useful in the future.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
mdeck_ 4y ago
> Between late 1978 and early 1981, drivers in the U.S. saw the price at the pump nearly double from 63 cents to $1.31 a gallon. Not sure how that change would amount to NEARLY doubling...
- selimthegrim 4y ago
  I don’t think inflation was on holiday during those years…also nearly doesn’t have to mean almost
fleddr 4y ago
A "food shock" variation... My late grandmother, whom lived to the respectable age of 99 years, experienced the Dutch hunger winter. A period of famine during WW2. For the rest of her lengthy life she could not tolerate any type of food waste. As an example, she'd buy a cabbage and then eat cabbage the entire week, even as it increasingly goes bad. She had zero interest in food quality or nutritional value, just food in itself. Behavior learned during the famine where you don't have the luxury to discriminate. As an example, she once babysat me and my brother and made an abundance of snacks. Just way too much. Quite soon we were full, but the single word "finish..." and her stare told us all we needed to know. We finished, with stomach cramps. Out of respect. Also, she had 9 children and survived 7 (genetic blood disease). She survived two husbands. In her extended family and friends, she survived...everybody. We have a single photo of her childhood, where she stands in front of her house. Which was...made from clay and reed. An astonishing reminder of how even in today's developed nations, wealth for common people is brand new. Despite plenty of opportunities in her lifetime, she rejected material wealth outside some basics. Zero material desires. Despite all this, not once in her life have I seen her sad or complain or moan. If us grandchildren did something bad or stupid, she didn't give a shit. You're still alive, in health...so what's the problem? Carry on. She didn't eat very healthy, smoke a pack a day and didn't exercise. And still she made a daily trip on her bicycle to get her own groceries. Or make two trips in a row if needed. Up to the age of 98. The collapse was short and sudden. After a hospital stay she was returned home to die. As she got carried out of the ambulance she saw my dad's work: her front-garden completely replanted with hundreds of blooming flowers, a sight to behold. "That looks nice" She was never very generous with compliments. And those were her last words. I'd call her Iron Lady, but it's an insult really. Iron is too soft to describe her. She lives on as my compass for life. When I worry, see darkness in the world, contemplate about world events and threats, I think of her. I'm alive, and I'm eating. I'm fine. Her scars are my lesson, and it's liberating. She lived in an occupied country, ate grass and flowers, whilst nearly freezing to death. She encountered enough personal loss to fit several lifetimes. And still lived a full life and remained positive throughout. So if at one point I have to cancel my Netflix, yeah...I think I'm going to be fine.
- hinkley 4y ago
  My great grandmother was 9 at the end of the Great Depression. Not that she talked about it, but I did an assignment for an anthropology class that was basically, "bother some old people about one of these Bad Times." She actually was a good cook, a lot of her dishes rode the line between simple and fancy. She had either the oldest fancy stove or the fanciest old stove I'd ever seen, and she treated every glass jar she met as a reusable container (to this day the majority of glass jars on store shelves are the same dimensions and threading as a Ball Mason Jar lid), had odd collections of belongings and many of her wide, wide variety of plants seemed to have come from an extensive network of barter and gift economy. We spent one trip to her house clearing her entire pantry of expired food, because my mom found one can, asked some questions and did not like any of her answers. Some of it was bad. Rob you and leave your body in a ditch bad.
bergenty 4y ago
Scar is a weird way of referring to being prudent.
crikeyjoe 4y ago
kbelder 4y ago
Price shocks in formative years cure overconsumption later in life.
ChuckNorris89 4y ago
Being poor in general, during your childhood, scars you for life. It makes you penny wise and pound foolish, adverse to taking risks in your career and investments, can destroy your confidence in yourself, while always having to look over your shoulder monetarily speaking. Habits that even after you remove poverty from your live, you still feel the the anxiety and triggers in your head.
- snarfy 4y ago
  I'll never have another credit card. Frequent flyer miles, what are those? The whole industry can go fuck themselves.
  - sokoloff 4y ago
    If you're able to live without the credit aspects of the credit card, why not take the 1-2% discount on nearly everything consumable that you buy? If you pay it off every month, credit cards have a negative cost (to you) and a fair amount of convenience (for renting cars, hotels, booking flights, etc).
    - duncan_idaho 4y ago
      That 1-2% is what they pay you for all your data. Credit cards are a key component of data brokers.
      - throwaway193948 4y ago
        compared to all the other data collected about me with no benefit to myself that seems like an ok deal
      - bombcar 4y ago
        The 1-2% is what they pay you for helping strong-arm the merchant into giving them 3%.
      - astrange 4y ago
refurb 4y ago
"“Those who came of driving age during the oil crises of the 1970s drive less in the year 2000,” the paper found. The doubling of gasoline prices in the late 1970s saw that generation drive 3.6% to 8.7% less than those born earlier or later" I can't find the paper, but when they say "born earlier or later" are they still looking at rate of driving in the year 2000? If so, aren't they just comparing ages? People born earlier or later would just be younger or older in the year 2000, which likely impacts driving too. Oh economics! You keep calling yourself a science, but you need to start acting like one!
- anamexis 4y ago
  Presumably if it was just based on age, the effect would be fairly uniform, instead of correlated to periods of price shock.
- NickRandom 4y ago
  Link to Full paper https://cseveren.github.io/files/FormativeExperiences_Paper_and_Appendix.pdf https://cseveren.github.io/files/FormativeExperiences_Paper_... if that helps?
  - refurb 4y ago
    Maybe I’m going nuts but it looks like they used 2000 US Census data on driving, so yes, they only looked at that year. They are literally comparing people who are older and younger with the cohort in question, so confounding results with how driving changes at various ages.
    - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
      > it looks like they used 2000 US Census data on driving, so yes, they only looked at that year The first major sentence under data: “The decennial census asks questions about commuting mode and time. ‘Journey to Work’ questions appear in the 1980, 1990, and 2000 censuses, and in the American Community Survey (ACS) (Ruggles et al. 2020). We use data from these three censuses, as well as the 2006/10, 2011/15, 2016, and 2017 ACS” [1]. Confirmation bias much [2]? [1] https://cseveren.github.io/files/FormativeExperiences_Paper_and_Appendix.pdf https://cseveren.github.io/files/FormativeExperiences_Paper_... bottom of page 6 [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias
quantified 4y ago
Yeah, we don't just burn gas driving everywhere. "Scar consumption" as a phrase assumes that consumption in the American style is a healthy activity to begin with, and this outcome is damaging or ugly. "Permanently reduce consumption" would be more worthy of an academic setting, that title is clickbaity. Perhaps some will overdo avoidance of something because of fear of expense. Better than masses overdoing from building their lives around unsustainable inexpensive consumption. Look where we are for sprawl and emissions.
- cs137 4y ago
  Plus, a lot of that gas consumption is spent commuting, which makes people miserable. Murdering the daily commute is a good thing Covid-19 did, although I don't expect it to last long (WFH-ers will get fewer promotions, despite working harder, and eventually RTO fetishists will rule the roost). Very few people want to "consume gas". They want to be able to live decently and have meaningful jobs. Unfortunately, in today's market, that usually means a shit-ass load [1] of driving. ---- [1] You don't want to know how much time I spent deciding whether to use the more conventional hyphenization ("shit-ass-load") or the version with better cadence.
  - quantified 4y ago
    Hopefully a lot less than you spend behind the wheel getting anywhere.
  - mistersquid 4y ago
    > You don't want to know how much time I spent deciding whether to use the more conventional hyphenization ("shit-ass-load") or the version with better cadence. It’s not a question of “cadence” but of grammar. “Shit-ass“ is an adjective modifying the noun “load”. Your choice is grammatically correct.
    - lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 4y ago
      Could there not be a noun, "ass-load"?
weinzierl 4y ago
It's more that abundance in formative years spoils you for life.
- kylecordes 4y ago
  Extreme are often bad. Having either not enough, or excessively much early on, lead to various irrational or otherwise maladaptive behaviors later. Humans perform best in a happy middle range along many axes.
  - april_22 4y ago
    This is so true. The middle is the best for most things in life. Too much pleasure can also mean pain
- cs137 4y ago
  Debateable. The reason rich kids turn into such pieces of shit isn't material abundance (since, after all, anyone born before ~1990 in the middle class also experienced material abundance) but the unearned high social status and the impunity that comes with it. Deprivation and poverty, on the other hand, fuck people up severely--often, through no fault of their own--and there's tons of empirical evidence showing this.
  - daniel-cussen 4y ago
    Yeah and like rich kids have impunity, poor kids have excess punishment meted out against them. Scapegoated a lot of the time.
  - ponow 4y ago
    Huh? Social status is relative, that is, defined by some kind of difference in a characteristic over which there is some competition (like wealth, looks, connections, fame, etc.). So how do you get that rich kid status without reference to material abundance? Remember, most people are comparatively poor: the wealth histogram is heavily skewed toward zero and with a wide tail toward infinity. It's impossible for everyone to be relatively wealthy and relatively high status. It is possible for everyone to have absolute wealth (or at least income) beyond a fixed absolute level, yet still widely disparate status.
cageface 4y ago
My grandmother grew up during the great depression and often went hungry as a child. Decades later when she had plenty of money she still refused to ever throw anything away. Her huge house was stuffed full of balls of old string, used popsicle sticks, ancient newspapers and wire.
- NickRandom 4y ago
  I had a relative that was a child during WWII and they had some very distinctive (borderline maladaptive) 'quirks' .... One of which is they would never take the last item of anything from out of the fridge (eggs, cheese slices etc) and would become irate if anybody else did. They (much like your grandmother) were also unable/unwilling to throw anything out 'just in case'.
cs137 4y ago
I worked in a grocery store in the late '90s, and the older customers (who grew up in the Great Depression) always carried penny pouches, because they remembered a time when one had to keep track of cents to survive. This is how I know that, even if we miraculously fixed our medical system tomorrow and outlawed private health insurance by a constitutional amendment, we'll still have, thirty years from now, 60-year-old Millennials dropping dead of preventable causes. The American healthcare system has already killed millions, but it's also killed future millions.
- tootie 4y ago
  My grandma did this. Never left a penny on the sidewalk, always took the bread from a breadbasket home. Even my parents absorbed some of that behavior despite being born in the next generation.
  - JamesSwift 4y ago
    Yep, my parents are baby boomers and definitely have this ingrained in them. I also have some habits around eating where I (usually) waste nothing, which was instilled in me by my grandfather.
    - distances 4y ago
      Not wasting food is just normal though, or is it just so ingrained in me that it only seems so?
      - JamesSwift 4y ago
        When I say dont waste food I mean my plate is completely clean when I'm done. I eat everything off a chicken wing so its _just_ bone left (eat all the cartilage and clean every bit of meat off). My grandfather would actually break the bones and suck the marrow out of each one.
  - Markoff 4y ago
    > always took the bread from a breadbasket home Care to explain it to non native speaker from Europe? Is it some bakery chain and she took home some cheap/free leftover bread?
bambax 4y ago
"scar" consumption? Or immunize against compulsive consumption?
- ponow 4y ago
  Absa-bloody-lutely. Living through a price shock informs you of actual reality, not the government created illusory one (constructed with central banking and government policy) that encourages indebtedness and leaves you weak and unprepared for unforeseen events.
- mjmsmith 4y ago
  How Price Stability in Formative Years Incites Consumption for Life
  - fuzzfactor 4y ago
    Yes, with low appreciation for how overpriced so many things are, it leads to a life scarred by consumption.
- meepmorp 4y ago
  Keep in mind, this article is from a business school website. The perspective is going to be skewed towards whatever is perceived towards benefitting businesses.
varispeed 4y ago
I know someone who immigrated from a former communist country. She talked how they lived in extreme poverty and now despite having great job and substantial savings, she pretty much lives the way she learned. For instance cooking the same food her parents used to cook from whatever they managed to find, only wearing used clothing. When her phone was stolen and she had to buy a new one, she literaly cried for a week thinking that for the lost money she could have food for months. The bad side is that I remember she berated her then boyfriend because he bought potatoes in the store that had them 20p (like a quarter in the US) more expensive than the one little farther from her place. Can you imagine being screamed at for 20p? He eventually left her and needed to attend therapy.
- Markoff 4y ago
  I perfectly understand her, I am in similar position despite being in top 3% earners in Czechia I will refuse to buy overpriced goods I know they are cheaper in other shop. I have 4 years old phone, wanted to upgrade for really long time, but I don't see the value in new one worth spending that much money for flagship just because I want compact phone with good camera and battery (Pixel 4A was closest price wise, but battery and punch hole killed it) despite I could buy easily 4-5 flagships from my monthly income. Is there something wrong though with keeping your spending habits low instead splurging on stupid things and risking potentially you will have to adjust them, if you lose job? I find it better to just keep them pretty much stable no matter how high is the income. Though I would not touch second hand clothes, but would not have problem to buy second hand phone and I consider people buying brand new cars crazy, you will lose lot of value just after leaving the dealership. It probably helps my wife is (stereo)typical Chinese who will reuse everything and has problem to throw away anything, that's even more extreme than me not buying overpriced goods when I know they are cheaper elsewhere (I'm actually supporting price competition this way, sadly most of the people are lazy and don't give a F about few cents causing inflation for everyone). I love especially expiring food with 60-70% discounts, finding best possible deal makes me probably more happy than products itself.
  - baal80spam 4y ago
    Can almost fully relate and I also grew up in a communist country (Poland).
CapitalistCartr 4y ago
I remember there not being seconds at supper (1960s), Mom would serve, deciding how much everyone got: Dad first, then each of four kids, then herself. I know this is part of who I am, and some of why the house is stuffed. My wife laughs at how much clothing I have, because I still have clothes from 1979. Well, mostly she laughs at my stuff from the Eighties. But I remember shopping at Goodwill or my mom making everything we wore. It's not worth the anxiety to not-have.
- scruple 4y ago
  At first appearances, I'm not too dissimilar to you though I am younger (in my 40s). > It's not worth the anxiety to not-have. Yes, but having too much stuff can also cause anxiety. There's a line in there somewhere that I strive to meet.
photochemsyn 4y ago
Mindless consumption is nothing but a disease, of the mental illness variety. People who get a dopamine burst or some similar neurotransmitter release when they go shopping have been indoctrinated into patterns of behavior that do them no good in the long run. They'll end up with a house crammed with possessions they never use, bought on a whim in order to make themselves feel better. A better mentality is to always think: "Do I really need this product/service, or can I make do with things on hand that I can rebuild/repair/reuse in some manner, and am I sure this purchase isn't just for the dopamine reward?" Sometimes the answer will be yes, and a simple purchase can have a lot of positive knock on effects - good tools, for example, allow you to repair things that would otherwise cost much more to replace, and last much longer than cheap tools. The claim that economic growth relies on consumer confidence (high levels of consumption) is also pretty suspect and relies a lot on how you define 'growth' - what's wrong with a steady-state economy with a stable human population and fixed levels of demand for goods and services, anyway?
- solatic 4y ago
  > what's wrong with a steady-state economy with a stable human population and fixed levels of demand for goods and services, anyway? Because there's no such thing as a steady-state economy. You might as well ask why people need to breathe in and out, why can't they just hold their breath?
  - asimpletune 4y ago
    I thought that was pretty funny, but after laughing it made me think… is it? Breathing in and out actually sounds like the respiration equivalent of exactly a steady state economy. Like, I don’t continue to grow in size with each year, thus requiring more breath than the previous year. I grew a lot as a kid/teenager, then a tiny bit as an adult, and now I am more or less the same size (and relatively same breath size) as I will ever be.
- princeb 4y ago
  i certainly wouldn't want to be living in prewar houses with prewar safety and prewar appliances with prewar electricity efficiency and driving prewar cars and receiving prewar medical attention. but i guess to many people, that seems like an upgrade, because they are far too poor to afford modern living. life has gotten worse for a lot of people.
PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
The paper fails to consider: 1. the cotemporaneous rise of (this iteration of an) environmental movement during exactly the same time period as the "price shocks" for gasoline that it considers. This has almost certainly had a significant impact on the zeitgeist for the cohort the study is considering, and it doesn't take much imagination to believe that it is a much more substantive impact. 2. studiously avoids an international comparison. The 78-80 "shock" caused by the Iranian revolution had impacts on gasoline prices everywhere, and even if (as the paper notes) the USA is a much more car-centric culture than elsewhere, certainly people were driving a lot in Europe during that period too. If the effect is real, you should be able to demonstrate it there too.
ffggvv 4y ago
scarring consumption is probably a good thing at an individual level as most people are reckless with money but the way our society is built we need people to consume to keep the economy afloat
jmyeet 4y ago
Let's extend this a little further. If we accept that events in life can scar or even just affect you for life (as this article claims) then why stop there? These people have children. Do you think that habits that form out of trauma, housing insecurity, food insecurity or were in fear of their lives don't subconciously impact their children? We don't even have to imagine that. We have physical evidence that the conditions a woman faces can impact her grandchildren [1]. Remember that a cis-woman is born all the ova she'll have so pregnancy conditions can affect grandchildren. But even if you ignore the physical, you'll find cultural and psychological effects on children from people who, say, fled a war zone or survived the Holocaust or whatever. If you accept all that you've then accepted that generational trauma is real (which it is). So what do you think that slavery did to people long after chattel slavery (officially) ended? [1]: https://www.science.org/content/article/moms-environment-during-pregnancy-can-affect-her-grandchildren https://www.science.org/content/article/moms-environment-dur...
- krapht 4y ago
  At least from the conversations I've heard about this topic, the issue isn't acknowledging that slavery and Jim Crow has caused problems for generations of blacks. The problem comes when measures to address it are discussed, like reparations or quotas. People see it as monumentally unfair because, while being black is a handicap, it's only one of many that are too endless to enumerate. For example, there is no affirmative action for poor whites who grow up in broken homes. There is no affirmative action for simply having parents who are a standard deviation below the population in IQ. Insofar as student spots at high-tier institutions go, here poor whites see favorable action to benefit blacks when they themselves never played a part in their oppression. Black, well-spoken immigrants from Nigeria who never experience discrimination in their home countries get benefits merely by dint of their skin color, and not actual suffering. Even if you limited it to some way to only US blacks who could prove lineage to an actual enslaved individual, suffering is difficult, if not impossible, to quantify. So... why action on this topic is politically impossible. I think color-blind welfare policies based on economic resources would be much more feasible, but... good luck raising taxes to increase the size of the welfare state.
nonrandomstring 4y ago
> Scar Consumption for Life Sounds like a good thing in a world where we over-consume almost everything? I can't agree with some of the commentary in this thread about risk, drive and early poverty. Some of the wealthiest people started out dirt poor. They didn't like it and resolved to become rich. Plenty more started out spoiled rotten and grew up to be lazy minded with mediocre life outcomes. "Brewster's Millions" is still a great film on this theme of growing a healthy relationship with money.
swatcoder 4y ago
There was an article here yesterday[1] about a study showing a correlation between Glucosamine and reduced lung cancer mortality. The top comment[2] challenged the worth of the study on the grounds that these sort of observational studies in large populations have too many confounders to be taken seriously. There's truth to that point, but it's interesting to see which topics slide into skepticism and critiques of method, and which take results at face value and build a discussion on top of them. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31746980 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31746980 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31747822 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31747822
tomcam 4y ago
Growing up not rich in the 60s and 70s was useful on the balance. I was willing to take risks in business because when you don’t have much to lose you are perhaps a little more free to try scary things. I read tons of how to succeed books and biographies and learned a lot about how failures are learning experiences. OTOH many of my peers wound up dead, on drugs, or incarcerated. I do tend to be hoardy and my clever technique has been to just buy more houses, so not a great role model in that regard.
beezle 4y ago
I was a kid during both oil shocks of the 1970s. That has absolutely nothing to do with my driving. What does, and not just for driving, is the family taught cultural value of 'don't be wasteful'. So unlike so many people today, I don't make 12 trips a day to stores/friends/whatever when I can just make one or two if I actually think 5 minutes ahead. That applies whether gas is $1 or $5 per gallon. I also try to make good use of what I own and not discard things that are functional simply to get the new shiny.
- master_crab 4y ago
  This read like “get off my lawn you damn kids!” Also, I don’t think people would want to waste all that time making 12 trips a day whether they care about the price of gas or not. Source: kid from the 80’s.
- jackblemming 4y ago
  How many years earlier does that let you retire?
  - bornfreddy 4y ago
    Is that the only goal people are supposed to have in life?
    - ninjanomnom 4y ago
      Many people nowadays see retirement, especially early retirement, as a means towards whatever goal they have in life. You can focus on whatever you like without worrying about your financial stability.
      - bornfreddy 4y ago
        My point was that this isn't the only goal people have. Just not being willing to waste too much time in traffic (while waiting for retirement) could also be the reason one prefers scheduling their trips to the shops.
Grustaf 4y ago
dukeofdoom 4y ago
I don't really think penny pinching works during inflation. Your money will be worth less in the future
annoyingnoob 4y ago
My grand-parents lived through the Great Depression and were the most frugal people I've ever met.
mathgladiator 4y ago
I grew up and watched Enron implode with stories of life savings going poof. That influenced me to sell every vesting round which is averaging. This strategy always haunted, but thankfully my performance made up for it. With the recent crash, the stock went down over 50% and it turns out that my strategy yielded me an average loss of 22% from peak. I feel like it is more optimal to have those scars to be cautious earlier than later. That being said, there is also a truth in taking more risks earlier in life. There is a balance to be achieved.
sys_64738 4y ago
This isn't exactly unexpected as your childhood and adolescent experiences are what people vividly remember the most. Adulthood is all a blur otherwise.
qgin 4y ago
As an aside, gas prices now are basically the same as they were in 2013, adjusted for inflation.
giarc 4y ago
I have a form of this in other areas. Growing up we didn't have a ton of money and batteries were expensive. We never had batteries to replace depleted ones, so once a toy was out of batteries, it was done. We just played without those features. Now, having kids, I'm so conscience of batteries. I have a tester and check each battery when "dead" and put them in a separate box if I think they have enough juice for a lower power item. We have the money to just replace batteries when we need to... I just need to conserve them. The other area is colour ink. Printing in colour as a kid was a big deal. I think think I'm going to get in trouble at work when I print in colour... like the massive organization I work for is going to care about 5 pages of full colour document.
- countvonbalzac 4y ago
  You can get rechargeable batteries.
  - giarc 4y ago
    Ya now I have the money to buy whatever batteries I need (thank you Amazon Basics) but as a kid we definitely didn't have the money to afford batteries. We didn't even buy paper towels, just used tea towels (as we called them). This also created an aversion to over using paper towels in my adult years. This isn't meant as some "whoa is me", but just a comment on how pricing and costs growing up can affect you for a very long time.
sbf501 4y ago
> Americans Have an Affinity for Driving Anecdata: I hate driving. I'd much rather take a bus or light rail, but that battle was lost in the 1940's[1], along with asinine city planning that was pro-car, anti-community that still exists today. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp...
fleddr 4y ago
Economic shocks are not fun, but to lighten the mood I figured to share a weird but hilarious subculture: vrekken. A "vrek" is the dutch word for somebody that is extraordinarily frugal in unhealthy ways. The vrekken culture embraces this as a quality and then escalates it to Olympic standards. Not even out of necessity, instead as an avenue for creativity. Here's one such vrekken news paper of the "Saver of the Fatherland": https://www.vrekkenpagina.nl/ https://www.vrekkenpagina.nl/ I'm unsure if there's international versions of this culture?
- somebodynew 4y ago
  In America there are subcultures devoted to couponing (hunting for discount promotions) and churning (opening many credit card or bank accounts to collect "new account bonuses").
- indecisive_user 4y ago
  There was a TV show on the TLC channel that covered people like this in the US. Called Extreme Cheapskates https://youtu.be/D8Yerg78m7M https://youtu.be/D8Yerg78m7M
- mrleinad 4y ago
  Sounds like my father in law: voluntarily chooses not to turn up the heat in winter to avoid spending, even when he could pay the bill multiple times and still have plenty left from his retirement monthly paycheck.
funstuff007 4y ago
When I was a lad, my grandfather used to hound me to finish all the food on my plate, and not waste a thing. When I'd complain to my mom her explanation was Grandpa grew up during the Great Depression and he often went without enough food.
shahbaby 4y ago
When people learn to live with less and within their means, it only hurts the rich bankers that publish these type of articles.
kwatsonafter 4y ago
It is indeed difficult to unlearn being poor. It is possible though.
fortran77 4y ago
My parents grew up in the depression and I was in high school in the 70s. I'm very careful with money, and have always been a frugal saver. Of course, people who save money are punished the most by government policies, and especially by politicians like Joe Biden.
ddingus 4y ago
Scar? Frankly, what happens is people learn the value of prudence early in life which then saves them a ton of money, time and anguish. I grew up in hard times, and spend to solve problems was rarely the right answer. Each new skill mastered was worth an awful lot of money! I picked up many and have broad competence today. The savings are still compounding. If you ask me, the current emphasis on consumption and so damn many things made to fail hard and or be replaced rather than serviced, refused or repurposed is morbid! Gluttony on parade. A lot of people need work and or to live on not a lot of money too. Right to repair plus some way for people to learn, maybe learn together would put a dent in many businesses. I get that, but which is it? Pay them more to actually consume, or maybe we all should not be surprised when large numbers of people begin to really walk that rugged individualist talk.
panny 4y ago
Interesting to me is 1) How the article focuses entirely on fossil fuel consumption rather than something much more damaging, like housing 2) The author's key takeaway is this is great and we should use it to manipulate people into consuming less fossil fuels by making their usage punishingly expensive. In particular, 1) is a societal wrecking ball, because no home means no stable environment to raise children, means more trouble in the pipeline for the next generation. Many people in the generation won't even have children and others will have fewer than replacement rate. 2) makes me think the same sort of people are behind the housing crisis. They believe in overpopulation and therefore they want to curtail it by making housing punishingly expensive.
lbschenkel 4y ago
I was a kid during hyperinflation years in Brazil: 80s to early 90s, sometimes higher than 70% a month. To this day I'm very frugal, and I have a strong aversion to having debt of any kind: the only kind of debt I ever had was a mortgage and I paid them off as soon as I possibly could. I can only sleep well at night if I don't owe any money to anyone. I cannot be sure, but I have this feeling that it is due to my formative years in that kind of environment.

286 points by NickRandom 4y ago

My grandparents didn’t go hungry this year (after Russia’s invasion) because they had a cellar full of preserves. For them, it was part of a tradition of hunger, a “never waste food” mentality reinforced by WWII, and Holodomor prior, and WWI prior, and the experience of being serfs prior to that.

kgwgk 4y ago
> WWI prior, and the experience of being serfs prior to that They may be quite old!
- nostromo 4y ago
  > it was part of a tradition
  - kgwgk 4y ago
    it was a joke, anyway
2-718-281-828 4y ago
In the spirit of the article or at least the title one might say your grandparent's regular food wasting attitude has been scarred by WWII.

seunosewa 4y ago

Is it fair to conclude that fossil fuel price shocks are good for the planet? If everyone experiences them early then we will all reduce our carbon footprint for life and slow global warming?

jrumbut 4y ago
The article addresses that a bit. The effect is small and they are still driving everywhere alone (instead of public transport) so the authors say that electric vehicles are the only way out.
ffggvv 4y ago
what if i told you a lot of fossil fuels go into producing electric cars, which then drives up the price of them making them out of reach for the avg person
- throitallaway 4y ago
  I'm sorry, but are you saying that the high price of EVs is due to fossil fuel prices? EVs were far out of reach of the average person well before fuel prices ticked up. They're priced high because they're based on relatively new technology and processes.
  - ffggvv 4y ago
    no i’m saying high energy prices make them even more expensive
duffyjp 4y ago
I 100% welcome higher gas prices. Americans are so wasteful it's ridiculous. It'll hurt if you're currently in an inefficient car but once you get a hybrid / EV you won't care. I don't even look at the price filling up my Prius. SUVs that look like school buses and people commuting to an office job in full size trucks is madness.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- paulywog 4y ago
  I'm in the automotive industry and the biggest fan of EVs in general. I was even home-building an EV before I moved to the city. I think we still have a lot to figure out with our charging infrastructure, in cities where often it's hard just to park. I want an EV badly, but it'd be a constant struggle to keep it charged. There's also an issue with car companies generally not making the cars I want anymore, though I understand this is a me problem. There's not a nice plug-in hybrid small convertible, even if I could charge it.

mmaunder 4y ago

Notable that the gas price doubled in 3 years. We’re almost at that point today. https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=pet&s=emm_epm0_pte_nus_dpg&f=m https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=pet&s=e...

giantg2 4y ago

I had a grandfather who lived through the depression. He never threw away anything that could possibly be useful in the future.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

mdeck_ 4y ago

> Between late 1978 and early 1981, drivers in the U.S. saw the price at the pump nearly double from 63 cents to $1.31 a gallon. Not sure how that change would amount to NEARLY doubling...

selimthegrim 4y ago
I don’t think inflation was on holiday during those years…also nearly doesn’t have to mean almost

fleddr 4y ago

A "food shock" variation... My late grandmother, whom lived to the respectable age of 99 years, experienced the Dutch hunger winter. A period of famine during WW2. For the rest of her lengthy life she could not tolerate any type of food waste. As an example, she'd buy a cabbage and then eat cabbage the entire week, even as it increasingly goes bad. She had zero interest in food quality or nutritional value, just food in itself. Behavior learned during the famine where you don't have the luxury to discriminate. As an example, she once babysat me and my brother and made an abundance of snacks. Just way too much. Quite soon we were full, but the single word "finish..." and her stare told us all we needed to know. We finished, with stomach cramps. Out of respect. Also, she had 9 children and survived 7 (genetic blood disease). She survived two husbands. In her extended family and friends, she survived...everybody. We have a single photo of her childhood, where she stands in front of her house. Which was...made from clay and reed. An astonishing reminder of how even in today's developed nations, wealth for common people is brand new. Despite plenty of opportunities in her lifetime, she rejected material wealth outside some basics. Zero material desires. Despite all this, not once in her life have I seen her sad or complain or moan. If us grandchildren did something bad or stupid, she didn't give a shit. You're still alive, in health...so what's the problem? Carry on. She didn't eat very healthy, smoke a pack a day and didn't exercise. And still she made a daily trip on her bicycle to get her own groceries. Or make two trips in a row if needed. Up to the age of 98. The collapse was short and sudden. After a hospital stay she was returned home to die. As she got carried out of the ambulance she saw my dad's work: her front-garden completely replanted with hundreds of blooming flowers, a sight to behold. "That looks nice" She was never very generous with compliments. And those were her last words. I'd call her Iron Lady, but it's an insult really. Iron is too soft to describe her. She lives on as my compass for life. When I worry, see darkness in the world, contemplate about world events and threats, I think of her. I'm alive, and I'm eating. I'm fine. Her scars are my lesson, and it's liberating. She lived in an occupied country, ate grass and flowers, whilst nearly freezing to death. She encountered enough personal loss to fit several lifetimes. And still lived a full life and remained positive throughout. So if at one point I have to cancel my Netflix, yeah...I think I'm going to be fine.

hinkley 4y ago
My great grandmother was 9 at the end of the Great Depression. Not that she talked about it, but I did an assignment for an anthropology class that was basically, "bother some old people about one of these Bad Times." She actually was a good cook, a lot of her dishes rode the line between simple and fancy. She had either the oldest fancy stove or the fanciest old stove I'd ever seen, and she treated every glass jar she met as a reusable container (to this day the majority of glass jars on store shelves are the same dimensions and threading as a Ball Mason Jar lid), had odd collections of belongings and many of her wide, wide variety of plants seemed to have come from an extensive network of barter and gift economy. We spent one trip to her house clearing her entire pantry of expired food, because my mom found one can, asked some questions and did not like any of her answers. Some of it was bad. Rob you and leave your body in a ditch bad.

bergenty 4y ago

Scar is a weird way of referring to being prudent.

crikeyjoe 4y ago

kbelder 4y ago

Price shocks in formative years cure overconsumption later in life.

ChuckNorris89 4y ago

Being poor in general, during your childhood, scars you for life. It makes you penny wise and pound foolish, adverse to taking risks in your career and investments, can destroy your confidence in yourself, while always having to look over your shoulder monetarily speaking. Habits that even after you remove poverty from your live, you still feel the the anxiety and triggers in your head.

snarfy 4y ago
I'll never have another credit card. Frequent flyer miles, what are those? The whole industry can go fuck themselves.
- sokoloff 4y ago
  If you're able to live without the credit aspects of the credit card, why not take the 1-2% discount on nearly everything consumable that you buy? If you pay it off every month, credit cards have a negative cost (to you) and a fair amount of convenience (for renting cars, hotels, booking flights, etc).
  - duncan_idaho 4y ago
    That 1-2% is what they pay you for all your data. Credit cards are a key component of data brokers.
    - throwaway193948 4y ago
      compared to all the other data collected about me with no benefit to myself that seems like an ok deal
    - bombcar 4y ago
      The 1-2% is what they pay you for helping strong-arm the merchant into giving them 3%.
    - astrange 4y ago

refurb 4y ago

"“Those who came of driving age during the oil crises of the 1970s drive less in the year 2000,” the paper found. The doubling of gasoline prices in the late 1970s saw that generation drive 3.6% to 8.7% less than those born earlier or later" I can't find the paper, but when they say "born earlier or later" are they still looking at rate of driving in the year 2000? If so, aren't they just comparing ages? People born earlier or later would just be younger or older in the year 2000, which likely impacts driving too. Oh economics! You keep calling yourself a science, but you need to start acting like one!

anamexis 4y ago
Presumably if it was just based on age, the effect would be fairly uniform, instead of correlated to periods of price shock.
NickRandom 4y ago
Link to Full paper https://cseveren.github.io/files/FormativeExperiences_Paper_and_Appendix.pdf https://cseveren.github.io/files/FormativeExperiences_Paper_... if that helps?
- refurb 4y ago
  Maybe I’m going nuts but it looks like they used 2000 US Census data on driving, so yes, they only looked at that year. They are literally comparing people who are older and younger with the cohort in question, so confounding results with how driving changes at various ages.
  - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
    > it looks like they used 2000 US Census data on driving, so yes, they only looked at that year The first major sentence under data: “The decennial census asks questions about commuting mode and time. ‘Journey to Work’ questions appear in the 1980, 1990, and 2000 censuses, and in the American Community Survey (ACS) (Ruggles et al. 2020). We use data from these three censuses, as well as the 2006/10, 2011/15, 2016, and 2017 ACS” [1]. Confirmation bias much [2]? [1] https://cseveren.github.io/files/FormativeExperiences_Paper_and_Appendix.pdf https://cseveren.github.io/files/FormativeExperiences_Paper_... bottom of page 6 [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias

quantified 4y ago

Yeah, we don't just burn gas driving everywhere. "Scar consumption" as a phrase assumes that consumption in the American style is a healthy activity to begin with, and this outcome is damaging or ugly. "Permanently reduce consumption" would be more worthy of an academic setting, that title is clickbaity. Perhaps some will overdo avoidance of something because of fear of expense. Better than masses overdoing from building their lives around unsustainable inexpensive consumption. Look where we are for sprawl and emissions.

cs137 4y ago
Plus, a lot of that gas consumption is spent commuting, which makes people miserable. Murdering the daily commute is a good thing Covid-19 did, although I don't expect it to last long (WFH-ers will get fewer promotions, despite working harder, and eventually RTO fetishists will rule the roost). Very few people want to "consume gas". They want to be able to live decently and have meaningful jobs. Unfortunately, in today's market, that usually means a shit-ass load [1] of driving. ---- [1] You don't want to know how much time I spent deciding whether to use the more conventional hyphenization ("shit-ass-load") or the version with better cadence.
- quantified 4y ago
  Hopefully a lot less than you spend behind the wheel getting anywhere.
- mistersquid 4y ago
  > You don't want to know how much time I spent deciding whether to use the more conventional hyphenization ("shit-ass-load") or the version with better cadence. It’s not a question of “cadence” but of grammar. “Shit-ass“ is an adjective modifying the noun “load”. Your choice is grammatically correct.
  - lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 4y ago
    Could there not be a noun, "ass-load"?

weinzierl 4y ago

It's more that abundance in formative years spoils you for life.

kylecordes 4y ago
Extreme are often bad. Having either not enough, or excessively much early on, lead to various irrational or otherwise maladaptive behaviors later. Humans perform best in a happy middle range along many axes.
- april_22 4y ago
  This is so true. The middle is the best for most things in life. Too much pleasure can also mean pain
cs137 4y ago
Debateable. The reason rich kids turn into such pieces of shit isn't material abundance (since, after all, anyone born before ~1990 in the middle class also experienced material abundance) but the unearned high social status and the impunity that comes with it. Deprivation and poverty, on the other hand, fuck people up severely--often, through no fault of their own--and there's tons of empirical evidence showing this.
- daniel-cussen 4y ago
  Yeah and like rich kids have impunity, poor kids have excess punishment meted out against them. Scapegoated a lot of the time.
- ponow 4y ago
  Huh? Social status is relative, that is, defined by some kind of difference in a characteristic over which there is some competition (like wealth, looks, connections, fame, etc.). So how do you get that rich kid status without reference to material abundance? Remember, most people are comparatively poor: the wealth histogram is heavily skewed toward zero and with a wide tail toward infinity. It's impossible for everyone to be relatively wealthy and relatively high status. It is possible for everyone to have absolute wealth (or at least income) beyond a fixed absolute level, yet still widely disparate status.

cageface 4y ago

My grandmother grew up during the great depression and often went hungry as a child. Decades later when she had plenty of money she still refused to ever throw anything away. Her huge house was stuffed full of balls of old string, used popsicle sticks, ancient newspapers and wire.

NickRandom 4y ago
I had a relative that was a child during WWII and they had some very distinctive (borderline maladaptive) 'quirks' .... One of which is they would never take the last item of anything from out of the fridge (eggs, cheese slices etc) and would become irate if anybody else did. They (much like your grandmother) were also unable/unwilling to throw anything out 'just in case'.

cs137 4y ago

I worked in a grocery store in the late '90s, and the older customers (who grew up in the Great Depression) always carried penny pouches, because they remembered a time when one had to keep track of cents to survive. This is how I know that, even if we miraculously fixed our medical system tomorrow and outlawed private health insurance by a constitutional amendment, we'll still have, thirty years from now, 60-year-old Millennials dropping dead of preventable causes. The American healthcare system has already killed millions, but it's also killed future millions.

tootie 4y ago
My grandma did this. Never left a penny on the sidewalk, always took the bread from a breadbasket home. Even my parents absorbed some of that behavior despite being born in the next generation.
- JamesSwift 4y ago
  Yep, my parents are baby boomers and definitely have this ingrained in them. I also have some habits around eating where I (usually) waste nothing, which was instilled in me by my grandfather.
  - distances 4y ago
    Not wasting food is just normal though, or is it just so ingrained in me that it only seems so?
    - JamesSwift 4y ago
      When I say dont waste food I mean my plate is completely clean when I'm done. I eat everything off a chicken wing so its _just_ bone left (eat all the cartilage and clean every bit of meat off). My grandfather would actually break the bones and suck the marrow out of each one.
- Markoff 4y ago
  > always took the bread from a breadbasket home Care to explain it to non native speaker from Europe? Is it some bakery chain and she took home some cheap/free leftover bread?

bambax 4y ago

"scar" consumption? Or immunize against compulsive consumption?

ponow 4y ago
Absa-bloody-lutely. Living through a price shock informs you of actual reality, not the government created illusory one (constructed with central banking and government policy) that encourages indebtedness and leaves you weak and unprepared for unforeseen events.
mjmsmith 4y ago
How Price Stability in Formative Years Incites Consumption for Life
- fuzzfactor 4y ago
  Yes, with low appreciation for how overpriced so many things are, it leads to a life scarred by consumption.
meepmorp 4y ago
Keep in mind, this article is from a business school website. The perspective is going to be skewed towards whatever is perceived towards benefitting businesses.

varispeed 4y ago

I know someone who immigrated from a former communist country. She talked how they lived in extreme poverty and now despite having great job and substantial savings, she pretty much lives the way she learned. For instance cooking the same food her parents used to cook from whatever they managed to find, only wearing used clothing. When her phone was stolen and she had to buy a new one, she literaly cried for a week thinking that for the lost money she could have food for months. The bad side is that I remember she berated her then boyfriend because he bought potatoes in the store that had them 20p (like a quarter in the US) more expensive than the one little farther from her place. Can you imagine being screamed at for 20p? He eventually left her and needed to attend therapy.

Markoff 4y ago
I perfectly understand her, I am in similar position despite being in top 3% earners in Czechia I will refuse to buy overpriced goods I know they are cheaper in other shop. I have 4 years old phone, wanted to upgrade for really long time, but I don't see the value in new one worth spending that much money for flagship just because I want compact phone with good camera and battery (Pixel 4A was closest price wise, but battery and punch hole killed it) despite I could buy easily 4-5 flagships from my monthly income. Is there something wrong though with keeping your spending habits low instead splurging on stupid things and risking potentially you will have to adjust them, if you lose job? I find it better to just keep them pretty much stable no matter how high is the income. Though I would not touch second hand clothes, but would not have problem to buy second hand phone and I consider people buying brand new cars crazy, you will lose lot of value just after leaving the dealership. It probably helps my wife is (stereo)typical Chinese who will reuse everything and has problem to throw away anything, that's even more extreme than me not buying overpriced goods when I know they are cheaper elsewhere (I'm actually supporting price competition this way, sadly most of the people are lazy and don't give a F about few cents causing inflation for everyone). I love especially expiring food with 60-70% discounts, finding best possible deal makes me probably more happy than products itself.
- baal80spam 4y ago
  Can almost fully relate and I also grew up in a communist country (Poland).

CapitalistCartr 4y ago

I remember there not being seconds at supper (1960s), Mom would serve, deciding how much everyone got: Dad first, then each of four kids, then herself. I know this is part of who I am, and some of why the house is stuffed. My wife laughs at how much clothing I have, because I still have clothes from 1979. Well, mostly she laughs at my stuff from the Eighties. But I remember shopping at Goodwill or my mom making everything we wore. It's not worth the anxiety to not-have.

scruple 4y ago
At first appearances, I'm not too dissimilar to you though I am younger (in my 40s). > It's not worth the anxiety to not-have. Yes, but having too much stuff can also cause anxiety. There's a line in there somewhere that I strive to meet.

photochemsyn 4y ago

Mindless consumption is nothing but a disease, of the mental illness variety. People who get a dopamine burst or some similar neurotransmitter release when they go shopping have been indoctrinated into patterns of behavior that do them no good in the long run. They'll end up with a house crammed with possessions they never use, bought on a whim in order to make themselves feel better. A better mentality is to always think: "Do I really need this product/service, or can I make do with things on hand that I can rebuild/repair/reuse in some manner, and am I sure this purchase isn't just for the dopamine reward?" Sometimes the answer will be yes, and a simple purchase can have a lot of positive knock on effects - good tools, for example, allow you to repair things that would otherwise cost much more to replace, and last much longer than cheap tools. The claim that economic growth relies on consumer confidence (high levels of consumption) is also pretty suspect and relies a lot on how you define 'growth' - what's wrong with a steady-state economy with a stable human population and fixed levels of demand for goods and services, anyway?

solatic 4y ago
> what's wrong with a steady-state economy with a stable human population and fixed levels of demand for goods and services, anyway? Because there's no such thing as a steady-state economy. You might as well ask why people need to breathe in and out, why can't they just hold their breath?
- asimpletune 4y ago
  I thought that was pretty funny, but after laughing it made me think… is it? Breathing in and out actually sounds like the respiration equivalent of exactly a steady state economy. Like, I don’t continue to grow in size with each year, thus requiring more breath than the previous year. I grew a lot as a kid/teenager, then a tiny bit as an adult, and now I am more or less the same size (and relatively same breath size) as I will ever be.
princeb 4y ago
i certainly wouldn't want to be living in prewar houses with prewar safety and prewar appliances with prewar electricity efficiency and driving prewar cars and receiving prewar medical attention. but i guess to many people, that seems like an upgrade, because they are far too poor to afford modern living. life has gotten worse for a lot of people.

PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago

The paper fails to consider: 1. the cotemporaneous rise of (this iteration of an) environmental movement during exactly the same time period as the "price shocks" for gasoline that it considers. This has almost certainly had a significant impact on the zeitgeist for the cohort the study is considering, and it doesn't take much imagination to believe that it is a much more substantive impact. 2. studiously avoids an international comparison. The 78-80 "shock" caused by the Iranian revolution had impacts on gasoline prices everywhere, and even if (as the paper notes) the USA is a much more car-centric culture than elsewhere, certainly people were driving a lot in Europe during that period too. If the effect is real, you should be able to demonstrate it there too.

ffggvv 4y ago

scarring consumption is probably a good thing at an individual level as most people are reckless with money but the way our society is built we need people to consume to keep the economy afloat

jmyeet 4y ago

Let's extend this a little further. If we accept that events in life can scar or even just affect you for life (as this article claims) then why stop there? These people have children. Do you think that habits that form out of trauma, housing insecurity, food insecurity or were in fear of their lives don't subconciously impact their children? We don't even have to imagine that. We have physical evidence that the conditions a woman faces can impact her grandchildren [1]. Remember that a cis-woman is born all the ova she'll have so pregnancy conditions can affect grandchildren. But even if you ignore the physical, you'll find cultural and psychological effects on children from people who, say, fled a war zone or survived the Holocaust or whatever. If you accept all that you've then accepted that generational trauma is real (which it is). So what do you think that slavery did to people long after chattel slavery (officially) ended? [1]: https://www.science.org/content/article/moms-environment-during-pregnancy-can-affect-her-grandchildren https://www.science.org/content/article/moms-environment-dur...

krapht 4y ago
At least from the conversations I've heard about this topic, the issue isn't acknowledging that slavery and Jim Crow has caused problems for generations of blacks. The problem comes when measures to address it are discussed, like reparations or quotas. People see it as monumentally unfair because, while being black is a handicap, it's only one of many that are too endless to enumerate. For example, there is no affirmative action for poor whites who grow up in broken homes. There is no affirmative action for simply having parents who are a standard deviation below the population in IQ. Insofar as student spots at high-tier institutions go, here poor whites see favorable action to benefit blacks when they themselves never played a part in their oppression. Black, well-spoken immigrants from Nigeria who never experience discrimination in their home countries get benefits merely by dint of their skin color, and not actual suffering. Even if you limited it to some way to only US blacks who could prove lineage to an actual enslaved individual, suffering is difficult, if not impossible, to quantify. So... why action on this topic is politically impossible. I think color-blind welfare policies based on economic resources would be much more feasible, but... good luck raising taxes to increase the size of the welfare state.

nonrandomstring 4y ago

> Scar Consumption for Life Sounds like a good thing in a world where we over-consume almost everything? I can't agree with some of the commentary in this thread about risk, drive and early poverty. Some of the wealthiest people started out dirt poor. They didn't like it and resolved to become rich. Plenty more started out spoiled rotten and grew up to be lazy minded with mediocre life outcomes. "Brewster's Millions" is still a great film on this theme of growing a healthy relationship with money.

swatcoder 4y ago

There was an article here yesterday[1] about a study showing a correlation between Glucosamine and reduced lung cancer mortality. The top comment[2] challenged the worth of the study on the grounds that these sort of observational studies in large populations have too many confounders to be taken seriously. There's truth to that point, but it's interesting to see which topics slide into skepticism and critiques of method, and which take results at face value and build a discussion on top of them. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31746980 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31746980 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31747822 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31747822

tomcam 4y ago

Growing up not rich in the 60s and 70s was useful on the balance. I was willing to take risks in business because when you don’t have much to lose you are perhaps a little more free to try scary things. I read tons of how to succeed books and biographies and learned a lot about how failures are learning experiences. OTOH many of my peers wound up dead, on drugs, or incarcerated. I do tend to be hoardy and my clever technique has been to just buy more houses, so not a great role model in that regard.

beezle 4y ago

I was a kid during both oil shocks of the 1970s. That has absolutely nothing to do with my driving. What does, and not just for driving, is the family taught cultural value of 'don't be wasteful'. So unlike so many people today, I don't make 12 trips a day to stores/friends/whatever when I can just make one or two if I actually think 5 minutes ahead. That applies whether gas is $1 or $5 per gallon. I also try to make good use of what I own and not discard things that are functional simply to get the new shiny.

master_crab 4y ago
This read like “get off my lawn you damn kids!” Also, I don’t think people would want to waste all that time making 12 trips a day whether they care about the price of gas or not. Source: kid from the 80’s.
jackblemming 4y ago
How many years earlier does that let you retire?
- bornfreddy 4y ago
  Is that the only goal people are supposed to have in life?
  - ninjanomnom 4y ago
    Many people nowadays see retirement, especially early retirement, as a means towards whatever goal they have in life. You can focus on whatever you like without worrying about your financial stability.
    - bornfreddy 4y ago
      My point was that this isn't the only goal people have. Just not being willing to waste too much time in traffic (while waiting for retirement) could also be the reason one prefers scheduling their trips to the shops.

Grustaf 4y ago

dukeofdoom 4y ago

I don't really think penny pinching works during inflation. Your money will be worth less in the future

annoyingnoob 4y ago

My grand-parents lived through the Great Depression and were the most frugal people I've ever met.

mathgladiator 4y ago

I grew up and watched Enron implode with stories of life savings going poof. That influenced me to sell every vesting round which is averaging. This strategy always haunted, but thankfully my performance made up for it. With the recent crash, the stock went down over 50% and it turns out that my strategy yielded me an average loss of 22% from peak. I feel like it is more optimal to have those scars to be cautious earlier than later. That being said, there is also a truth in taking more risks earlier in life. There is a balance to be achieved.

sys_64738 4y ago

This isn't exactly unexpected as your childhood and adolescent experiences are what people vividly remember the most. Adulthood is all a blur otherwise.

qgin 4y ago

As an aside, gas prices now are basically the same as they were in 2013, adjusted for inflation.

giarc 4y ago

I have a form of this in other areas. Growing up we didn't have a ton of money and batteries were expensive. We never had batteries to replace depleted ones, so once a toy was out of batteries, it was done. We just played without those features. Now, having kids, I'm so conscience of batteries. I have a tester and check each battery when "dead" and put them in a separate box if I think they have enough juice for a lower power item. We have the money to just replace batteries when we need to... I just need to conserve them. The other area is colour ink. Printing in colour as a kid was a big deal. I think think I'm going to get in trouble at work when I print in colour... like the massive organization I work for is going to care about 5 pages of full colour document.

countvonbalzac 4y ago
You can get rechargeable batteries.
- giarc 4y ago
  Ya now I have the money to buy whatever batteries I need (thank you Amazon Basics) but as a kid we definitely didn't have the money to afford batteries. We didn't even buy paper towels, just used tea towels (as we called them). This also created an aversion to over using paper towels in my adult years. This isn't meant as some "whoa is me", but just a comment on how pricing and costs growing up can affect you for a very long time.

sbf501 4y ago

> Americans Have an Affinity for Driving Anecdata: I hate driving. I'd much rather take a bus or light rail, but that battle was lost in the 1940's[1], along with asinine city planning that was pro-car, anti-community that still exists today. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp...

fleddr 4y ago

Economic shocks are not fun, but to lighten the mood I figured to share a weird but hilarious subculture: vrekken. A "vrek" is the dutch word for somebody that is extraordinarily frugal in unhealthy ways. The vrekken culture embraces this as a quality and then escalates it to Olympic standards. Not even out of necessity, instead as an avenue for creativity. Here's one such vrekken news paper of the "Saver of the Fatherland": https://www.vrekkenpagina.nl/ https://www.vrekkenpagina.nl/ I'm unsure if there's international versions of this culture?

somebodynew 4y ago
In America there are subcultures devoted to couponing (hunting for discount promotions) and churning (opening many credit card or bank accounts to collect "new account bonuses").
indecisive_user 4y ago
There was a TV show on the TLC channel that covered people like this in the US. Called Extreme Cheapskates https://youtu.be/D8Yerg78m7M https://youtu.be/D8Yerg78m7M
mrleinad 4y ago
Sounds like my father in law: voluntarily chooses not to turn up the heat in winter to avoid spending, even when he could pay the bill multiple times and still have plenty left from his retirement monthly paycheck.

funstuff007 4y ago

When I was a lad, my grandfather used to hound me to finish all the food on my plate, and not waste a thing. When I'd complain to my mom her explanation was Grandpa grew up during the Great Depression and he often went without enough food.

shahbaby 4y ago

When people learn to live with less and within their means, it only hurts the rich bankers that publish these type of articles.

kwatsonafter 4y ago

It is indeed difficult to unlearn being poor. It is possible though.

fortran77 4y ago

My parents grew up in the depression and I was in high school in the 70s. I'm very careful with money, and have always been a frugal saver. Of course, people who save money are punished the most by government policies, and especially by politicians like Joe Biden.

ddingus 4y ago

Scar? Frankly, what happens is people learn the value of prudence early in life which then saves them a ton of money, time and anguish. I grew up in hard times, and spend to solve problems was rarely the right answer. Each new skill mastered was worth an awful lot of money! I picked up many and have broad competence today. The savings are still compounding. If you ask me, the current emphasis on consumption and so damn many things made to fail hard and or be replaced rather than serviced, refused or repurposed is morbid! Gluttony on parade. A lot of people need work and or to live on not a lot of money too. Right to repair plus some way for people to learn, maybe learn together would put a dent in many businesses. I get that, but which is it? Pay them more to actually consume, or maybe we all should not be surprised when large numbers of people begin to really walk that rugged individualist talk.

panny 4y ago

Interesting to me is 1) How the article focuses entirely on fossil fuel consumption rather than something much more damaging, like housing 2) The author's key takeaway is this is great and we should use it to manipulate people into consuming less fossil fuels by making their usage punishingly expensive. In particular, 1) is a societal wrecking ball, because no home means no stable environment to raise children, means more trouble in the pipeline for the next generation. Many people in the generation won't even have children and others will have fewer than replacement rate. 2) makes me think the same sort of people are behind the housing crisis. They believe in overpopulation and therefore they want to curtail it by making housing punishingly expensive.

lbschenkel 4y ago

I was a kid during hyperinflation years in Brazil: 80s to early 90s, sometimes higher than 70% a month. To this day I'm very frugal, and I have a strong aversion to having debt of any kind: the only kind of debt I ever had was a mortgage and I paid them off as soon as I possibly could. I can only sleep well at night if I don't owe any money to anyone. I cannot be sure, but I have this feeling that it is due to my formative years in that kind of environment.