Based on Michael Lewis' definition I most certainly am "poor", but I can't help but feel that there's a nugget of truth in his tongue-in-cheek complaints about how poor people ruined the housing market.
So right after the Bear Stearns funds blew up, I had a thought: This is what happens when you lend money to poor people.Don't get me wrong: I have nothing personally against the poor. To my knowledge, I have nothing personally to do with the poor at all. It's not personal when a guy cuts your grass: that's business. He does what you say, you pay him. But you don't pay him in advance: That would be finance. And finance is one thing you should never engage in with the poor. (By poor, I mean anyone who the SEC wouldn't allow to invest in my hedge fund.) ...
Call me a romantic: I want everyone to have a shot at the American dream. Even people who haven't earned it. I did everything I could so that these schlubs could at least own their own place. The media is now making my generosity out to be some kind of scandal. Teaser rates weren't a scandal. Teaser rates were a sign of misplaced trust: I trusted these people to get their teams of lawyers to vet anything before they signed it. Turns out, if you're poor, you don't need to pay lawyers. You don't like the deal you just wave your hands in the air and moan about how poor you are. Then you default.
I think the central thesis of his comedy is correct: both the lenders and the borrowers were foolish to expand the sub-prime mortgage market. Credit scores mean something, and both borrowers and lenders ignore them at their peril.
(HT: Instapundit.)
That was freaking brilliant. But I think "poor" should be replaced with "people who live beyond their means." I knew of a married couple in Northern Virginia where both husband and wife were pulling down 6 figures from their government contracting jobs and still living pay-check-to-pay-check. They were in such dire economic straights because they had a gigantic house (they needed the extra room for everyone one of their 0 kids), 4 cars in the driveway, and yearly trips to the Outer Banks for vacation at their time-share. The fact is, there are a lot of really STUPID people out there, and they feel entitled to everything their hearts desire.
We have created a society nearly devoid of danger and hardship of any kind. Even the absolute bottom of America society is better than living at any level in most of Zimbabwe. I think this has led to a perception that that safety should be perpetuated.
This ties into the "War of (sic) Terror". If these "terrorist" organizations were really a threat, we would be carpet bombing half of Iran and Pakistan to actually get rid of these guys. But that's not what we're doing, instead our government is passing edicts (the Patriot Act)focussed internally. And they can get away with it because of the throng of Soccer Moms screaming "Save my babies! You HAVE to make the world safe for my babies!" Haven't you also recently linked to an article about the rising incidence of late-child-bearing and late-mothers being much more protective of their children?
Pervasive helmet rules for ALL sports, even in the face of research showing that helmets for certain sports provide no or even negative benefit; anti-bacterial soaps, despite research showing that living a *dirtier* lifestyle can make a person's immune system more robust; an ironic movement against infant immunization because of a small occurance of autism due to the shots; taking off our shoes before getting through airport security, despite several decades of prior air travel being completely safe without the need for these draconian measures; the popularization of the phrase "If it just saves one life", without analysis of the quality of total life thereafter(re: the DDT ban).
Reference back to the talk you posted titled "What are Men Good For?" Men, lacking the reduced capacity for close, interpersonal relationships, and an increased capacity for managing shallow, extended networks of relationships, are better suited to making decisions that affect the common good over the individual suffering. Women, being more suited to nurturing individual relationships, lack the cold-hearted detachment to make tough decisions in tough situations.
On the flip side of increaseing female participation in traditionally male life tracks must be met with a decrease of female participation in traditionally female life tracks. We are reducing the birth rate, leading to a reduced capacity for total physical and mental labor (see: illegal immigration for efforts to augment physical labor and contracting outsourcing for efforts to augment mental labor); a reduced capacity to nurture our children in their developmental stages (see: the rising crime rate, the rising under-aged pregnancy rate, etc); a complete ignorance of nutrition (see: 1/3 of American children are grossly obese, with another third being overweight in America).
These things are all linked, and I think current efforts to find solutions to any one of these problems fails to recognize the greater context of the problems. It's not education (or the lack thereof) that is the source of the problem, it's not the "failure of the family", it's not the shunning of God from our lives, it's not any single one of these things or more, it is all of them. It's all a complex feedback function, giant failings in one system are not possible; incremental failures in a single system provide the opportunity for incremental failings in the others. Unfortunately, it's a two way street, undoing it has to be a feedback function as well.
It's hard to tell whether or not the apparent unraveling of Western civilization is a blip, or something larger akin to the Dark Ages after the demise of the Roman Empire.