Financial Privilege Blinds Us From Seeing The Reality Of Other’s Deprivation

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In our society everyone is not in the same social economical class and we never realized this while growing up until we got to a certain stage in our lives. There are people who were born with financial privilege, most of these people have a different perspective and view in life. You can’t expect them to have the same sense of reasoning, financially, with other people who were not born with financial privilege. People with financial privilege see a lot of financial possibilities, they want the latest material possession and the question is not “Can I afford it”? The question is “How Much”?. That’s financial privilege, and people that grew up with this lifestyle, sometimes fail to see the reality of other’s deprivation.

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Imagine a child born with a silver spoon, grew up in a big expensive house, got access to anything he wanted that money could buy, went to the most expensive schools and hangs around with friends of the same social economic class just like him. Do you think this child will ever believe there is a sentence called “I can’t afford it”? Don’t take this the wrong way, it’s not their fault, it’s financial privilege. They think the financial privilege extends to everyone, that is why they sometimes seem surprised when someone claims they can’t afford a particular thing. This reminds me of an experience I had when I was much more younger, I think I was 7 years old at that time.

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It was a Sunday afternoon, my dad always buys me pizza on sundays, it was like our weekly tradition, “Sunday Pizza”. We went to the pizza place to get my usual Sunday pizza, while waiting for my pizza, a lady walked in with 3 children and asked for the price of pizza, she was told the price of pizza and she gave this sad look and told her kids it was time to go that they couldn’t afford it. It seemed like she had underestimated the amount and the amount she brought, was not enough to buy the pizza the kids wanted. She left with 3 kids who were disappointed. In my point of view being a 7 year old little boy that always had pizza every Sunday, I found it weird that an adult couldn’t afford pizza for her kids. I asked my dad, why couldn’t she afford pizza, my dad replied “because the money she had wasn’t enough”. There is an ATM outside, she can go withdraw money and add it up to the one she had and buy pizza for her kids. My dad laughed and looked at me, that was the first day I was given the lecture of the concept of money and financial privilege.

I wasn’t born from a wealthy home but my dad always provided everything we wanted, not luxury, but the necessary basic things in life. He made me understand how not everyone is lucky to be from a home where money is not a problem for them. When you grow up, there comes a time in life where you have to be independent from your parents, you will be left to go fend for yourself. People try to go fend for their selves by getting a job or starting a business, most people get lucky and find a very good well paying job that can afford to pay their rent, house bills, car and pleasure. While most people don’t get that opportunity, they can only afford to place their needs in a scale of preference.

Scale of preference is satisfying your wants in order of their priorities and importance.

So you can’t afford to satisfy your desire to go on vacations when you haven’t paid your house rent, or afford to buy a fancy car when you haven’t settled your bills, feed yourself and pay your house rent.

But when you are born with financial privilege, you can do all these at still have enough money to do other things. I asked him if I had financial privilege, and his reply was “It depends”. Because what I might consider financial privilege is not what another person can consider financial privilege. He decided to use the woman as an example, her kids are seeing me getting pizza as financial privilege because their mom couldn’t afford pizza, but there are places my dad can take me and he won’t be able to afford some of the things they have there. For instance, my dad can’t take me to a jewelry store where authentic gold and diamond jewelries are sold and ask me to pick what I want. If we ever find ourselves in that situation, and my dad couldn’t afford the particular jewelry I wanted, I will see another kid whose dad could afford that as having a financial privilege.



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I often talk about sustainable finance. I believe when it comes to money, a person should always wish to fall under this section of it, if a person's financial privileges are sustainable, meaning that at the cost of long term, it would still be there and printing, it's much more preferable than any temporary riches.

Though I may have deviated a bit, I totally get your point, and based on your latter explanations, everyone has things their money can't buy and they'd definitely see anyone that can afford it to be more financially privileged. But if those privileges are not sustainable, then it's not worth having, my point exactly.

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It’s a very good valid point. Concept of money is vast and it covers a majority amount of ideas. I thought about sustainability when writing this content, but I felt that wasn’t the point of writing it, may be I will make a different post regarding that. But imagine a generation that has lived off old money inheritance, sustainability in a way is a norm for that family.

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Very good article. It seems your article touches alot on relative poverty and absolute poverty. So in relative poverty. You're only in a sense poor in comparison to someone else. For example.. today you may be considered poor for not having a refrigerator.

If you go back to the 1800's you may find even billionaires or multimillionaires of the time didn't have refrigerators. So the idea changes relative to others. Now here's the problem. We then cross a threshold of undeniable absolute poverty. That may include a person who doesn't or can't afford food, shelter or clothing, medicines and maintenance of personal health etc.,. When you see it you're pretty clear on what you're looking at. We call that " absolute poverty".

The concern is many experts feel we're moving ever closer to a state of neofeudalism or a more dualistic economy. What does this mean? It means that the lines of absolute poverty and those with money will ever so widen the gap. This is not healthy for any economy. In fact this is the sign generally of some type of collapse or great depression right before it happens. So you never want this. It's not economic prosperity or fitness of health of your system. Which is why we should be concerned and push for it not to happen. This should be one of our primary concerns if not the biggest concern because it impacts everything from health to crime to wars etc.,

This can result in a far reaching effect in both our standard economy and crypto economies. You see i have a different economic philosophy. I believe we should do all we can mechanically, directly and indirectly to stop these systems from forming. So my solution is i'm a basic income advocate to slow that process.

  • This post has received bbd coins on Hive Engine*

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You literally just brought out the words for my mouth, I had something similar to talk about, but I have been looking for the best way to present it. I picked some insights from what you posted above:

The concern is many experts feel we're moving ever closer to a state of neofeudalism or a more dualistic economy.

I can’t help but wonder, if the world is scared of this, can’t the world come together and agree to alleviate poverty. Wealth and poverty or rather the socio economical class at large, is an imaginary concept the world created in a very much obvious real world. Why feel some people deserve to starve because they don’t meet a certain socio economical standard

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"Why feel some people deserve to starve because they don’t meet a certain socio economical standard"

I think i can try to answer this question from a certain perspective. I once was considered a hotshot on wallstreet. I was top of my firm. I was making alot of money. So first part was i noticed when you make alot of money in this type mindset of capitalism and greed. You'd think you'd reach a certain level and you'd be wow i hit my goal.

I remember getting fancy cars .. fancy clothes fancy girlfriends lol.. then each time it was this insatiable neverending always thirsting drive next to one up that. This what the culture that was breed there in the idea of success. Now the problem with all of this is first they are all constructs. Even currency as we're finding out through a more clear lense is a construct it's fake it doesn't exist. They go around here making up these cryptocurrencies and it's only really mostly our belief pushing their value.

So why do they need to have people starve. It's simple to feel important and in control. That's all it is. After years of deep thinking about it. it's as simple as that. So to construct a world of prestige and this is your new currency because material resources have become unimportant. how ridiculous is it to have several fancy exotic homes and you know you can' only occupy one at one time in spacetime and only in that moment can you enjoy the one unless you're an interdimensional being so the people who do that their maximum satisfaction from traditional currencies have been reached. They have nothing else they are like empty shells.

In fact a study was done. Where it's said something like once you earn north of $75k usd annually. you're almost now at the top of the maximum happiness you can get from money and locking up resources from others. THe reason i believe that is because being a high earner on wallstreet it just reached a point where everything felt normal and you had many of the material resources you need and then had to be looking for something else.. like prestige influence.

Interesting enough even unfortunately something like hive is mostly based on this capitalistic influence model. That's what they selling. thats what the hive power is prestige and influence. In order to sell that kinda currency you gotta have someone to lord influence over lol.

In a business in a market.. What happens if you have more than enough of a capital good? the price goes down or it becomes less valuable and that's not good for your business. So that means we have to either create fake scarcity lol. Or the business has to go out of business. So if everyone in the world came together as you say. They decided to take down the veil and go. We got enough everything? we only create this model for influence and prestige this fake scarcity.

Well then what would the empty people who have nothing else of value do? They only have the influence above others to value themselves. So if they did what you have pondered. They'd no longer have that. Now the world would be better if they did that lol. However they haven't realized that yet. So this is where we are with it.

this ceo in the video below did it.. look how well it worked out for him. it would work out well for them as well is my belief

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