Thinking about that guy that posted on reddit about how his dad got POA over his grandmother with dementia and "invested"...
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Thinking about that guy that posted on reddit about how his dad got POA over his grandmother with dementia and “invested” (gambled) her life savings in cryptocurrency
I had a taxi driver who told me that he took a lot of money out of a savings account he shared with his wife to invest in some coin (without her knowledge), got rugpulled, and went into so much debt that he had to sell their house. Fuming, his wife took the kids to Pakistan to live with her parents, where she cought COVID and died.
I’ve heard a handful of stories of guys “investing” money they couldn’t afford to lose in cryptocurrency, because they believed it was guaranteed to go up, and about what happened to them when they realized it was not.
I’ve heard enough of these stories that I’m not sure where to place these guys. Are they all victims that have been lied to? Are they perpetrators of greed and blatant stupidity? Is the Kind Of Guy that buys into a stupid bubble actually a very important ecological niche in our economy, some kind of host to already fabulously wealthy wealth-extractors?
I guess the question I’m really trying to answer for myself is: “am I supposed to feel bad for these people or not?” And will a policy of compassion merely subsidize wealth extraction from lower classes, as this kind of shit happens once a decade?
I mean. yes. their lives are fucked because they fell for a scam. seems pretty straightforward to feel sorry for them, even if a) they made bad choices and b) they hurt other people doing that
Will compassion towards them subsidise further scams? Very dependent on implementation details. There are obvious problems with saying “oh no you got scammed, here, we’ll just make you whole out of the government’s pocket” (note that this is distinct from “we caught scammers and recovered the money, here’s yours”)
what can you do? financial literacy helps, but you can’t subsidise that enough that nobody ever bets their life savings on some bullshit (or indeed some non-bullshit that happened to get unlucky! “legitimate” investments can lose money too). there’s already complicated rules about who can invest on what things and what kinds of disclosure you need before some random person can invest in you, and scams still happen
and the further along you go on that scale, the more you’re curtailing people’s freedoms. which is in fact bad. if some people keep making bad decisions with money at some point all you can do is take away their power to spend their own money and give it to someone else (a relative, the government), but that is obviously ripe for abuse.
I don’t really have an answer. but i think it’s important to maintain a sense of compassion that these people really are victims and it’d be better if they were not scammed, because otherwise it’s very easy to fall into a trap of “well, if you’re stupid enough to fall for a scam, you deserve to” and sweep the problem under the rug.
Are they victims? They seem more like people who stole a lot of money from their loved ones and then lost it in an idiotic way, all with extremely gendered undertones.
I think these are just shitty men, and even with much more financial literacy in our society there would still be stupid assholes who do shit like this.
shitty men can be victims. if you lose all your money to a scam then yes you are the victim of the scam, that is what the word means.
if you also stole that money from someone else then that makes you an asshole too, obviously.
I mean that they’re not victims in the policy sense – society should do nothing to protect them beyond paying for financial literacy to be taught in schools.
Laws about fraud are a thing society is doing to protect them already. Securities regulation is a thing society is doing to protect them already. Don’t particularly think those should stop.
Well, no, THOSE should continue. I obviously meant that there should be no additional protections – look, we should punish what we can, but past a certain point fools are going to find a way to be parted from their money.
Stupid investments and gambling, and people investing/gambling money that was in some sense not entirely theirs to invest/gamble with is not in any way a new development, nor is it exclusive to men. Like, every time some “sure thing” goes belly up, this happens to some group of people.
This is, incidentally, what the “accredited investor” status is for; in the regulated world they only let you buy into things that could blow up if you’re rich enough not to miss the money