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I mean, there are no men available to them who aren’t in the bottom quintile. It’s perfectly reasonable to pass up a relationship if it has to be with someone in the bottom quintile. Being a criminals mistress, on the other hand, often comes with short term benefits.
To me this is a similar (and expected) style of thinking to "poverty finance"
Why do poor people buy lottery tickets or gamble when the expected return is zero? Consider the alternative; "saving" but with poverty levels of cash.
Say you are barely making ends meat but manage to come up with $10 a month which you dutifully deposit into some online broker account (leave aside that it might be difficult for you to open one of these accounts).
$10 / month for 20 years at an assumed 7% annual return (within the accepted range for the SP500)
You will have $5,209.27 in 20 years.
Yeah.
20 years of diligence to have enough for a down payment on a car? It takes quite a bit of delayed gratification and discipline to stick to it. So, instead, shoot for the moon! Lotto tickets, semi-legal gambling, or just hedonic indulgence.
If you're a woman sifting through bottom quintile men, perhaps you can convince yourself to stick it out with a guy who's only ever semi-employed and semi-sober in the hope that over the next 20 years you'll make it work and build a modest home?
Or, you say "fuck it" and fuck the local drug dealer so you can enjoy a certain "lifestyle" for a few months or a few years.
I've never accepted the idea that poor people are just "stupid." A lot of them make a host of bad decisions (often repeatedly) but they are operating in a different context. The average PMC household has the means to give each of their children a four year vacation masquerading as an "education." That creates a lot of different time preferences and relative value calculations than when you're bouncing checks to pay rent and put gas in the car. Asking the latter group to employ what is top 10% levels of focus, discipline, and self-denial is like admonishing a functional illiterate to "crack the books and study to pass the bar."
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