Compound interest isn't much help to those spending their whole paycheck meeting their basic needs. Knowing how to properly invest doesn't help those who can't generate enough income to effectively invest, and didn't receive any help from family or angels.

https://xkcd.com/947/

That raises an interesting question. If you were poor, would you want to sacrifice your happyness a bit to ensure that your children will be better off than you? Sure this is quite a slow solution but it would actually work if done consistently.

Happens all the time. I keep running into stories from people that grew up in a poor household, or is a parent in the same situation. And always the parent will sacrifice a meal or similar to make sure that the kids get to eat.

In nature, getting between a mother and her baby is perhaps one of the most dangerous situations you can be in. very few predators, unless they are out of options, consider humans a viable meal. But even ruminants will potentially attack you to defend their young.

Trying to treat humans as cold calculators of utility is perhaps the worst idea economists have clung to over the years.

This got downvoted and I'm curious why. (Perhaps because talking about my "super-hazy memory" sounds lazy? I dunno -- if I'd omitted the last part, would my comment have been better received? It doesn't seem like that would actually have been an improvement.)

If you downvoted the parent of this comment and would like to help me do better in future, I'm all ears...