Insightful Thoughts of the Day!!

1) Met with my Teammates mentee this morning. Learned his favorite sport is baseball, and not basketball...I asked for a new mentee.

2) Baseball is underrated. The MLB is overrated.

3) Read an article at Mises.org titled "Why Some People are Poorer." The author spoke about how people can be divided into four different "subcultures." However dividing these subcultures doesn't take into account present circumstances of the individual. These "subcultures," he says, "are not necessarily determined by present economic status, but by the distinctive psychological orientation of each toward providing for a more or less distant future."

It's not that I agree with the article, but it's just an interesting way to look at things and I point this out because I've never thought about it this way before.

We usually think either that people are poor because of luck, bad parenting, motivation and other such factors. But this article described the "lower class" and "upper-class," and remember the author doesn't mean lower and upper class as far as economic conditions, but lower and upper class as "future oriented." Which do you fall under?

UPPER-CLASS: "At the most future oriented end of this scale, the upper-class individual expects long life, looks forward to the future of his children, grandchildren, even great-grandchildren, and is concerned also for the future of such abstract entities as the community, nation, or mankind. He is confident that within rather wide limits he can, if he exerts himself to do so, shape the future to accord with his purposes. He therefore has strong incentives to "invest" in the improvement of the future situation — e.g., to sacrifice some present satisfaction in the expectation of enabling someone (himself, his children, mankind, etc.) to enjoy greater satisfactions at some future time."

LOWER-CLASS: "The lower class individual lives from moment to moment. If he has any awareness of a future, it is of something fixed, fated, beyond his control: things happen to him, he does not make them happen. Impulse governs his behavior, either because he cannot discipline himself to sacrifice a present for a future satisfaction or because he has no sense of the future. He is therefore radically improvident: whatever he cannot consume immediately he considers valueless. His bodily needs (especially for sex) and his taste for 'action' take precedence over everything else — and certainly over any work routine. He works only as he must to stay alive, and drifts from one unskilled job to another, taking no interest in the work."[3]

I think I have characteristics from both classes. I have a very future-oriented mind set in what I do as far as education and my career, but I do suffer from an impulsive behavior. "Should I go out with my friends and go wild, or should I stay and outline for Bankruptcy?" Hmm...let me think....