But like...if making business decisions is not a thing you have done or a thing your culture sees as aspirational, then you probably see "businessmen" as people who have large boxes of goods and are willfully/greedily refusing to give them away for free.
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Replying to @s_r_constantin @diviacaroline
It is true that the *very* poorest people are usually not "doing business", but I'm not sure the correlation holds above about $50,000 a year? Lots of well-paid employees who never set prices or sell things or negotiate, lots of not-super-rich people who own auto repair shops
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Replying to @s_r_constantin @diviacaroline
Like, a lot of people think "Why can't you just pay workers more/treat workers nicer/charge less for your products/give away all your money? You *can*, you're just selfish."
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Replying to @s_r_constantin @diviacaroline
Sometimes that's true; the "rich person" *could* share more, they just choose not to.
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Replying to @s_r_constantin @diviacaroline
And sometimes the "sharing" that the "rich person" is supposed to be selfishly choosing not to do, is literally impossible (like Bloomberg giving every American a million dollars).
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Replying to @s_r_constantin @diviacaroline
sometimes it's a weird hybrid, like: you *could* give all the money in your business's bank account to the poor. But then you would not have a business any more. Would you want everyone to do this? If so, where would the stuff come from?
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Replying to @s_r_constantin @diviacaroline
I think "could this even work, if you were to do it?" is sort of a question at the wrong level of abstraction though. Actually modeling how you would carry out a plan is imagining yourself being powerful.
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Replying to @s_r_constantin @diviacaroline
I can imagine being in a headspace of "well, look, CLEARLY nobody is going to put me in charge, or loan me enough money to start a business. The people who get those opportunities are just qualitatively a *different sort of people than me*." (e.g. for class/race/gender reasons).
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Replying to @s_r_constantin @diviacaroline
From that perspective, geeking out about how money works is a thing for the *kind of people who will ever be allowed access* to nontrivial amounts of money or credit or power. There's no point in my even touching those topics.
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Replying to @s_r_constantin @diviacaroline
So, of *course* I don't have accurate beliefs about how money or business works; that knowledge would be futile to acquire, because it's about a world I'm already locked out of. There's no "yum factor" to learning about it.
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(I think some people even feel this way about arithmetic.)
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Replying to @s_r_constantin @diviacaroline
And, like, that journalist who made the arithmetic error is probably right that Michael Bloomberg is not a deeply empathetic man whose top priority is helping those less fortunate than himself.
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