i'm gonna go out on a limb and say the last book is full of shit.
I haven't read the book but I can imagine the message. Don't rely on others and make money to look after yourself. He/it may not be to everyone's liking but I think it's a message more people need to listen to. Making money is a different kind game to what everyone is taught in school.
the lie is deeper than that, though. the US welfare system is strained because people like donald trump want it to be. we have the resources to do a better, fairer job looking after each other than we do. that we don't is a political choice, and it's one that books like that play a part in supporting.
i'm not saying making money is wrong, or that self-help books focusing on how to invest better or save or whatever are all useless or false. you're right: we don't learn nearly enough in school about how money and finance work and if you're not born rich there's no obvious place to start learning stuff like that. i've got a book like that on the shelf: the millionaire teacher. but i haven't read it because thinking about money and investing and long-term and blah blah blah is intimidating and it's easier to muddle through.
but convincing poor people that the government can't help them, that any sense of collective responsibility is a constraint on individual potential, and they should rely on themselves is one of the most important strategies of economic and political elites have used to drive the concentration of wealth at the top, the gradual hollowing out of the middle class, and worsening quality of life for the poor in the US, UK, and other places over the last 40 years (not to mention a lot of other problems). i mean, class mobility is worse in the US than in the UK, which still has a real live aristocracy. plus, human beings are social, we rely on each other all the time! the idea that we don't or shouldn't is ludicrous, and it's worth thinking about who that idea serves. the 20th-century ideal of a man who goes out and works to feed his family of four while his wife takes care of the kids and the house relies on the wife taking care of the kids and the house without being paid. erasing that interconnectedness and reinforcing the idea that everyone is an individual whose sole purpose is to maximize their own gain is just wrong.
so sure, look out for yourself, try to make more money, yeah. but i wish more people would think about how to make our shared institutions do a better job of looking out for everyone. and for the love of god, who on earth would take financial advice from donald fucking trump? born rich as hell, a deeply terrible businessman who's gone bankrupt multiple times only to be bailed out repeatedly by his racist slumlord father, he'd be richer than he is today if he'd put the cash daddy gave him in an index fund and then sat back and done nothing. and he's now a deeply corrupt president who is using the US government as a way to funnel cash to his businesses. anything he has to say about finance is either stolen from somebody else -- in which case just go read that person -- or a lie.
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