Wednesday, July 06, 2011

[fpsonrhq] Rich people can adapt to change

Conditions change.  Rich people, having savings or are not liquidity constrained, can stop in life and carefully consider a new plan of action to maximize income under the new conditions.  Poor people cannot, living hand to mouth, and may have to proceed with a suboptimal plan because they cannot easily change, or cannot discover how to change.

Thus, the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer.  Is there a solution?  Certainly (broadly) technology could lower the cost of discovering the new plan of action: an artificial intelligence personal financial assistant.  Are liquidity (credit) markets functioning properly for poor people?  Maybe not, with imperfect information, as borrowers know better their ability to repay than lenders.  Are poor people making the right decisions of when to borrow?

From an evil point of view, this is a business plan: get a poor consumer locked in and then change conditions, e.g., raise prices on them.  Ought to be consumer protections.  Such a firm does not want consumers getting smarter, the profits are derived from inducing the consumer to act suboptimally; this could even be a case of the rich getting richer at the poors' expense (a negative sum game!).

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