为什么富人越来越富，穷人越来越穷？Why Do the Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Poorer?

Speaking to this question at the level of the individual, through how it shows up in daily life

I think the Zhihu answer below, though its logic is a little patchy, mostly matches my own views. And it offers practical guidance for action

The copyright of the answer below belongs to its author. Author: Wan Fangzhong Link: https://www.zhihu.com/question/21128507/answer/84749961 Source: Zhihu

It is mainly a question of how people think. In my years out in the working world I have dealt with the poor and I have dealt with the rich, and the impression that runs deepest is this: the differences between people are simply enormous. Some people make millions a month, while some cannot even keep themselves fed and warm. The feeling is a little like this: both may not have a cent to their name, yet with some people, even working for them makes you happy and fulfilled, and everything you put in feels worth it; while with others, when they do something for you, you come away unhappy, uncomfortable in your own skin. The differences between people have, in fact, already been quantified in money. If we are going to talk about scorning the poor and fawning on the rich, we must first talk about what poor-person thinking is, and what rich-person thinking is. Here I need to say up front that what follows describes a common phenomenon and an overall tendency, not a blanket claim about one hundred percent of all poor and rich people: among the poor there are very smart people with a rich person’s mindset, and among the rich there are those with a poor person’s. Otherwise no poor person in this world would ever work their way to wealth, and no rich person would ever fall into poverty overnight.

1.From the dimension of money When the poor set about doing many things, the very first thing they weigh is money, and they lose sight of what the thing is essentially for. I have seen many extreme attitudes toward money, especially among the poor. I have a relative whose family kept an air conditioner at home but almost never turned it on. Winters in the south are cold, but the family figured that in winter you simply wear more layers; they couldn’t bear to switch it on, and froze until three of them caught colds, at which point they turned it on with a clear conscience: see, I’ve caught a cold now, so of course the air conditioner goes on. An air conditioner costs two or three thousand yuan. The way that household scrimps, by the time the machine gives out, the electricity used probably still won’t add up to the price of the unit. They think they have come out ahead, when in fact they have lost: a thing was bought and never delivered the value it was meant to deliver. For the rich, the air conditioner frees them from being at the weather’s mercy, gives them a far superior environment to work in, and so raises their efficiency, creating value far, far beyond the electric bill. An air conditioner is bought, in the first place, so that people can live more happily and comfortably, and the poor keep getting this backwards: tough it out first, and turn it on only when it truly cannot be toughed out. From the moment of purchase, the essential point of the thing has already been missed.

2. From the dimension of time. Different understandings of time create the vast gap between rich and poor. Someone once told me something rather interesting. He said: “Look at you, eating out for every meal. The food out there is dirty and never fresh, and expensive besides. If you ask me, cooking is something you should do yourself: clean and hygienic.” I said: “I have the money to hire someone to cook, doesn’t that settle it?” He said: “Hire someone? Whatever for? If I just do the cooking myself, isn’t that money saved?” It’s an interesting view, and many poor people think this way: so long as money can be saved, no amount of time is too much to spend. My time isn’t worth anything anyway, it just sits there, so it may as well save money: better to spend half an hour waiting for the bus in a cold wind than a dozen-odd yuan on a taxi; better to spend two hours a day cooking than a few dozen yuan to have a professional make the meal and set it on the table; better to spend a whole afternoon cleaning than to pay an ayi to do it. “Save wherever you can” is their stock phrase. The truth is, each of us arrives in this world stark naked, without a cent on us. That you can sit at leisure in a café drinking coffee is because, before the coffee, you spent time working; you take the money your working hours bought and spend it on the coffee. In effect, sitting here, you are drinking this cup with a double portion of time. Between these two stretches of time, money serves merely as a medium. In essence, you are trading working time for the leisure time of drinking coffee: an exchange of time for time. The poor man would rather take on personally every job that ought to cost money, earning while never letting a single cent leave his pocket. He believes he is “saving”; tally it up and his turns out to be the costliest way of all. A person who wants to come out ahead everywhere ends up, in the long run, taking the long way around. Far better to contract the specialist work out: hand it to the professional driver, the professional cook, the professional cleaner, and efficiency multiplies. And the time saved can go into more of what you yourself are good at, creating more value. The poor man sees only the price of the meal in front of him, and the price of a meal just sits there: a sum that is finite and plainly visible. Better by far to spend that time on his career, where the horizon is far wider. The same thing plays out in dating. I see some men forever complaining: “I keep looking for a girl and never find one, why?” One look and you find him on Momo messaging girls “hi” one by one, never suspecting that plenty of girls’ inboxes are stuffed full of “hi.” The rich man is cleverer: he simply tosses a red envelope to the people nearby, perhaps just for the fun of it. And a girl, naturally, would rather keep company with someone generous and easygoing. 3. The dimension of horizons Because the rich are well off, they have more leisure than the poor, and so they have the time to receive a better education, to enjoy books and films, that nourishment of the spirit, and to raise themselves through it. Much of the time I feel it is not birth or anything of the kind that creates the vast difference between poor and rich; it is thinking that creates the gap between the two, and over a lifetime this gap accumulates, growing wider and wider. When I worked at a factory, something quite interesting happened: I sat in the office, and next door was the workshop, and whenever the workers had an idle moment they liked to peer into the office to see what we were doing. The funny thing is that the office often really was idle; when the work was done, people would sometimes sit around watching films, playing cards, fiddling with their phones. I often talked with these workers, and when the chance arose they would say to me, dripping with sarcasm: “You office people have it good, sitting there all day playing on your phones and watching films and collecting money for it. Not like us, working overtime to ten every night with no rest.” I would say: “So I don’t work? The goods you turn out, do they just sit in the factory once they’re done? Who arranges the shipping for you, who handles the customs declarations?” “Of course you don’t work. You look at a computer, tap some keys, print a few sheets of paper, and the month’s wages land in your hand.” They talked this way, but I was not angry, because I knew that some things come down to how much one has seen. Viewed from inside their horizon, in this world only people like themselves, laboring diligently every day, turning out one article after another, truly create value. In their words: that is called keeping your feet on the ground. While our daily tapping away in front of computers is all empty air. Yet precisely the things that look valuable to them are the least valuable of all. China’s manufacturing is shrinking year by year, and one important reason is that many countries are now replacing human labor with robots. In phone manufacturing and car manufacturing, robots are already in use across many processes; in the future, robots replacing repetitive, single-motion manual labor is an unavoidable trend, and the shoe industry, I believe, will be among them. As for who gets laid off first, by any reckoning it will be them before me. Doing one repetitive task over and over is the least valuable work there is: cashiering, say, or cleaning, or manufacturing. The cleaning robots so many of our households use now are one example. I once had a relative who was very rich, and one day found himself destitute; with no way out, and still needing to eat, he went to the neighborhood committee to apply to sweep streets. It turned out no one would have him even for street sweeping. Why? Because far too many people were fighting over that rice bowl: anyone at all, so long as they are a person, can sweep. Of course, I mean no disrespect whatsoever to street sweepers here; my point is that such jobs are far too replaceable: you can do them, I can do them, he can do them, a robot can do them. Hence they hold no distinctive value. A clever person does everything possible to raise their own level, to leave this low-income circle and enter another circle where the value content is higher. Not to spend every day envying this one nearby who earns more than you, or that one who does less work than you: among a few old acquaintances the difference comes to no more than a few thousand yuan either way, and it is all meaningless. Beyond souring your own heart and everyone else’s, it accomplishes nothing. In fact there are people who started out as workers and, through their own learning and self-improvement, finally leapt out of their circle. Zhang Yimou is one. It is just that many people, once the work is done, think only of cards, drink, food, and sleep, never of changing anything, and let the time drain away for nothing. If a rich man is not simply the son of a rich man, I think there are reasons he is rich. The most frightening thing about the poor man’s way of thinking is that it not only keeps him poor, it invariably spills over onto others: 1.With money, a poor man who is stingy with himself will naturally be no kinder to anyone else. When I was at the factory, there was an air conditioner in the office. Even in Guangdong’s hottest stretch of the year, even with the thermometer climbing to 40 degrees and the desks hot to the touch, he would not turn it on for you. And the boss offered his reason with perfect equanimity: “Look, aren’t I right here with you, suffering the same heat?” Yet the moment a client appeared, even just one, on went the air conditioning. It left a very bitter feeling: as though only clients were people, and none of us deserved cool air. Compared with other industries, manufacturing is a relatively poor one. I am sure that any internet company daring to claim it could keep the air conditioning off during working hours would find itself unable to hire at all. And the ugliest phenomena (wages in arrears, no benefits, inedible canteen food) are concentrated almost entirely in this industry. 2.The poor man not only fails to treasure his own time; he fails to treasure other people’s. When I first began to move among the rich, I noticed something: this group speaks little. At first I took them for cold, aloof, full of themselves; later I realized that in fact they treasure their time, and put their usable hours into things that matter. The poor, meanwhile, produce a great deal of idle talk, and one pattern stands out: an overfondness for putting the self at the center. Today at the shop so-and-so was rude to me; such-and-such a person has poor character; yesterday’s pot of soup was simply delicious; and so on. Bring such a person into a workplace and the team suffers; bring them home and the family’s mood suffers. Communicating with them is very hard too: a conversation tends to open with “I’m so upset,” “I’m furious,” “that man looks at people the way a dog looks down on them,” rattling through one great loop of description before at last arriving at the point, wasting their own time and everyone else’s. The rich rarely complain this way. Many rich people I have met quietly let these inconsequential trifles pass and put their energy and time into what they judge most important. Their speech is concise and to the point, brief, straight at the heart of the matter, with no wasted words; talking with such people, it is hard not to enjoy yourself. 3.Narrow horizons make for narrow hearts, and breed conflict and friction all the more easily. Payday at our factory was quite a spectacle. It was not enough for a worker to collect his wages; he had to go leafing through the wage sheets to see everyone else’s. The workers stitching uppers, say, liked to measure their pay against the lasting workers’: “We’re all making the same shoe, just different parts of it, so why do the lasters get more than the uppers?” So off they went to the boss for a blazing row, and at the end of all the shouting nothing changed, because it was not just our factory: go to any other, and the rates on offer are the same. All of it, really, is meaningless. Anyone who sees through the workings of things even a little will understand this: the market is always clever, and the final price it sets is the reasonable one. Price is what emerges from the final contest of person against person, person against money; the boss is not so foolish as to overpay the lasters while underpaying the stitchers. When these people see someone earning more than they do, the very first reaction is anger, rather than the thought: compared with him, where do I fall short, what are my weak points? I should be closing the gap head-on. Why do I do more work than others and take home less? Instead they exhaust their powers of mockery; in truth this is not merely narrowness of heart, it is ignorance and a poverty of emotional intelligence. A clever person, before saying such a thing, should already foresee that once said, it can only invite resentment, and beyond that accomplish nothing. Words that harm others without profiting yourself are better left unsaid. From childhood we have had one idea drilled into us: money is the root of all evil. As I see it, money in itself is neither evil nor good. Like a river, it always flows to where it ought to go. Shi Yuzhu once said: the greatest sin of an enterprise is failing to make money. Across the world, people in wealthy regions are on the whole far better cultivated than people in poor ones. Across history, people of prosperous ages surpass those of impoverished ages in moral sense, in average refinement, in upbringing. Poverty itself is not the frightening thing. What is frightening is this: poverty breeds the poor man’s way of thinking, and the poor man’s thinking deepens the destitution in turn. If you are still mired in poverty, you should study, again and again, the way the rich think through problems, rather than sink into envy, loathing, and complaint, which will only make you poorer. Only by learning actively, only once you have the rich man’s way of thinking, will the wealth to match it follow, and life get better step by step.