Crisis.

How do you make money in a crisis? How do you build ANY kind of a future in a crisis? And don’t let anyone kid you, you are living in a crisis. It just hasn’t gotten bad yet. Yeah, I know the government sent you a check and they are probably going to send another and anything can happen from now and the next 110 days until the election when ALL the bills will come due for payment.

Hey, maybe you let Fake News convince you that student loans could be forgiven, mortgage debt could just go away, the lease on the building erased, medical could be free for all and somehow magically no one would have to work, even the professors, doctors, landlords. Maybe you believed socialism was possible, sort of like they do in northern Europe.

I promise you that the government can and will make up a whole bunch of “money” out of thin air next month and they will send at least the big corps and those with the smallest incomes, SOMETHING. It’s simple, there is an election in just 3 1/2 months!

So if you are going to die in November, you will be fine. But once the election comes then all the socialism in the world will start cracking at the seems, including the United States paying for it’s choices.

Of course most kids won’t be in physical school. (Many will try, someone will die, probably a professor or teacher, and the powers that be for better or worse, will shut down the schools.)

Here’s a secret: Most people will be at home, widening their current social circle a BIT, but not much.  This is actually a very good thing because when you work and live at home you avoid expenses, will develop tax breaks and will have a huge edge IF you do things wisely.

Here’s the reality of your life, your money, your world, your future:

If you do not seize the bizarre opportunity of the moment and build wealth now, you will have a real personal crisis in 5 years.

With the exception of World War II, the events of 2020 are the biggest game changer in the last century, simply because the impact is global.

Instead of solving problems as humans, “solutions” are now legislated. People imprisoned in their homes (literally in some countries)…so yeah crisis. Where people have the power of decisions they often experience FEAR of making mistakes, regret, etc.  But where people are boxed up without any choices? They tend to experience loss of control, hopelessness, depression. In either case you have crises on all levels of society.

It’s fascinating. It was a year where the external excuses of life seemed to trump the internal strategies of what’s happening inside of people’s homes. On a personal level I don’t like that. Wreaks of socialistic disasters just waiting to make a comeback.

Life changed but your BEST future didn’t, at least not  your future out say…4 years.

Understand, the TRANSITION during crisis is always challenging.

Never think it isn’t because if people tell you it’s easy then you have bigger problems, you’re listening to idiots. It’s not super easy, effort will be required. There will be a period where you’ll work harder for less. But you CAN choose to be better off in 2 – 4 years. It’s a series of choices.

And just because a the world caught a nasty cold doesn’t mean that having a life that is safe, secure, stable and prepared to set up a solid future that is sound and storied with success has changed. Not an iota. Not a jot. Not a tittle.

But people have taken to causes instead of working. This is predictable. People have taken their complaint to the world and good for them, but they will sink their own lives, their futures as they do so.

No, life didn’t change because of a virus. It simply created the breeding ground for another set of obstacles, some real, and some fabricated.  There is nothing new about people getting sick. Right now we can safely guesstimate 1.5 million people will probably die from combinations of covid and something else over the next 12 months. I see no reason and no math to believe a change is going to happen. You can’t “hope” for “vaccines” that WILL appear, I promise you “they” will appear. I like vaccines. They CAN be very helpful for a lot of people. Real vaccines. Vaccines generally take 10 – 20 years to get to the public from square one because to do otherwise would be insanity. You can kill a lot of people in haste.

Meanwhile there are others that are talking about “cures” to flu/cold, however you wish to quantify CV.  You don’t really believe that. No one over 30 can POSSIBLY believe that. How many cures for the cold and flu are there TODAY?

ZERO.

So, instead of being afraid of something that DOES appear to have SOME risk to average normal humans as far as mortality, it’s absolutely worth getting on with life which will END ANYWAY.  This doesn’t mean be stupid and shake hands with a bunch of people at a nursing home after visiting a meat packing plant. There’s no reason to give the frail yet another unnecessary risk in what little time they have left on this planet.

It’s impossible to KNOW what to “believe” in this wildly large social experiment but one thing is certain and…

To be clear: CV19 is ONE challenge like drunk drivers, protestors, demonstrators, bad cops, taxes, the government in general, criminal activity in general and on and on and on. It’s A problem. It’s not THE problem. People’s lives that matter and all related “causes” and “fights” will destroy millions more lives than a virus.

Each of these things is not THE CAUSE of a bad life.

Each is AN obstacle.

15 years ago you were coming up on what would be a significant recession. Nothing like the early 80’s. No, obviously not. Different kind of world then. THAT was hard. But the then coming recession would still be challenging. I started to encourage people to START A COFFEE TABLE BUSINESS at the HEIGHT of the “life is a bowl of cherries boom” of 2003 – 2006.

I laid out in painstaking detail why starting projects IN YOUR HOME and NOT IN A BUILDING NEXT DOOR is necessary for every thinking family.

MANY people listened and thrived. I’m thankful for that.

Each year more and more people realized that everything from the tax benefits to control over your own money, to living with your loved one’s NEAR TO YOU,  to using your talents at peak income, all come while working over your coffee table.

EVERY TIME?

Nope.

Not every time. Sometimes people had to “try, try again.” Sometimes an obstacle is having selected the wrong set of projects. That’s where Inner Circle paid off. Rarely do we see anything go wrong that is unfixable with people in IC.

Why?

Because we replicate what works over and over.

Now the governments of the world join hands and don’t ask people to be RESPONSIBLE for their behavior, but DEMAND that their behavior meet a new set of criteria, that of the government. Look at the people who got paid to stay home and do between nothing and very little. Do they want to go back to work? Obviously not.

But there are now a HUGE number of people who have a DISASTER on their HANDS. A REAL CRISIS…

…but as I’ve written 500 times, crises ARE the MOMENTS OF OPPORTUNITY. It’s one of those things people write on Facebook now but have no clue as to the depth or you’d see change in their world.

People who are smart TODAY will have the same advantages of when I first wrote articles like this from 2003 – 2009.

OBSTACLES of late 2020 and 2021 are going to be BIG like they were in the early 80’s and they might be worse…Maybe a lot worse.

And because we have the CUMULATIVE IDIOCY of governments around the world, I promise you that there are going to be two groups of people who will thrive.

1) The already wealthy. Good for them. They were smart and hung onto their earnings.

2) Those who SEE WHAT IS COMING and make that Coffee Table Business happen NOW so when things are REALLY challenging in late 2020 and 2021 that they will have a HUGE JUMP START on the rest of the planet.

As I noted hundreds of times in the late 2000’s, the FAST WILL EAT THE SLOW.

And they will again in this crisis.

It’s time to get back to THINKING, PLANNING, STRATEGIZING, CARING ABOUT FAMILY, FOCUSING ON WHAT MATTERS.

With this in mind…

You want to be able to set up forecasts of probable and less likely outcomes where you live and what you will really be doing in the world in the next few years.

How would you like to know what people are thinking?

How would you like to know how to predict what they are going to do next?

This article will show you just how surprisingly predictable people are. (Predictable once you understand what makes people tick.)

Then, you get to learn how this will all factor into the problems you will face in wealth building…

The Rich Get Richer…

….In real life people who build wealth tend to continue to work hard and build wealth in spite of the penalties given to people who strive for success, people who work two jobs and earn more money to take care of their family, etc…

And…In real life, people who blow their money tend to repeat the same mistakes over and over…and society rewards them…only to have them blow what they were given again and again.

In general, it’s somewhat fair to say that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. It just takes more effort to accomplish BOTH of those things than we might imagine. And it’s all because of our emotions.

In the United States and most English speaking countries, all things being equal, anyone without major physical or mental handicaps should be able to build wealth if they choose to. And that is a true statement.

If you and I live in the same house or the same city, or state, for the most part, it’s a decision as to how much money you want to earn. And the decision is yours and it’s mine.

Unfortunately that person you’re living with only gets taxed 15% on his income because he works 8 hours per day. You work two jobs and get taxed at 28%.

That’s real life in America. It makes absolutely no logical sense whatsoever.

And the guy in the bedroom next to you gets the same amount of services (or more) for doing less than you do.

Thus, those who build wealth tend to work with even more focus and determination to do whatever they can to not let society’s punishments run them over. And just what happens when society is given THAT chance?

I’ll show you in a minute.

The Egalitarian Society

“Equality” is an interesting concept.

And we find that people really don’t like to see that other people have “more” than they themselves do…

Take people out of real life and put them in a University laboratory and some mind blowing things happen.

What we find is that people choose to punish people who work hard and succeed in order to bring them down to the level of non-success that they experience. And, they are willing to spend a lot of their money to do it!

(If this sounds like politics, I heard it, too.)

I did an experiment with a group of people in an adult setting a few years ago. People in the class were given random amounts of money and had choices to share it with secret members of the audience or not, based upon offers given to them, by me, representing each secret member. It was simple. The audience member could take $20 they were given in one dollar bills and split it between someone on the panel in any way they suggested. The only catch was the person on the panel had to agree to the split or give the money back to me.

So, if a guy offered a girl $1 and he’d keep $19, it takes no rocket scientist to figure out that the girl on the panel should accept the split. Otherwise, all twenty dollars returns to me.

Make sense?

Of course it makes sense.

It’s simple logic.

But people aren’t logical and they don’t think.

So is Something Better Than Nothing? Turn the page…

Almost everyone puts the kabosh on these wide splits. The people on the panel were always comfortable with 50/50 splits and about half the time they accepted $7 when the audience member suggested they keep $13.

Obviously the people on the panel should ALWAYS agree to ANY split because otherwise the money just all gets returned to Kevin who is running the game. And that is indeed what happened with MOST of the money as the day went on.

Once everyone decided to accept or not accept splits from secret audience members, I wrote on the flip chart how much money each person had. About half had no money. Some people had as much as $10. Of those that had money about half of them had $5-7.

Next up, I gave $10 to each of the poor people on the panel. Now all the people who had nothing to start with (those who were stupid enough to not take a split whatever it was) were the richest or equal to the richest. Instantly the impoverished were “moved into the mansion.”

Then I went to the people who had money from their decision to accept a split.

I told them I would give them $3 (to each person) or each person could take away $6 from anyone on the panel. However, no secrets. They would have to name the person and have me write down the remaining amount of money for that person on the board so the class could see it.

Now logically, every person should take the $3 and be happy. It’s free money. But that isn’t what happens. What happens is that people start pecking away at the people with the most money and pull them down to a level closer to their own income. Pretty soon, no one on the panel had more than $5 and I was getting money back in droves.

The richest got hit first. Then the middle class….until everyone was poor.

Given another round where I would give them $3 or they could take away $3 from someone, they typically chose to punish the person who had punished them.

Instead of taking the $3 and being pleased, they chose to take away from those with a few dollars left and impoverish them.

Now, I have to confess that I didn’t invent this “game.” Scientists have been playing variations of this game for years with participants all over the world.

What I did find out was…

What I found out was how much people were angry with each other after the experiment was over. One couple who had gone out the night before, didn’t speak after the game. Even taking away a few bucks from someone in a game, in a class, can cause people to have intense hostile feelings toward each other.

The rich didn’t get richer — at least not in my game under my rules, or under other scientists’ recent studies.

Behavioral Study

According to a new study of behavioral economics, published in  Nature, people will spend their own money to make the rich less rich and the poor less poor. They do so without any hope of personal gain, acting, it seems, out of a taste for equality and sense of fair play.

Earlier research has demonstrated that people are willing to incur costs to punish and reward others, especially in scenarios where every player’s contribution to a common pool results in greater benefits for all. But in those cases it is hard to tell whether the actions are motivated by egalitarian preferences for similar income levels or a desire to enforce norms and encourage group cooperation.

So James Fowler, associate professor of political science at the University of California, San Diego, doctoral student Christopher Dawes and their coauthors set up a game to see if there’s a drive for equality.

The results suggest that a form of material egalitarianism is more than just a long-held ideal of utopian philosophers and political theorists. With not only self-interest but also group cooperation removed as factors, people still, at a cost to themselves, gave money to the poorest players and took it away from the richest.

Fowler and colleagues believe that their experiment shows that egalitarian motives, to some extent, underlie the evolution of cooperation and reciprocity in humans. “One of the reasons we cooperate may be because we care about equality,” Fowler said.

Real-world analogues for egalitarian preferences, said Fowler, can be seen in the wide acceptance of a progressive tax and a social welfare net.

“If people didn’t have a taste for equality, then I would expect the world would be even more unequal than it is,” he said. “It has not been fully appreciated yet how much people are willing to level the playing field and how much this determines our ability to cooperate with each other.”

A total of 120 volunteers took part in the experiment over six sessions, playing the game five times in groups of four. Group composition changed with each game and players’ game histories did not follow them. In other words, reputation and retribution were not allowed to play a role.

Participants were randomly allocated different sums of money. They were shown what each player got and presented with a choice to do nothing and maintain the (unequal) status quo or to reduce their own real takeaway pay by one monetary unit in order to either increase or reduce another player’s income by three units. Outcomes of each game were then displayed.

In all, income alteration was frequent: About three-quarters of participants reduced or increased another player’s income at least once and about a third did so five times or more.

Subjects who had received more than the group average were penalized most frequently and most heavily, at a rate of about three-quarters of a unit for each unit above the average. In contrast, those that started out with considerably less than the others got sizeable gifts, at rate of about eight-tenths of a unit for each unit below the average.

The pattern of behaviors had the effect of equalizing income. It also did not change as players gained experience with the game (and so could clearly see that there really was nothing to be gained from their costly actions). Furthermore, it didn’t seem to matter whether individuals had themselves been the targets of an increase or reduction in the previous round: They continued acting as they had, either redistributing winnings according to apparently egalitarian principles or, as was the case with a minority, concentrating wealth in the hands of a few.

The researchers capped their experiment with a questionnaire designed to elicit emotional reactions. Players expressed the greatest levels of annoyance and anger in a hypothetical situation where one player got far more than they had. And the players who felt this way the strongest spent more to equalize the distribution.

And that’s not all. Continue reading...

Translation to Politics

In related research, Fowler has shown that game behavior correlates with people’s political participation. Those that engage in costly giving and taking in a game tend to also be registered with a major political party and to vote at greater rates.

“The ‘Robin Hood impulse’ people display in the lab,” Fowler said, “appears to translate into good citizenship out in the world.”

Coauthors on the Nature paper are Tim Johnson, of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin and Stanford University, Richard McElreath, of UC Davis, and Oleg Smirnov, of the University of Miami.

The research was supported by the Center for Adaptive Behaviour and Cognition at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development and the UC Davis Institute of Government Affairs.

Note: Parts of this article have been adapted from a news release issued by University of California – San Diego.