An interesting discussion popped up in my comment section yesterday around Helaine Olen’s recent article in Pacific Standard about Dave Ramsey. I’ll let Helaine handle the questions about the details about her article. I’m just going to deal with her big message, which is that no one gets rich by simply making lifestyle changes.

In the mid 90s, I dated a Columbia medical student. He and his friends were in the same boat as me and my friends. We were all in graduate school, living off student loans, and with very little income coming in. However, there was a huge difference in our spending habits. Even though the medical students had major six figure loans, they spent money like crazy. They used their student loans to finance cruises and nice sweaters from J. Crew. My PhD crowd bought our clothes from the discount stores on 34th street and never vacationed anywhere. The med students ate in nice restaurants, while the PhD students ate rice and beans at a local Chinese-Cuban restaurant. Guess who’s richer now.

The med students could afford to make seemingly bad financial choices, because they knew that they were going to bring in the big bucks down the road as plastic surgeons and heart specialists. And when you’re taking out 300,000 grand in loans, what differences is another 2K to pay for a cruise to Mexico?

Dave Ramsey preaches the word of wealth. His audience isn’t me or the medical students or most of my readership. He’s talking to people with much more limited financial resources who are in over their heads and are looking for some control in these economically unstable times.

When Steve lost his job last year, I went into full panic mode. One afternoon, I went to Barnes and Noble and sat in front of the personal finance book section looking for answers. I found none. The suggested three-month safety fund is meaningless, when it can take up to a year to find a new job in Steve’s field. Simply giving up the Starbucks coffee wasn’t going to pay the mortgage.

Actually, giving up the Starbucks coffee isn’t really going to help anyone.

The road to wealth isn’t frugality. The road to wealth is growing up in the right family, having the right combination of genes, escaping debilitating illnesses and personal crises, and making sensible career decisions. (I’m looking at you, worthless PhD diploma.)

There isn’t anything wrong with frugality. Making good decisions about homes and cars can make a big difference for a middle class family. It doesn’t make any difference if you’re wealthy. It doesn’t make a difference when your income is barely above the poverty line and when the economy has shifted and taking away career dreams that seemed sensible in your 20’s.

What makes the Dave Ramsey-types dangerous is that they distract people from the man behind the curtain. They place the blame for poverty on the individual, instead of looking at the huge societal and political forces that create inequality. They let the wealthy believe that they are wealthy simply because they have good habits and not because of the sheer luck of being born in the right family and with the right genes. They give a “get out of jail card” to politicians who really ought to be concerned with the larger political-societal forces that are creating inequality.

There’s also some cruel about telling the salesgirl at TJ Maxx that she’s poor, because she bought herself a nice pair of boots on Zappo’s, when the real reason that she’s poor is that she’s getting a crappy paycheck from TJ Maxx, she didn’t attend college, her rent is $1,000 per month, she doesn’t have any financial help from her parents, and she doesn’t know anybody who has a middle class job. It’s that cruelty that really ticks me off.

Frugality is a good thing. In comparison to our friends, Steve and I live very simple lives and avoid debt and all the things that Ramsey suggests. But frugality isn’t the bedrock of our success. Our bedrock is Steve’s paycheck. And Steve is able to make that paycheck, because he’s very smart and because we made serious career changes fourteen years ago. He left academia and went into finance, and I made other sacrifices to make sure that he is able to devote all of his brain power to his job. We also benefited from my parents who gave us a handout, when we had to start over.

The real road to financial success — luck, genes, support — doesn’t make for a snappy finance book, which can be leveraged into a popular and lucrative conference talk. It’s too bad, because I’m still pissed off at my last freelance check this month and am looking around for the next project.