Oxfam: World's 8 richest as wealthy as half humanity • Hacker News Board

Re: Oxfam: World's 8 richest as wealthy as half humanity

#41

Post by tjansen » Mon, Jan 16, 2017, 5:31 PM UTC

aluhut wrote: post #28

OskarS wrote: post #15

This is an incredibly misleading statistic because they use NET wealth, which means that they subtract your debt from your wealth. That means that if you have more debt than wealth (not necessarily a bad thing), you have negative wealth. This is the case for roughly 40% of the world's population. This means that, by the same metric used in this headline, your average groundhog or newborn baby has more "wealth" than t…

> This means that, by the same metric used in this headline, your average groundhog or newborn baby has more "wealth" than the poorest 2.85 billion people in the world. But isn't that true? If you are not born into a family that will give you a huge dept and a second mortgage on the house, you are better of.

No, not necessarily. Cash flow matters more than debt. Spending all the money that you earn and keeping your net worth at 0 is actually a great way to live (at least until you retire). Being born into a family with huge debt is likely giving you above average income potential. I'd rather be worrying about being born into the family with just a little debt, but struggling to pay it off.

Re: Oxfam: World's 8 richest as wealthy as half humanity

#42

Post by aluhut » Tue, Jan 17, 2017, 12:58 AM UTC

tjansen wrote: post #41

aluhut wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This means that, by the same metric used in this headline, your average groundhog or newborn baby has more "wealth" than the poorest 2.85 billion people in the world. But isn't that true? If you are not born into a family that will give you a huge dept and a second mortgage on the house, you are better of.

No, not necessarily. Cash flow matters more than debt. Spending all the money that you earn and keeping your net worth at 0 is actually a great way to live (at least until you retire). Being born into a family with huge debt is likely giving you above average income potential. I'd rather be worrying about being born into the family with just a little debt, but struggling to pay it off.

> Being born into a family with huge debt is likely giving you above average income potential.

I don't understand that. A family with a huge dept is a badly managed family. How can there be anything good coming from that?

Re: Oxfam: World's 8 richest as wealthy as half humanity

#43

Post by tjansen » Tue, Jan 17, 2017, 9:04 AM UTC

aluhut wrote: post #42

tjansen wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, not necessarily. Cash flow matters more than debt. Spending all the money that you earn and keeping your net worth at 0 is actually a great way to live (at least until you retire). Being born into a family with huge debt is likely giving you above average income potential. I'd rather be worrying about being born into the family with just a little debt, but struggling to pay it off.

> Being born into a family with huge debt is likely giving you above average income potential. I don't understand that. A family with a huge dept is a badly managed family. How can there be anything good coming from that?

In order to get huge debt you need to be able to demonstrate a high income potential, high enough to convince the creditor to lend you that kind of money. If you have huge debt, it's likely you can pay it off sooner or later. Also, you won't get it as an uneducated working class family. The background of a huge debt family usually results in an above-average income for the offspring.

Re: Oxfam: World's 8 richest as wealthy as half humanity

#44

Post by aluhut » Thu, Jan 19, 2017, 6:23 AM UTC

tjansen wrote: post #43

aluhut wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Being born into a family with huge debt is likely giving you above average income potential. I don't understand that. A family with a huge dept is a badly managed family. How can there be anything good coming from that?

In order to get huge debt you need to be able to demonstrate a high income potential, high enough to convince the creditor to lend you that kind of money. If you have huge debt, it's likely you can pay it off sooner or later. Also, you won't get it as an uneducated working class family. The background of a huge debt family usually results in an above-average income for the offspring.

I don't really need to demonstrate anything with credit cards looking to the US for example. Thinking of those nasty dept packages that got so prominent 2008.