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Americans Are Horribly Misinformed About Who Has Money

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Re: Americans Are Horribly Misinformed About Who Has Money

#81

Post by shashashasha »

philwelch wrote: post #47
johnswamps wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it means that if you're poor, you're spending a larger percentage of your income and saving less of it. Poor people have to spend a higher percentage of their money on basic necessities such as rent, food, clothing, transportation, etc.

I think you and redwood are violently in agreement. If you have more money, you can save your money and that money will make you more money. If you have less money, you can't.

Upvoted for "violently in agreement" — I'll have to steal that one

Re: Americans Are Horribly Misinformed About Who Has Money

#82

Post by redwood »

jshen wrote: post #69
redwood wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other thing is that the bottom folks aren't as "needy" as folks were in, say, the great depression. - I.e. "no one starves in america" and most people know this: so while the distribution in wealth is extreme, the distribution in QUALITY OF LIFE is less extreme. - This biases people's view and makes them feel that generally, for most americans, things are okay. This is all true of course: except that the worry ab…

"the distribution in QUALITY OF LIFE is less extreme" You're kidding right? Ever have someone in your family get an unexpected major medical problem while their young and either have no insurance or have the insurance refuse to cover care? That is a quality of life killer! Or the simple fact that wages for the average person are stagnant or slightly down in the past few decades while healthcare costs are rising as we…

My point was that it's a lot less bad than it was 100 years ago. Today even the poor will get antibiotics at the ER when dying of infection.

Re: Americans Are Horribly Misinformed About Who Has Money

#83

Post by lnguyen »

jonhendry wrote: post #52
jacoblyles wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fears of a plutocracy are overblown. You write that "money is power and speech". But people like Meg Whitman and Mitt Romney have tried to buy elections with their personal fortunes and it didn't work (and self-funded candidates do worse, on average, than other candidates). Political inertia, the passions of the mob, and the maladaptive incentives facing legislators and bureaucrats are much more potent forces sha…

"But people like Meg Whitman and Mitt Romney have tried to buy elections with their personal fortunes and it didn't work (and self-funded candidates do worse, on average, than other candidates)." Seeking office is probably the least effective way for wealth to exercise its power. They do a lot better from behind the scenes, giving smaller sums to many politicians (or threatening to withhold it) to buy influence. Jami…

They're after the public recognition and acknowledgement of their status. Satisfying their ego is what's important, not how much money they've spent or whether it could've been used in better ways.

Re: Americans Are Horribly Misinformed About Who Has Money

#84

Post by tibbon »

waqf wrote: post #3

The question they asked is difficult to interpret, i.e. hard to translate between specific answers "I think the top quintile possesses N% of wealth" and an intuitive understanding of how skewed (or not) a distribution we're talking about. I have a strong quantitative background, and I have to do some calculations to interpret these numbers. And these guys are interviewing average Americans and inviting them to pull n…

However, I think that anyone who understands general statistics and numbers as they apply to social groups would guess at this trend almost immediately as things like this almost always fit a Lorenz/Gini curve, although I guess the harshness of the reality of it really is shown here.

I remember when studying some social network stuff the other year I found that pretty much everything in every social network I looked at followed this type of trend regardless of what the 'wealth' was (twitter followers, youtube subscribers, flickr views, etc)

Re: Americans Are Horribly Misinformed About Who Has Money

#85

Post by natrius »

jonhendry wrote: post #56
iwwr wrote: post #10

Technology allows people to be much more productive than the mean and the weight of most productivity is naturally skewed toward a small minority. This is not an injustice. A top programmer will be many times more productive than an average programmer and large codebases tend to include code from top programmers preferentially. Not only that, the value generated by top programmers (or project leader) is vastly more t…

"This is not an injustice." Paris Hilton. Among other examples. Yes, there are people who get large paydays because they are strikingly effective at what they do. Then there are the people who get large paydays for no particular reason. Or because of their parentage. Before celebrating the übermensch, please try checking back in with reality.

Sorry, Paris Hilton being rich is not an injustice. She's rich because people (particularly her parents) wanted to give her money. Trying to prevent that sounds like an injustice to me.

Re: Americans Are Horribly Misinformed About Who Has Money

#86

Post by natrius »

vacri wrote: post #72
tjansen wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did a manager at a grocery store have the same amount of responsibility as today? My guess would be that today being a deli manager just means that you need to follow your chain's rule books. In 1985, with more independent stores and smaller chains, a manager had more responsibilities, and thus her contributions were more directly related to the store's profit than today. Thus a good deli manager is worth less than s…

While we're pulling reasons out of the air, I think that the difference in wages betwen '85 and today is /clearly/ because of Saturn's wobble.

That's a ridiculous comment. The reasons were not pulled out of thin air. Relative to the population, it seems likely that more people are qualified to become deli managers today than they were in 1985 due to standardization and advances in technology. If more people can do a job, it will receive less compensation.

At least be right if you're going to try to shoot down a comment with worthless sarcasm.

Re: Americans Are Horribly Misinformed About Who Has Money

#87

Post by anthonyb »

redwood wrote: post #26
Benjo wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_distribution Wealth inequality is much more pronounced than income inequality, especially in the bottom quintiles.

Which is very interesting, if you think about it: it means that through a little more money now, you will generally have a lot more money later... i.e. money makes it easy to make money

Assuming that your extra money goes straight into a bank account or is invested somehow. If you have to spend it on medical bills, food or shoes for your kids, extra money won't make much difference to your income.

Re: Americans Are Horribly Misinformed About Who Has Money

#88

Post by anthonyb »

zamfi wrote: post #39
pg wrote: post #6

I wouldn't be surprised if most respondents are answering as if the question were about income rather than wealth.

I wondered about this too. Just for fun, I plotted the household income distribution on the same chart: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/667/income-distribution.jpg Income distribution looks quite different from wealth distribution, and is more equal than the estimates in the original article. [ Household income data from here: http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/DistributionofIncome.html ]

What does it look like once you subtract cost of living expenses though, or even just minimum wage? That'd give you an idea of the discretionary spending of each quintile; more informative than just a raw value. I suspect that discretionary spending would follow much the same pattern as wealth.

Re: Americans Are Horribly Misinformed About Who Has Money

#89

Post by mattrepl »

cletus wrote: post #78
jshen wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm kind of confused. The big three are our biggest expenses (which includes healthcare for veterans). So giving tax cuts to the super rich (or anyone really) without addressing the big three is the problem that the person you're replying to is pointing out. How is that a "no sale"? Cause he mentioned veterans?

http://www.comw.org/qdr/fulltext/100223williams.pdf > Growth in Budgets for Military Health Care > The DoD's health care costs rose from about $20 billion in 1998 to $47 billion in 2010 (FY 2010 dollars)—an annual growth rate of 7.4 percent above inflation. Absent changes in policy, CBO projects they will at least double between now and 2028. It's no sale because it's ~2% of the budget masked in emotion, which is at…

I believe you want the Department of Veteran Affairs. The 2010 budget was $114 billion.

http://www.va.gov/budget/products.asp

Re: Americans Are Horribly Misinformed About Who Has Money

#90

Post by gnaritas »

ctdonath wrote: post #17
byoung2 wrote: post #2

What’s interesting here is the extent to which the public vastly overestimates the prosperity of lower-income Americans. I bet this is due in large part to the availability of credit over the last few decades. Credit has allowed lower-income people to "play the part" of the wealthy, giving rise to the distortion. In particular, interest-only, 0% down mortgages, low or no-interest credit cards, and car leases let some…

Most lower-income americans make more than the world median income. Our "poverty line" is 20x the income line for half the planet. Of late in Atlanta, one news story about someone unable to pay to heat more than one room had a dramatic photo of her showing her heating bill in her living room - with a 55" HDTV and Xbox360 in the same room. Problem with that chart is scale: while 20% may have most of the money, the poo…

> Most lower-income americans make more than the world median income.

A meaningless stat; cost of living here is far more than the world median as well.

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