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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

#101

Post by nostromo »

pg wrote: post #6

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

The paper says that they addressed that:

"We ensured that all respondents had the same working definition of wealth by requiring them to read the following before beginning the survey: “Wealth, also known as net worth, is defined as the total value of everything someone owns minus any debt that he or she owes. A person's net worth includes his or her bank account savings plus the value of other things such as property, stocks, bonds, art, collections, etc., minus the value of things like loans and mortgages."

Re: Americans Are Horribly Misinformed About Who Has Money

#102

Post by jshen »

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 think your focus on this one example instead of his larger argument could also be considered an irrelevant distraction. VA benefits are part of two of your big three so they seem relevant to me. In order to cut taxes we have to cut something from the big three and VA care is such a thing that could be cut to pay for tax cuts. It seems completely relevant to me, and yes it is emotional, that's why we never deal with this problem. The estate tax is emotional too, especially when called the death tax. It seems impossible to talk about this stuff without dealing with things that are emotionally charged.

Re: Americans Are Horribly Misinformed About Who Has Money

#103

Post by gensym »

jacoblyles wrote: post #31
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 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…

Political inertia and the passions of the mob can be purchased, as the Koch brothers know.

Re: Americans Are Horribly Misinformed About Who Has Money

#105

Post by moultano »

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…

You're entirely right. I dont think anyone but a demographer has an intuition for stats like this. I'd bet that a ton of people answered 20% across the board.

Re: Americans Are Horribly Misinformed About Who Has Money

#106

Post by pyre »

cletus wrote: post #55

I find posts like this one depressing. They're cynical and shortsighted. The premise of such posts is that if people were aware of who was getting a tax cut they would be against it. Put another way: the premise is that everyone is purely motivated by self-interest. There are two immediate problems with this line of thinking. The first is tha it ignores how aspirational people are.i remember a survey from the 2000 el…

  > with declining birth rates and increasing life expectancy.
Unless you're talking about Japan, I'm going to ask that you provide hard numbers before throwing statements like this out.

Re: Americans Are Horribly Misinformed About Who Has Money

#107

Post by mindcrime »

redwood wrote: post #20
pg wrote: post #6

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

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…

Since as Marx shows this is not really in the interest of the upper classes (that is: tyranny and extreme poverty are precisely what leads to a violent reaction by the down-trodden) it may be that

It's not just about violent reactions; simply because extreme poverty does not benefit the very rich in economic terms... in fact, it harms them. And some (maybe a few, maybe most, who knows?) of the very rich understand this; look at what Larry Page and Sergey Brin did in establishing Google's charitable foundation. They understood that - in the end - their ability to grow their business requires a population of healthy, productive, engaged people to do Google searches.

it may be that, through the miracle of technology's abundance, we will continue on a track where we all have a high quality of life, but only a smaller and smaller pool of people "own" the production engines.

If anything, technology seems to be making it easier and easier for people with less capital to produce things. In "our world" (that is, computers, software, web-based consumer sites, etc.) it's already possible to build a software startup with a negligible amount of money. Open Source Software and cheap hosting from Linode, Slicehost, etc. have made this stuff way accessible.

And even in the world of physical goods, every time we turn around we're hearing more about cheap 3d printers that make it possible to spit out real world physical items without a big, expensive factory.

Print-on-demand books make it possible to become an author / publisher for almost no cost. And the "print on demand" concept has been applied to other areas... have artistic talent? You can quickly be in the business of selling your art via the Internet, as clothes, prints, etc.

Now granted, doing something like making jet engines or automobiles still takes a lot of up-front capital, but still... I think the trend is towards more and more forms of production becoming more and more accessible to everyone.

Re: Americans Are Horribly Misinformed About Who Has Money

#108

Post by sparky »

mixmax wrote: post #40
sparky wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wealth != Inflation-adjusted dollars. You can buy many things for $100 today that would have cost $5000 in 1985 (or more likely, that didn't exist at all). Life's necessities, with the important exception of homes and apartments, have gotten cheaper in inflation-adjusted dollars over time. I'd argue that the truest measure of wealth is the distribution of 'happiness' over a population, but that opens so many cans of…

The things you mention are what inflation is meant to nullify. In an economists perfect world the amount of a normal good you can buy with $1 would be the same as the amount of that good you could buy for 1 inflation-adjusted dollar at any other time in history.

You're right, an inflation-adjusted dollar should buy some fixed fraction of e.g. a loaf of bread at any time in history. It's just such a multidimensional space that any one number is bound to leave out some pretty crucial information as to how much money a given person needs to be happy.

Re: Americans Are Horribly Misinformed About Who Has Money

#109

Post by ramanujan »

cletus wrote: post #55

I find posts like this one depressing. They're cynical and shortsighted. The premise of such posts is that if people were aware of who was getting a tax cut they would be against it. Put another way: the premise is that everyone is purely motivated by self-interest. There are two immediate problems with this line of thinking. The first is tha it ignores how aspirational people are.i remember a survey from the 2000 el…

The other critical point is that "the rich" are not passive targets but highly mobile. Swing at them too hard and too repeatedly and they will just leave. If your life is on your laptop this really isn't that hard.

Unless they then make it hard. After all, the state paid for your (compulsory) education, so to some you owe them all future success. And so you can't leave to escape a regime which is broke and desperate.

The end game of this process is East Germany or North Korea, where the state taxes 100% and literally shoots you if you try to leave. In the US, of course, we don't shoot you if you emigrate...but in 2008 the US did, for the first time, implement a massive ~50% exit tax for those over 200k in net worth who renounce citizenship. It was remarked upon as a radical shift, as a desirable/wealthy place makes it hard to immigrate while an undesirable/destitute country usually makes it hard to emigrate. A harbinger of things to come?

Re: Americans Are Horribly Misinformed About Who Has Money

#110

Post by anamax »

jshen wrote: post #97
redwood wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"Today even the poor will get antibiotics at the ER when dying of infection" You're moving the goal posts a bit aren't you? For starters, those antibiotics will be followed by bankruptcy for the poor person in most cases. And most importantly, that alone isn't convincing me that quality of life for the poor is better than ever. I also didn't mention in my last comment that who is really seeing their quality of life d…

> For starters, those antibiotics will be followed by bankruptcy for the poor person in most cases.

So? Bankruptcy eliminates debt, which is a good thing for poor folks.

And yes, I've read the studies about "health care bankruptcies" - have you? They counted anyone who had health care expenses, and they included gambling and drug abuse as health care problems.

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