131–140 of 194 posts
Poor Americans are simply much, much, much needier than people realize. You're not needier just because your neighbors are richer than you thought they were.
I think the idea is that your neighbours are poorer than you thought they were.
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> 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.
Comparison of historical age distributions in the U.S. suggest this problem. http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=u.s.+age+distribution+i... http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=u.s.+age+distribution+i... This problem is much worse in China.
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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. There's a difference between the ability to purchase one-off consumer goods and the kind of situation this person is in. Consider that those consumer goods may have been purchased before an economically catastrophic event such as an illness or a layof…
My inner libertarian is unable to comprehend the confusion of ideas that allows the purchase of a 55" HDTV et cetera without ~six months of rent in the bank. My inner liberal fires back with the complete, utter and deplorable lack of financial education and hence literacy in this country which is at the very least a partial cause of the most recent subprime financial kablooie. My inner conspiracy theorist mutters som…
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…
Matt Yglesias is claiming that Americans underestimate the wealth of the poor and overestimate the wealth of the poor. He concludes means they underestimate the needs of the poor.
I think you are making the assumption that what is being promoted is anti-wealthy as opposed to pro-poor. I think it's probably safe to assume the authors consider themselves in the latter.
I wouldn't be surprised if most respondents are answering as if the question were about income rather than wealth.
I'd like to see that graph broken down between people who think that wealth is a zero sum thing that can be represented as a pie (as shown) vs those who know it isn't. That is, people who think that if I have a dollar, then they can't also have that same dollar at the same time.
I remember this from Hackers and Painters. Money is a zero-sum game, wealth is not. So yes, I can't have the same dollar that you have.
It's sitting there on both your and my bank statement. We both have it at the same time.
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 propert…
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…
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We engineers live in an information economy. Many, if not most Americans do not (pardon my lack of statistics). They work in service jobs that will be trivially automatable in our lifetimes. Wealthy people will actually own the means of production in a very meaningful way, and those that aren't equipped by their genes, upbringing, or education to participate in the information economy will be unable to earn an income…
Many, if not most Americans do not (pardon my lack of statistics). They work in service jobs that will be trivially automatable in our lifetimes. Most jobs that truly are "trivially automatable" have already been automatized. I think it's extremely unlikely that most or nearly most of Americans' jobs can be replaced by computers in our lifetimes, barring something like the Singularity happening (which I'm not holding…
If you think capital itself is a virtue that is entitled to the profits of all labor, then I suppose you are in turn entitled to hold that opinion. So long as the lives of those who are in thrall to capital have a "reasonable quality of life", yes? I won't even go down the road of opportunity inequality here, but I will just say I disagree with how readily you discount environmental factors in the development of people, and how readily you discount the influence of privilege.
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Who cares who owns what, as long as it isn't stolen from others, indeed. But there are conflicting opinions about how predatory the current economic system is. How much wealth is stolen? It's not easy to answer unless you are an ideological zealot.
What are you talking about? It's illegal to steal money from other people, barring taxes -- so other than taxes, none of it is stolen. The only economic system that is not predatory is a free market, which is based on voluntary trade for mutual benefit; any other economic system involves coersion, which is required for something to be predatory. In the current economic system of the civilized world, government holds…