Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Americans Are Horribly Misinformed About Who Has Money

good.is

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 194 posts

Re: Americans Are Horribly Misinformed About Who Has Money

#141

Post by wladimir »

nhangen wrote: post #25

I think the headline is misleading, if not a flat out lie. Americans know who has money...almost everyone else. The average American is living paycheck to paycheck, or worse...they know that their friends are living in the same situation. We know that people like Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, and future Mark Zuckerbergs hold billions. I don't really know anyone that is confused or surprised when they hear that this is h…

Indeed. The USA has a huge divide between poor and rich for a developed country. Their poor can hardly come by, their healthcare system is a mess, and even basic infrastructure is underdeveloped in a lot of areas.

And the funny thing is, even though many people agree with that, everyone is coming up with excuses. No one is addressing the problem on how to narrow the poor-rich divide instead of further widen it in any meaningful way. They all are caught up in discussions about details such as 'should we increase tax this year' which will probably have zero influence in the big picture.

But the most disgusting thing to me is that they are still trying to push their system of corporate plutocracy on the rest of the world, as if it is the best thing since sliced bread.

Re: Americans Are Horribly Misinformed About Who Has Money

#142

Post by biafra »

krschultz wrote: post #123
anamax wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I don't need the studies, I'm living it. Right now my girlfriend and I are having a hell of a time with medical bills. She recently started her job, but they won't give her health insurance for the first 5 months. To cover the gap we bought our own individual plan. So far she has gone to the hospital for an allergic reaction to food she has never been allergic to before, and also needed to see 2 doctors along the way…

"She would love to buy an individual plan that covered more than just catastrophic hospital visits, but she can't."

I am not that familiar with the US healthcare system. Why can't she buy a different plan for herself? Is it too expensive? Or would it also kick in too late?

Re: Americans Are Horribly Misinformed About Who Has Money

#143

Post by code_duck »

Another way that Americans are quite misinformed about who has money is that the media portrays Hollywood stars as the most wealthy people in the world. A relatively minor point, but it does serve to cover up the people who truly have a lot more wealth and power than someone who makes a 'mere' $25m per movie.

Re: Americans Are Horribly Misinformed About Who Has Money

#144

Post by canterburry »

I can't help but to always sense and underlying message of "are the rich too rich?" whenever a story like this gets published.

Rather than just looking at the raw numbers (which these articles always love to do), I think the more relevant questions is, do or don't the "rich" deserve their wealth? If they deserve 85% of all wealth due to their involved in the economy, job creation etc...well, then they should have it.

I think few here in the HN community would argue against some entrepreneurial fellow HNer making a buzzillion dollars off of some cool and desirable product/service which instantaneously puts then into the 1st 20th percentile of the graph. Why? Because this person created enough value to earn that money....and maybe those other Americans in that top percentile did too.

Re: Americans Are Horribly Misinformed About Who Has Money

#145

Post by encoderer »

dkarl wrote: post #130
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…

Are you suggesting that if you removed the grossly incorrect image of reality someone has and replaced it with a radically different one, that they would have the same opinions about closely related policy questions? I'm skeptical. People try to keep their view of reality in line with their political beliefs. How do you think Americans end up believing such wacky things? The survey show something like 19% of people t…

dKarl Marx? Kidding :) I upvoted you. The "Marx" comment was inspired by the fact that every time a reasonable liberal with a nuanced view has a turn on the public soapbox, he's instantly demonized as the most ultra-far-left-nutjob.

Re: Americans Are Horribly Misinformed About Who Has Money

#146

Post by Confusion »

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 premise of such posts is that if people were aware of
  who was getting a tax cut they would be against it.
That is not a premise, but a corollary from the conclusion. The conclusion is that people wish for a distribution of wealth that is vastly different from the actual wealth distribution. The corollary is that they would not support measures that retain the status quo or skew the distribution further from their expressed optimum.

  Put another way: the premise is that everyone is purely
  motivated by self-interest.
How on earth is that 'putting the same thing in another way'? The richest quintile thinks the poorest quintile should be more wealthy. If they took that conclusion from these statistics to their logical consequence, they would immediately donate the relevant portion of their wealth and allow it to be redistributed. If anything, the numbers suggest rational people would act in an altruistic way to change things towards their expressed optimal wealth distribution.

Re: Americans Are Horribly Misinformed About Who Has Money

#147

Post by sleight42 »

natrius wrote: post #79
javert wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. I think the first part of what you said is right: we will continue on a track where we all have a high quality of life, absent a paradigm shift in which the economy crashes like in Weimar Germany. The second par…

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…

Spoken like someone in the second 20% who believes that they are in the top 20%.

"We engineers" are barely in that top 20% if at all. It's occupied by corporate CEOs, Wall Street bankers, and lawyers: the people who either write or lobby/bribe the people who write the laws (at least in the plutonomy/plutocracy that we call the United States).

"We engineers" don't control the information. We write the tools that do. The people with the money (see above) use the tools.

Statistically speaking, I imagine that the majority of engineers who participate in a successful startup exit (how else is an engineer going to get into the top 10 or 20%?) are still less well off than a great deal of the above "fat cats".

What separates "we engineers", at least those that read and participate in Hacker News, is that, perhaps, we have just a little more potential for social mobility than the rest.

Bring on them downvotes!

Re: Americans Are Horribly Misinformed About Who Has Money

#148

Post by zoomzoom »

m_myers wrote: post #100
vacri wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, the good ol' "if you're poor it must be your fault" reasoning, wearing yet another dress today.

More like "if you stay poor it's probably your fault".

There are more black people in Prison then in college in this country. It's hard to advance when the cards are stacked against you.

Re: Americans Are Horribly Misinformed About Who Has Money

#149

Post by rdl »

jacoblyles wrote: post #111
redwood wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed today: but it could be that the wealthy will LEARN to be more controlling. Meg Whitman was a failure: but what if she's backed someone who was a great politician instead. And perhaps this is precisely how much of our politics already works. I don't fear this as much as some because I know that elites have always held undue influence, and that has been generally a good thing, with some bad apples throughout. Sm…

>" Meg Whitman was a failure: but what if she's backed someone who was a great politician instead." It would be illegal, unfortunately. The amount of money you can spend on your own campaign is unlimited, the amount you can spend on others is capped. >"It's just that today, with media and technology, the ratios are larger than ever before." If you mean that more people can exert political influence, then I agree with…

Clearly the solution is for a politician to marry into wealth...

Re: Americans Are Horribly Misinformed About Who Has Money

#150

Post by Confusion »

ryanwaggoner wrote: post #13

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.

On the other hands, they are needier, because you just realized they are much less wealthy than you previously thought. So much less wealthy that you cannot conceive of living on that amount of wealth. If they are at the 20th percentile, they earn 5 times less than you at the 80th percentile[1].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_...

Post reply on HN