Americans Are Horribly Misinformed About Who Has Money • Hacker News Board

Re: Americans Are Horribly Misinformed About Who Has Money

#151

Post by ryanwaggoner » Sun, Dec 26, 2010, 2:27 PM UTC

Confusion wrote: post #150

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_...

Ah, but this isn't about income, it's about wealth. The two are very different; there are plenty of people in the bottom quintile of wealth earning six figure salaries.

Re: Americans Are Horribly Misinformed About Who Has Money

#152

Post by yummyfajitas » Sun, Dec 26, 2010, 2:54 PM UTC

guelo wrote: post #138

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…

No one is starving in America? It's people with your callous ignorance that are allowing things to get so awful, I take it you have no idea what is going with the food pantries in your city.

The USDA seems to share his ignorance. Less than 2% of the country even reported losing weight as a result of food security. The word "starve" doesn't even occur in the report.

http://www.ers.usda.gov/Publications/ERR66/ERR66.pdf

More intuitively, go live in a poor neighborhood. For the most part, the only skinny people you see are the addicts. Everyone else is fat.

Re: Americans Are Horribly Misinformed About Who Has Money

#153

Post by alexqgb » Sun, Dec 26, 2010, 3:31 PM UTC

encoderer wrote: post #145

dkarl wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's true of nuanced views in general.

Re: Americans Are Horribly Misinformed About Who Has Money

#154

Post by rapind » Sun, Dec 26, 2010, 3:41 PM UTC

ramanujan wrote: post #109

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.…

Depends on how rich you mean. Why would the very rich leave a plutocracy many of them have worked very hard to create? The US is a pretty sweet place to live if you have a lot of money. You not only get to live in luxury, you also have a disproportionate affect on public policies that allow you to grow your wealth.

Maybe the 2th would be happy to leave though.

Re: Americans Are Horribly Misinformed About Who Has Money

#155

Post by waqf » Sun, Dec 26, 2010, 3:58 PM UTC

jfager wrote: post #64

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…

Cognitive biases are going to skew these numbers horribly I guess I thought the point of the article was to demonstrate exactly this skew. Where does a person's emotional reaction to tax cuts or welfare come from? If people casually think that poor people aren't as poor as they really are and that wealthy people aren't as wealthy as they really are, they're going to act accordingly when it comes up in their daily lif…

You missed my point, or at least part of my point. The point is that the numbers people write down in this survey will not accurately represent their own impression of how poor poor people are.

Re: Americans Are Horribly Misinformed About Who Has Money

#156

Post by jshen » Sun, Dec 26, 2010, 4:09 PM UTC

biafra wrote: post #142

krschultz wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I'm not the OP, but if she is already having medical problems then the new plan would likely refuse to cover it because it's a pre-existing condition.

Re: Americans Are Horribly Misinformed About Who Has Money

#157

Post by rapind » Sun, Dec 26, 2010, 4:17 PM UTC

tibbon wrote: post #84

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…

The reality looks a lot like the 80/20 principle doesn't it?

Re: Americans Are Horribly Misinformed About Who Has Money

#158

Post by jshen » Sun, Dec 26, 2010, 4:23 PM UTC

ramanujan wrote: post #109

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.…

I'm really uncomfortable with the implicit metaphor that this is a fight between the rich and the non-rich. I don't think that is an accurate representation of the situation. Also, many of the rich would not be rich if they were born in some other country. To a large degree they are the product of the opportunities of the environment they are in. That environment requires investment and good management.

Our current situation has people like Warren Buffet paying a far lower percentage of their income in taxes than you and I, yet the rich use government services to a far greater extent than the rest of us. The US military isn't protecting oil fields I own in nigeria because I don't own any oil fields. The fire dept. isn't protecting the factories I own throughout the US because I don't own any.

I think it only makes sense that those who benefit the most from our government, and who can afford it, invest in it accordingly. For starters they shouldn't have a significantly lower percentage of income taxed than the rest of us.

Re: Americans Are Horribly Misinformed About Who Has Money

#159

Post by brown9-2 » Sun, Dec 26, 2010, 4:24 PM UTC

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…

Some may ascribe to Reagenesque trickle down economics.

And the problem with this counterargument is that trickle-down does not work.

Re: Americans Are Horribly Misinformed About Who Has Money

#160

Post by Confusion » Sun, Dec 26, 2010, 4:33 PM UTC

ryanwaggoner wrote: post #151

Confusion wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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_...

Ah, but this isn't about income, it's about wealth. The two are very different; there are plenty of people in the bottom quintile of wealth earning six figure salaries.

True, but, from the data mentioned, the income distribution doesn't look very different.