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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

#161

Post by zacharypinter »

krschultz wrote: post #121
natrius wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Most jobs that truly are "trivially automatable" have already been automatized." Food service. Retail. Automobile repair. Lower-end healthcare jobs. Any job that doesn't require creativity can be automated. Do you doubt that a McDonalds with zero human employees will exist in our lifetimes? When farming and transportation are automated as well and Big Macs are produced with zero human involvement, will you agree t…

Actually I worked at a McDonalds in high school, did a lot of research on AI and robotics in college, and do automation with robotics now for the biomedical industry. I've explained it in detail before when someone made your point, but suffice to say that nobody is going to automate a McDonalds anytime soon. A robot equal to a human costs $50,000 at least. If you have someone working for $10 an hour, that is 5,000 ho…

For a great example of where things are heading, look at RedBox. They've found a way to produce machines that bring more benefit than they cost. It's forseeable that a burger machine could be made in the near future with similar economics.

Re: Americans Are Horribly Misinformed About Who Has Money

#162

Post by zacharypinter »

jshen wrote: post #98
ipince wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well... on his/her defense, the quality of life might still suck for some people, as you aptly pointed out, but that doesn't contradict the original statement..

and there was no evidence given to support the original statement. How is quality of life for the middle class better now even though the disparity between them and the rich is far larger than before. I think I gave concrete examples of how it's worse, which is more than the OP.

An economist (I forget which one) posed an interesting thought experiment: Would you rather be a millionaire 100 years ago, or middle-class today.

Sure, some people would choose 100 years ago, but a large majority of people, when asked, would rather live a middle-class life today than as millionaires 100 years ago.

Clean water, sewer systems, restaurants, the Internet, television, microwaves, dishwashers, transportation, etc all make a middle-class lifestyle today far better than it was 100 years ago.

Re: Americans Are Horribly Misinformed About Who Has Money

#163

Post by zacharypinter »

jellicle wrote: post #51
arvinjoar wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly, and I can't see why the charts shouldn't look like this. Saving money is a luxury, it's a good thing to do if you can afford it and if you're saving your money for something worthwhile. What's important is that people are living the lives they want to be living, and I'm sure that's possible without lots of savings (although wealth could probably help). Most people like to spend money now instead of later tho…

You're absolutely right, the reason why people earning $10K/year aren't millionaires is because they just aren't saving properly. {shakes head sadly}

There's probably an interesting correlation-vs-causation discussion somewhere beween the poor and the wealthy. Are the poor not saving because they don't have any money to save (probably an easy argument for the very poor)? Or is it that people are poor because they don't save (or rather, because they are poor at managing their finances)?

There's plenty of examples of people that win the lottery, only to spend it all within a few years and be back to where they started.

Re: Americans Are Horribly Misinformed About Who Has Money

#164

Post by mbesto »

lotusleaf1987 wrote: post #118

Some of these comments are so bizarrely disconnected from reality trying to talk about how money isn't zero sum, but seriously when the top 20% of the population has 85% wealth there is something fundamentally and critically wrong.

And so what do you define as being "right"?

(playing Devil's Advocate here btw)

Re: Americans Are Horribly Misinformed About Who Has Money

#165

Post by skorgu »

krschultz wrote: post #127
skorgu wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

My dad worked at one company for 28 years. He was fired. He had a year of emergency money in cash in the bank. Not rent, 12 months of money to cover every last little expense they had. They should have been set for any emergency, afterall, who has that much cash in the bank? And no outstanding car, credit card, or mortgage debt (lived in the same house for over 30 years) It took him over 18 months to find a job. Sure…

The story in question didn't include anyone losing their job. You're arguing against a point I have not made.

Re: Americans Are Horribly Misinformed About Who Has Money

#166

Post by skorgu »

dkarl wrote: post #133
skorgu wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

My inner softy/dumbass bought a MacBook Pro as a gift for a single mom/graduate student I was involved with. At today's TV prices, it was enough to pay for a 55" TV (probably not a very good one) and an Xbox 360. She didn't even own a working car, but she had a $1400 laptop. Oh yeah, I also bought her a bicycle and took her and her kid skiing in Colorado. She was extremely frugal and did very well raising her kid and…

Good point, thank you.

Re: Americans Are Horribly Misinformed About Who Has Money

#167

Post by pelle »

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…

The whole problem with these scaremongering articles about equality and the lack of it is that it doesn't matter. They promote this because it fits in to their zero sum world view. A world where it is always someone-elses fault and where we as community must do something or we are selfish. This world view thats based on Dickensian stories of children living on the streets with coal dust on their cheeks. It just isn't true.

I find it particularly disturbing that these thoughts even find an outlet on HN which is the antithesis of the zero sum world. You, yes you coder, entrepreneur are part of building wealth out of nothing. How can you possibly think that by doing so you are stealing food out of the mouthes of poor children in the inner city. You are helping them in the long run by growing the economy.

To a poor person objectively speaking it doesn't matter on anything but an envy level if someone else is rich. What matters is their own life. And this is what Gini coefficients and graphs like this one doesn't show. Yes it's interesting that people have different views of this, but it is not important.

Imagine we can put a number on quality of life. If the poor person starts out at say 1 and is at 10 after 10 years (as has happened in many developing countries). Does it matter that the rich person also is 10 times better off or even 100 times better off? I don't think so. That poor person now is healthier, has better opportunities etc than before.

The children of this poor person will likely have a much better life while inequality might not have budged much in his country.

See Hans Rosling who illustrates this very well:

http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_reveals_new_insights_o...

America is a very unequal country that is true. Just not unequal in opportunities. The richest people in the US (the ones with 80% of the wealth) have probably in most cases earned it.

Many of them have come from other parts of the world and created lots of jobs both here and abroad. Due to the fact that there are so many opportunities wealth distribution of course is skewed towards the rich.

Another fact that simple populist statistics don't show is that many of the poor are new immigrants arriving here because of those same opportunities. Their kids will be considerably well off.

Just by virtue of the HN community being who we are, we should keep doing our bit to increase the overall wealth of our world and countries, even if we may end up with more than our "fair" share.

Re: Americans Are Horribly Misinformed About Who Has Money

#168

Post by jberryman »

cperciva wrote: post #137
nostromo wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Requiring people to read the definition doesn't guarantee that they will understand it.

Of course. But wealth as defined in that sentence is not a difficult thing to understand. It's what everyone thinks about when they say someone is wealthy: they have a lot of stuff and a lot of money in the bank.

I also disagree with pg's assessment; I find it hard to imagine peoples minds defaulting to thinking of percentage of income earned (what does that even mean?) over percentages of money and stuff owned.

Re: Americans Are Horribly Misinformed About Who Has Money

#169

Post by Jach »

jshen wrote: post #158
ramanujan wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

I'm not so sure that the rich vs. non-rich fight is so inaccurate; throughout history it's always been a fight between those with power and those without, and until money no longer correlates so strongly with power (we're getting there) there will always be some "class warfare". Apart from that, I agree with you.

Re: Americans Are Horribly Misinformed About Who Has Money

#170

Post by p_nathan »

javert wrote: post #114
natrius wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Partial Baloney!

Fast food joints could be mechanized. I have a scheme for a nearly fully automated department (grocery/walmart/etc) chain. It would take capital and engineering, but it's a solved problem.

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