On the Experience of Being Poor-Ish, for People Who Aren't

This might narrowly be true if your definition of engine excludes other ICE-only components like the transmission or radiator (which is technically correct in specialist discussion but not general usage). The most common non-crash explanation I’ve heard people cite for turning cars into write-offs with is a blown head gasket, so I’m not sure about your thesis in general, and it’s certainly not something an electric car owner needs to worry about along with a slew of other cost/complexity increases specific to ICEs.

This is an awesome write-up.

I am not rich. I have never been rich, and it's likely that I never will be, but this:

> At the same time, I’m mostly happy. I have a wonderful wife who is very satisfying to be near, two kids who are about as custom-fit to my personality as possible, and dozens of friends online and off who would take a bullet for me, and vice versa.

describes my life pretty well.

I have lived low on the hog for almost my entire life, and that allowed me to save up enough, so that I can live in a fashion that is comfortable to me, while I do the kind of work I love (the kind that could make other people millions, but not so much for me). I just love doing this stuff. I'm living the dream (which I once described as "My dream is to one day, work for free").

I also grew up overseas (mostly Africa), and know what real poverty is like. It has had a huge effect on my outlook.

And, for my entire adult life, I have worked intimately with people that are on the shit end of the stick. I am constantly hearing (and seeing) what living rough is like.

Helps me to stay grateful.

$1200 a year insurance? Seems a huge amount! Is this one of those things where it's for some reason more expensive for poor people?

I vigorously agree that some jobs destroy value on net, but the report described in the BBC's article is pretty unconvincing. I have the impression that the people who wrote it knew what conclusion they wanted before they began.

As an example, they claim that the UK's top bankers and fund managers destroy about £7.40 in value for every £1 they get in salary. How do they get that figure? They assign to those people ...

* 100% of the predicted reduction in UK GDP from 2008 to 2014 as a result of the 2008 crisis (as measured by the difference between IMF forecasts immediately before and immediately after) * an "adjustment to reflect a loss of 5% of UK economic capacity between the onset of the crisis and 2020" (that sounds like double-counting to me, but I can't tell because they don't give any details) * 100% of an estimate of increased debt as a result of the crisis, obtained as the difference between an IMF forecast immediately after the crisis and the UK government's forecast immediately before it (sounds like more double-counting to me, and I bet the government's predictions are systematically more optimistic than the IMF's) * an "allowance for debt servicing costs on the additional debt incurred" * 50% of 1/6 of the tax revenue from the UK financial sector (treated as a pure positive to weigh against the pure negative of value destroyed by the 2008 crisis). The 1/6 is because they guess 5/6 of the UK financial sector is retail rather than wholesale finance and consider the gains attributable to top bankers to be only in the wholesale part. The 50% is because not all of the tax paid by the wholesale financial industry is paid by, or otherwise attributable to, its top bankers. * 50% of 2.5% of the UK's GVA or "gross value added" as estimated by the ONS. The 2.5% is the ONS's estimate of how much London financial services contributed to GVA. The 50% is because not all of that is attributable to the top bankers. I don't know why they're using GVA here but GDP when estimating value destroyed by the 2008 crisis. * 50% of 50% of an estimate of post-tax earnings of finance workers in the City of London. Post-tax because they already counted tax revenue. 50% because not all the credit for those people having those jobs belongs to the top bankers. 50% because if they didn't have those jobs then they'd presumably have other jobs.

The costs of the 2008 crisis are considered as a one-off. For the benefits, which are a recurring thing, they assumed a 20-year career for those bankers.

Soooo many things about this look highly dubious to me. There isn't a 2008-scale crisis every 20 years. The 2008 crisis was a global thing and we have no idea what fraction of it was the fault of people in the UK, versus what fraction of its effects were suffered by the UK. It's not at all clear that it's entirely attributable to "top bankers". Their measures of value destroyed by the crisis look very susceptible to double-counting and other errors. If there's a good reason for using GDP to reckon the loss and GVA to reckon the gain, it eludes me. So far as I can tell, the ONS's reckoning of the financial industry's contribution to GVA is looking only at things like how much revenue the financial industry gets for the services it provides, whereas the claimed benefits of the financial industry to the economy are all about things like providing liquidity, more efficient allocation of capital, etc., which they don't consider at all. Almost all the key numbers in their calculation are low-effort guesses: look at all those "50%"s.

I would be 100% unsurprised if it turned out that top bankers' net contribution to the world is negative. But I don't think this report really tells me anything of value about whether that's so.

That was the first profession in the report. I haven't looked at the others. I strongly suspect they are just as terrible as this one.

Here's the actual report: https://neweconomics.org/uploads/files/8c16eabdbadf83ca79_oj... -- all the details are in Appendix 2.

I can appreciate the sentiment of books like that, however reality isn't that ...fair.

For any one "millionaire next door" who made it by being frugal, many more starve no matter how frugally they live. Many will rise and fall, many more will never even rise above poverty.

I'd like to see the statistics on lifetime well-being between frugality and financial risk-taking†. I'll bet the disparity is shallower than we'd like to believe.

These discussions always interest me, but I'm disappointed by the amount of puritan dogma that usually gets treated as some kind of natural truth. If being poor taught me anything, it's that there is no dogma you can lean on.

† Caveat: the risks being made with a goal to "level-up" (read: escape poverty), rather than blind self-indulgence. Ex—do you max out your credit card (/whatever available leverage) to acquire the tool you need to perform a job in the manner of quality you know can be accomplished with said tool, or do you buy the tool you can "afford" and gradually, over time, work your way up to the "right tool" in this case. In the past, more of the latter may have been possible. These days, I think you're at an even more immense disadvantage by taking that path. Admittedly, my outlook might be too coloured by my own experience. Had I not taken the chances (sometimes enormously painful), I would probably still be trying to squirrel-away $5 bills at a time while working 11 hour warehouse shifts.