What is Wealth in America? • Hacker News Board

Re: What is Wealth in America?

#41

Post by dredmorbius » Sun, Oct 16, 2011, 11:32 PM UTC

0x12 wrote: post #38

dredmorbius wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Take a look at the major US stock market indices from 2000 to present: DJSE, S&P 500, NASDAQ. They're flat or down (markedly so for the NASDAQ from its 2011 peak). Stock investing for retirement is predicated on a market which rises relative to inflation (investing in this regard is an inflation hedge). Paul Krugman in The Great Unravelling (2003) noted that a stock market which provides consistent returns is also co…

> Stocks (or any other investment vehicle) are not an automatic win. And if something would be an automatic win it wouldn't take long before everybody would be doing it, killing the economy (and whatever it was that was an automatic win) in the process.

The efficient market hypothesis is also not an automatic win ;-)

Re: What is Wealth in America?

#42

Post by Hitchhiker » Mon, Oct 17, 2011, 10:51 AM UTC

Hitchhiker wrote: post #24

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_bTbM8lbUTLU/S8dg-BMfi_I/AAAAAAAAAD... source : http://samroweis1972-2010.blogspot.com

Perhaps, the down-votes have a point.. I insulted Sam's memory by connecting an incisive picture to this link from Forbes. Perhaps, I should have just left the picture unattributed.

Sorry about that.. it was induced by strange inexplicable feelings of sadness combined with sincere revulsion.

Interesting guidelines here ( that often seem to be ignored ) :

" Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic. "

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I guess, there is no cure for Eternal September.

Re: What is Wealth in America?

#43

Post by SanjeevSharma » Tue, Oct 18, 2011, 2:10 AM UTC

Very interesting, all the comments this post has received. I posted this link on HN because I guessed that several readers here are entrepreneurs like myself, who would one day like to be amongst the 'rich' (or according to the articles author 'upper middle class') and would like to know how that segment of society lives. I had no intention of starting a discourse on class warfare ;)

On the other hand, personally I found this article to be extremely instructive on the relationship between 'net worth' and 'income'. As someone who has worked a job all my life, till date, I have always looked as my salary as my measure of how well I was doing financially. This article made me take an alternative perspective and look at 'net worth'. If and when I decide to stop working for money (side note - someone said Steve Jobs worked so he was middle class. He worked, yes, but I am sure it was not for money! He was Rich.) I would like to still have cash flow coming in from my investments and other passive sources. I believe that is what the author is getting to. If that amount at which I can stop working for money is $100,000 per year, I need to have $2 million in net worth; for an income of $1 million (whew!), I need to have $20 million, and so forth...