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The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy

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Re: The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy

#211

Post by Latteland »

seibelj wrote: post #130
Latteland wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In US, each school district receives money proportional to their students, with some places raising money via levys or bonds in their district. It takes a long time to make new schools. If people could go to any school, you'd overwhelm some districts with tons of students and you can't just make a new school in a year or two, it takes a lot of time for the district to figure out they'll need one long term, raise the…

OK, so build low-income housing in rich districts (unless you are saying the presence of poor kids destroys the good school) and stop using zoning to limit what kinds of residences can be built (lot-size, multi-family, building height, etc.). In the suburb of Saint Louis where my wife grew up, each lot had to be at least 1 acre, and had to be single-family. Given how expensive it was to live there, realistically the…

I think we'd be better off if poorer people were not concentrated, of course today it's economic concentration or discrimination that makes it harder to equalize things. Not only am I lucky to live in a good school district for my kids, but people in my more wealthy area are much more willing to support school levys and donate money and time.

There is some lower income housing, but in a boom town like Seattle you get a second negative impact on poorer people, which is displacement through rising prices of homes and apartments. Poorer people have to leave because they can't afford rising rents. Their old neighborhood starts to get more of the better educated people who could help the local schools with their background and money.

It's not impossible to go up, but it feels like it is harder. In my family, my grandparents were both some of the first people to go to college during the great depression, with basically no money. They came from tiny high schools but managed to make it.

Re: The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy

#212

Post by Latteland »

noir_lord wrote: post #107
Latteland wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me the point is that "other middle class" you mention, call it lower middle class, is shrinking, falling into the lower class. Because of loss of decent paying factory jobs, retail shrinking, etc. If you are an adult today without special education, it's really hard to have a decent lifestyle. Most of my friends are programmers or teachers, and they most all of them have decent jobs. The teachers are increasingly…

> Software engineers are more fortunate. We are, I earn significantly more than my partner who has a degree and I don't have a degree. It's one of the last fields that without a degree you can still earn a good living if you can break into it somehow (in my case it was side gigs/contracting to crappy full time position to none-crappy full time position to decent full time position). Though I'm in the UK, I gather the…

I think it used to be easier in the US to be a dev without a degree, but it's hard to get all the background to pass interviews without serious education, things like time complexity and their of computation.

Re: The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy

#213

Post by leetcrew »

FrozenVoid wrote: post #210
ElevenLathe wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well that escalated quickly. I'm not saying "people with adequate, diversified retirement savings are evil capitalists." I'm just saying that "We shouldn't count the value of people's houses when determining how wealthy they are." is absurd. Clearly it should count. They own it. It's not a political stance, just a pro-accuracy one.

The problem with it these people will not sell their houses. Its not a liquid capital. Selling their only house would be something like once-in-lifetime decision. What i'm saying, and you're failing to understand is that a if citizen A has a million dollar house and 10K in savings but his income is very low, he is actually much much poorer than citizen B who has 1.01million in cash, 80K salary and rents an apartment.…

your argument essentially reduces to "$1.01mm net + $80k salary is much more well off than $1.01mm net + low salary". unless A happens to be a financial wizard, this is always going to be true no matter how A's assets are allocated. i'm not sure what your point is with respect to counting primary residences in net worth. if A were truly worse off for having the house (and they very well may be with that lopsided allocation), they could just sell it. a typical yearly return on $1.01mm is very close to the median household income in the US.

Re: The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy

#214

Post by geebee »

seem_2211 wrote: post #87
zjaffee wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a big debate in the HN world too, where tech workers in that top 10% think they are working class. The real breakdown here is that in todays day and age, there's hardly a middle class, there's the working class who struggles, lives basically paycheck to paycheck, and at the age of 45 has up to 40k in wealth to their name. Then there's that top 10% whose able to afford a million dollar home, take yearly vacati…

Yep, you see it a lot in San Francisco (I've noticed it creeps into my mind a lot more frequently than I'd like to admit). The thing is, it's like the boiling a frog in water analogy. You get desensitized to it. I tend to work with salespeople, so there's a tendency to get flashier things than a lot of my programming friends, but it manifests in things like always having the latest iPhone (or it's Android equivalent)…

"But you still can't buy a house in San Francisco."

Are you in a dual income family, and have you considered buying areas like the Excelsior, Ingleside heights (excluding Ingleside terrace), Oceanview/Merced Heights, Outer Mission, Portola, Silver Terrace, or other such neighborhoods?

I don't mean to dismiss your question, these are still expensive neighborhoods, probably between 800k-1.2mil for something decent. This is tough for two incomes, as the dual income thing means you're also stuck with high childcare costs, which will probably be ~25k per kid in San Francisco (I'm talking about the kind that allows you to go to work from 8am-6pm - and even then you will have to recuse yourself from meetings to be at daycare by 6pm, officially surrendering your membership in the young people are just smarter and can focus on what's important club in Silicon Valley companies[1).

I do think this is in reach of the group you just described, though. 250k+ family income isn't unusual for two tech workers or other professionals in SF (a programmer and dental hygienist pair, for example, should exceed this).

[1] https://venturebeat.com/2007/03/26/start-up-advice-for-entre...

Re: The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy

#215

Post by CamTin »

FrozenVoid wrote: post #210
ElevenLathe wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well that escalated quickly. I'm not saying "people with adequate, diversified retirement savings are evil capitalists." I'm just saying that "We shouldn't count the value of people's houses when determining how wealthy they are." is absurd. Clearly it should count. They own it. It's not a political stance, just a pro-accuracy one.

The problem with it these people will not sell their houses. Its not a liquid capital. Selling their only house would be something like once-in-lifetime decision. What i'm saying, and you're failing to understand is that a if citizen A has a million dollar house and 10K in savings but his income is very low, he is actually much much poorer than citizen B who has 1.01million in cash, 80K salary and rents an apartment.…

Yeah, they have the same wealth right now. I'm not sure what "economic impact" means here, but Citizen B will likely be much much richer in the future, seeing has how his 1million in cash can basically instantly be converted to securities that allow him to live without working at all, and he can either quit his $80k/year job or save all o it.

Citizen A can likewise sell his house, buy those same securities, and also live without working, but evidently doesn't have the same option to work for $80k/year and save even more, which is all the more reason he should diversify his portfolio.

Forgetting the potential salary (assume both lose their jobs and can't work ever again), they are exactly as rich as one another, but A has foolishly constructed his portfolio such that his house is 90%+ of his wealth. Yes, he is in a financially precarious situation due to his reliance on strong housing prices, but it's totally of his own design. He can sell at any time and cash out. If he can't actually sell (no one will buy the house for what it's "worth") then his house isn't really worth a million dollars.

Re: The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy

#216

Post by throwawayjava »

nordsieck wrote: post #91
throwawayjava wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Who "just has money" and doesn't control capital? 1. The vast majority of middle class wealth is locked up in (non-investment) housing. That money provides a roof and access to quality education, but in almost all cases, it's not being efficiently deployed as capital. 2. Whatever remaining money that is deployed as capital, is not done so in a way that implies control over their chosen investments. Think "majority…

> The vast majority of middle class wealth is locked up in (non-investment) housing. There are literally 0 people I know who think owning a house is not an investment. If you're trying to make a distinction between income generating assets and assets that don't generate income, you're just digging yourself into a hole - housing doesn't generate income, but it does save cost - namely rental cost. In that sense, it is…

> You have to get to some truly lofty heights before you find the activist investors.

That was exactly the point the GP was trying to make...

Re: The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy

#217

Post by emodendroket »

Latteland wrote: post #212
noir_lord wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Software engineers are more fortunate. We are, I earn significantly more than my partner who has a degree and I don't have a degree. It's one of the last fields that without a degree you can still earn a good living if you can break into it somehow (in my case it was side gigs/contracting to crappy full time position to none-crappy full time position to decent full time position). Though I'm in the UK, I gather the…

I think it used to be easier in the US to be a dev without a degree, but it's hard to get all the background to pass interviews without serious education, things like time complexity and their of computation.

You can easily learn that stuff yourself if you care to; the hardest thing is getting interviews when you don't have the work history yet.

Re: The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy

#218

Post by emodendroket »

returnInfinity wrote: post #195
wolco wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are still working you are not part of the richest class. Measuring income per year misses the richest group of all. Those who would look down on anyone working.

Even the rich need to work to retain their wealth.

In fact, the class of people the GP is talking about do not.

Re: The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy

#219

Post by seem_2211 »

geebee wrote: post #214
seem_2211 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, you see it a lot in San Francisco (I've noticed it creeps into my mind a lot more frequently than I'd like to admit). The thing is, it's like the boiling a frog in water analogy. You get desensitized to it. I tend to work with salespeople, so there's a tendency to get flashier things than a lot of my programming friends, but it manifests in things like always having the latest iPhone (or it's Android equivalent)…

"But you still can't buy a house in San Francisco." Are you in a dual income family, and have you considered buying areas like the Excelsior, Ingleside heights (excluding Ingleside terrace), Oceanview/Merced Heights, Outer Mission, Portola, Silver Terrace, or other such neighborhoods? I don't mean to dismiss your question, these are still expensive neighborhoods, probably between 800k-1.2mil for something decent. Thi…

I agree 100%. I meant to sum up the prevailing attitude on housing out here.

Re: The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy

#220

Post by stillsut »

LateRuin wrote: post #89
dgreensp wrote: post #11

Wait, so 10% of the county is millionaires (more or less, if 9.9% are 1.2-millionaires), and these people have such “good family, good health, and good jobs” that they might as well be a different species? If I tell you how “good” someone’s family or health is, you can tell me if they are a millionaire or not? I think the author’s intent was to acknowledge privilege, but the article is just making more weird caricatu…

>If I tell you how “good” someone’s family or health is, you can tell me if they are a millionaire or not? Yes, I can. That's the point -- the rich and poor are far more visually distinct today. Take for example obesity/overweight and marriage status. The poor are far more likely to have both an elevated BMI and to be single parents / divorced / never married

> the rich and poor are far more visually distinct today.

That is one narrative - the stepford wife vs the welfare mom, the soylent drinking tech worker vs the beer drinking factory worker. True to some extent.

But it was Taleb in Antifragile that noted in a room full of banking exec and policy guys, only the wait staff will exude physical dignity. I think you can extend that observation further and see the lower working class (like waiters, personal trainers) opening up an appearance advantage on the upper intellectual class (lab rats and office workaholics). Not so for the true elite though - vc's, celeb's, etc.

To generalize: The comfortable and sedentary elite have an advantage of appearance over the comfortable and sedentary poor. But being poor and trying to escape it is a more healthy lifestyle than to be upper middle class and try to escape into the elite.

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