221–230 of 245 posts
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Relative to your income. My home was about $120k. It’s easily affordable on a tech industry salary. The median household income in my county is under $30k...
Ahh, so you mean the debt owns you, not the house per se.
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9.9 is the top ten percent minus the .1 percent - he agrees the .1% are a problem, but wants to address his own class, the rest of the top 10% = 9.9%. That bin has the size it has, and the measured effects he points to presumably deduct the stats for the .1%. There's no trickery, just a stat or two to conjure with. If you think he's skewed the measure by using mean instead of median or mode and not subtracting the co…
There are ways to estimate right bin locations and sizes given a relatively known distribution - maximising information. He's done none of them. (As opposed to disinformation.) Even simple PCA would figure it out.
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It’s relative on how you define wealth really - ability to provide stability in the form of a mortgage, or amount of money you make. I feel like in SF or any big expensive city owning a home is not something for the middle or upper middle class - there’s a point that no matter how many brunches or vacations you can take, you can’t trade them for a house except in an area where you’ll be basically going down in econom…
Owning a home is overrated, it owns you.
Choose your poison.
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I disagree that it's segregating or done on purpose, but it is deeply unfair that the price of a good "public" education is being able to afford the real estate in that catchment area / school district.
But it's ultimately the high price of the real estate in that area that makes the schools good. We live in an economy where intelligent academic achievers do pretty well. So expensive areas are highly skewed toward intelligent academic achievers. Guess what kind of children they have...
(This is impossible in California, however, because the property taxes are set at the county level and school districts have no control over their own funding.)
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Relative to your income. My home was about $120k. It’s easily affordable on a tech industry salary. The median household income in my county is under $30k...
Ahh, so you mean the debt owns you, not the house per se.
In that sense, the house owns you, not the other way around.
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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…
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.
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> I would hypothesize that even within this 9% we’d find the wealth concentrated at the top in the “2nd 1%”, i.e., the top 2% likely make the middle class look mostly irrelevant. I doubt this particular point. The 98th percentile of earners make something like $200-$300k a year, the 89th percentile make about $100k/year[0]. That's a big difference, and it will equate to an even bigger difference in wealth, but not en…
I couldn't find any firm numbers on "the 2nd 1%", so I'd probably have to get my hands on some data to calculate it. That makes sense though. 1%, 9% and 90% may be a reasonable approximation of upper, middle, and lower classes. And I think your point about the interests of the 9% being more aligned with the 1% than the 90% is an important one. Which is part of the author's point as well, that the 9% are really benefi…
It's reasonable to define 90% of the country as "lower class"? Sorry, no, I can't buy that definition. The top of the bottom 90% are upper middle class at least by any reasonable definition.
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But it's ultimately the high price of the real estate in that area that makes the schools good. We live in an economy where intelligent academic achievers do pretty well. So expensive areas are highly skewed toward intelligent academic achievers. Guess what kind of children they have...
I remain skeptical of that part. There are, however, plenty of cities in the US where the school district boundaries are drawn very precisely to enable the imposition of property taxes that support the schools. It becomes a sort of private-public school, in the sense that all the homeowners in the district pay extra and those schools have sports teams and labs and orchestra and field trips that the kids on the other…
It is entirely possible to get a good education at the many schools that don’t count as “good” in our brand-obsessed system. But the “bad” ones really are bad for you. For those who made the mistake of being born to the wrong parents, our society offers a kind of virtual education system. It has places that look like colleges—but aren’t really. It has debt—and that, unfortunately, is real. The people who enter into t…
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Ahh, so you mean the debt owns you, not the house per se.
I'm not jacob019, who originally made the comment, but as I understand it, the point was not the debt. The point was the maintenance. When the basement floods, it's my problem, not the landlords. When the attic fan fails (I was surprised that attics had fans), it's my problem. When the driveway concrete starts to buckle, it's my problem. In that sense, the house owns you, not the other way around.