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Comment by dgdas9 | Hacker News Reader

We've been over this several times now. Oxfam uses very disingenuous criteria, and their numbers are not to be trusted. They consider debt to be negative wealth, which means that a middle class family with no net savings and a mortgage on their house is "poorer" than a starving child with 2 cents on their pocket.

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How does that work? Wouldn't the house be considered an asset then and, assuming it's not underwater, put the family back in the black?

Shh... Your ruining his narrative.

I believe the point stands. If a penniless, homeless child has a worth of 0, and I have a house valued at 80,000 with a 90,000 mortgage, am I really worse off than the child without a home? Assuming I have a job and can make payments.

If you assume you can make payments, then you are equivalently assuming your job has present asset value (or that you have human capital). So yes, a full accounting will show you are not actually underwater.

If you are delusional and have no job security, then yes, you're worse off than the child.

That specific example is a bad one as you say. A better is perhaps student loans. I recommend checking out BBCs More or less, they has covered the issues with Oxfams claims several times.

Even in the case of student loans, that's still not an incorrect way to count net worth. The only problem with it is that we don't have a good way to measure the value of human capital.

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