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Comment by ryanwaggoner | Hacker News Reader

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ryanwaggoner·

Poor Americans are simply much, much, much needier than people realize.

You're not needier just because your neighbors are richer than you thought they were.

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I think the idea is that your neighbours are poorer than you thought they were.

Poorer relative to the other neighbors, not poorer in absolute terms.

Exactly, and the term "needier" conveys an extra piece of the puzzle that these data do not support. Steve Jobs is poorer than Bill Gates by an order of magnitude, but he's hardly needy.

For housing, your relative slice of a community's wealth is actually a pretty good predictor which bits of land/housing you'll be able to buy / live on, since real-estate prices in a region tend to rise with its GDP.

Exactly, a fancy house and an expensive SUV may mean they're deeper down in debt.

They may have less net worth, but that doesn't mean they have income to the point that we could consider them "poor". I would really like to know what the median income is within each quintile of wealth distribution.

If you're the kind of person that frequents HN, I would have thought you'd have the google skills to find that out.

On the other hands, they are needier, because you just realized they are much less wealthy than you previously thought. So much less wealthy that you cannot conceive of living on that amount of wealth. If they are at the 20th percentile, they earn 5 times less than you at the 80th percentile[1].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_...

Ah, but this isn't about income, it's about wealth. The two are very different; there are plenty of people in the bottom quintile of wealth earning six figure salaries.

True, but, from the data mentioned, the income distribution doesn't look very different.

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