Hacker News Reader

By and large I think you're on point, especially with media portrayals. I think it's hard to conceptualize the bubbles that people live in until you experience it directly. People in various demographics have, quite literally, "no idea how the other half lives".

However, I still think inequality is a massive problem. People in trades or services that work for larger conglomerate companies can't fly under the radar, don't have health benefits, and can be laid off en masse. They aren't generally "doing OK".

Also:

>every kind of engineering other than "software engineering" requires occupational licensing and has professional associations that both stick up for workers and set a bar for training and quality

Once upon a time, that was the reality. These days a lot of occupational licensing exists solely for profiteering and protectionism. Professional education/certification companies print money on the back of egregious CPE requirements, while new entrants to the field find themselves absolutely crowded out of a few entry level jobs with financially prohibitive certification and education requirements. Mind you, these grads already have a pile of debt, and no way to pay it back yet. Those groups work great if you've been in the field for 15+ years, not so much if you're just starting out.

For better or worse, software engineering is slightly more egalitarian in that regard: you can self-educate, you don't necessarily need to amass a ton of debt, and can get even an entry-level job that would make the Simpson's life "attainable".

> For better or worse, software engineering is slightly more egalitarian in that regard: you can self-educate, you don't necessarily need to amass a ton of debt, and can get even an entry-level job that would make the Simpson's life "attainable".

This really be true. So much of the certification Ive seen are bogus nogus even high schoolers can figure out. I suppose the software world cares less about looking good on paper and more about practically writing software of good quality/creative work.

> This really be true. So much of the certification Ive seen are bogus nogus even high schoolers can figure out. I suppose the software world cares less about looking good on paper and more about practically writing software of good quality/creative work.

The software world cares less about building things that actually work reliably, compared to other engineering professions. It's accepted and sometimes even celebrated that software will have serious, preventable defects (e.g. "move fast and break things"), in a way that's not so in many regulated professions that "build things."

I’ll second this. I lived in the US in a rural area for a while. The standard of living there was pretty simpsons-esque despite most of the area being only high school educated. When I moved to an urban center a few years later that is when I saw a lot more people in this authors demographic, struggling to make ends meet. People in the rural areas were fairly aware of the urban, but the reverse was not true at all, people in very urban areas assumed their experience was universal.

Hmm, the poverty rate in rural America is almost the same as in urban (https://www.brookings.edu/testimonies/the-changing-geography...).

The broad trends in union membership, financial insecurity, and income and wealth distribution hinted at in the article are, to my knowledge, broadly true in the US, and also true when broken down by geographic distribution (rural vs urban).

Anecdotally—I grew up in rural America, and people would talk about the nearby (50k person) city like "the big city." I would say there was very little awareness of urban folks how rural residents nearby lived, and similar ignorance in the reverse.

Does the Brookings poverty rate adjust for cost of living? I can't find a source.

The core of the argument OP is making is that you can have a more comfortable lifestyle in a rural area on a lower income.

I think in that link they're just using US Census data, which uses fixed thresholds.

You're right that rural costs of living are lower. Unfortunately I don't see any good data adjusting for this.

Nonetheless, the idea that rural America is doing just fine is sort of silly, for a few reasons:

- It's a minority of the population. So from a policy perspective, it's unclear to me what the conclusion should be. That more people should move to rural areas? That the Atlantic article is missing the experience of 1/5th of the population? ;)

- The same macro trends (rising GINI, declining real household wealth) exist across rural/suburban/urban divisions. (Note too that the Simpsons is probably set in a suburban, not rural, area—and suburban areas have experienced a sharp increase in poverty.)

- Qualitatively, rural poverty is associated with prescription drug abuse (extremely prevalent where I grew up), limited education and labor flexibility, limited geographic flexibility, etc.

So I never know what to make of these "it's going fine in Rural America" arguments.

The US Census threshold-based poverty rate does OK at country-level aggregates, but it flatters high-cost/high-income places and exaggerates the problems of low-cost/low-income places. We might be better served by using the Census Bureau's supplemental poverty rates.

It has a significant impact on rates: https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2020/demo/p60-27...

California's, for example, goes from 12-ish percent (average) to 18-ish percent (below only DC).

Thanks!

"exaggerates the problems of low-cost/low income places"?

You know, the federal poverty level for a single individual is under $13K per year. In which low income / low cost area do you think that's not a problem?

When you're comparing rates it doesn't matter where the bar is set. That just changes the size of your numbers. For the sake of comparison the threshold just needs to be set somewhere that doesn't result in a huge number of states being crammed at one end of the spectrum.

The problem is the flattening of urban and rural within state like others have said. A suburb of NYC may as well be a foreign country compared to a suburb of Buffalo.

Of course if you're gonna doll out aid based on the absolute number you should set a sane threshold but that doesn't really matter for the purposes of this discussion.

I must be dense. I don't understand what you're saying. Why does the distribution matter?

If anything, yes, I agree the thresholds should be set much higher than they are now, and should be dependent on local CoL, but $13K/year is going to be a problem no matter where you live.

Because if you set the poverty line so that everyone not in the 1% is poor you'd get a rich state with 98.93% poverty and a poor state with 99.52% poverty or some other asinine result that requires more post-processing to actually make sense of.

The closer the rate is set to the real definition of poor (however you define that) is the less adjustment you need to do to know how many people are "actually" poor, you just multiply by the population of the area that has that rate.

But like I said, the problem is you can't use one federal number and apply it across areas (be those areas states or subsections of states) with very different economic conditions without adjustment. Trying to do so is like trying to compare salaries across countries without taking into account exchange rates.

With the single federal rate you can do some rough comparisons. For example we can compare Ohio, a fairly blue collar, not totally rural but also not urban dominated state, with Massachusetts, a state that has all its stats dominated by the Boston area in order to tease out the difference between what it's like living in middle America. But even than it's kind of limiting because the next obvious question is what are the county poverty rates and that gets real messy and inaccurate real fast.

Think of the federal poverty rate like U3 unemployment, better than nothing but not good for much if you really want to understand what's going on

Right, but the numbers are artificially low. I don't see how that exaggerates the problems of low COL areas, as I wrote in my initial comment. How does any of this apply to my actual question?

If the cost of living in a place as people actually live is below what a federal poverty formula set in 1963 says it is, then the rate will overreport. If it is above that line, the rate will underreport. In both cases, a number based around the social assumptions of 1963 is not a perfect way to measure what life is actually like for actual people more than fifty years later. Things like household composition and non-cash income affect lived reality too.

I hope that answers your question! Personally, I found the report from the Census Bureau and BLS (as per my earlier comment) quite educational for exactly this sort of eminently reasonable concern. But your mileage may vary!

You're really telling me there's someplace anyone can live a halfway reasonable life for $13K/year? MIT's living wage calculator tells me the lowest living wage in any state is in Kentucky, and that clocks in at around $22k for a single individual.

I'm telling you that you have before you a rare and wonderful opportunity to partake of highly informational resources provided to you. It is not often in life that questions are so readily answered by neatly presented, authoritative, and trustworthy reports.

Do let me know if you have any trouble with the Census Bureau SPM report, I'm happy to do my best to help you read it.

To put it another way, I think the question that you're getting stuck on is too simple to be very helpful and that better information might help you formulate better questions. I hope this makes sense to you, but I know my communications skills are quite far from perfect.

>Things like household composition and non-cash income affect lived reality too.

And these things vary, sometimes greatly, based on where you live.

Barnstable County (where the Kennedys live and the Kochs have (had?) summer houses) for a long time (might still be) middle of the road, poor-ish (~35k median income 2010 census, current national average is 56k) on paper because the really rich claim primary residence elsewhere and the wealthy people who do claim residence are retired (retired engineering managers and whanot, these people aren't Murdoch rich) are mostly savvy enough to look poor on paper so they can get discounted services from the state and pass more of it on to their kids. Who does that leave? Well there's no white collar industry to speak of so it leaves the trademen who fix the plumbing in the Kennedy compound, the service industry and a few business owners. So the county winds up looking dirt poor on paper despite the fact that there's a ton of money sloshing around (and it shows when you look at how the tradesmen and small business owners live).

This is an extreme example but you can see how more minor differences when applied across an entire county or state could pollute a comparison when you're trying to compare very precise things, like how well off a median plumber in Reno is vs the median plumber in Chicago.

According to the Census Bureau the poverty rate of New Mexico or Mississippi drops by more than three percent when you factor in cost of living, household unit sizes, poverty alleviation programs, and other things.

With that in mind, the answer seems to be that in twenty-five states the straightforward calculation based on income exaggerates real poverty. You'll find aggregate numbers, and methodological details, at the link above.

I hope that answers your question.

I strongly suspect that poverty where I live, in a county of 34k people and a median family income of <$30k, is qualitatively different from poverty in a large city.

I own a home in a very rural part of the US, but do a lot of work with people in large cities. I was talking with some people in NYC about our 5 bedroom home that we bought for $120,000 and how most of the houses for sale in our town are about half that price. The people from NYC couldn't imagine such a thing. One said, "So does that mean that no one needs to take out a loan to buy their home?" I explained that the people in my town weren't making NY level wages either.

The idea that there were parts of the US where you could buy a house for $60k was just as foreign as the idea of someone making $25k per year. They simply had no frame of reference for what wages and cost of living look like in places that weren't big cities.

I agree with all these points, but I think one point not being made is alot of pay in the trades is alot higher than some people think(in higher paying metro areas). Alot of people in my Wife's family are either electricians, or building engineers/heavy machine owner/operators. And they all are doing fine. Here are some examples of rough pay(all are unions jobs and dues are due):

- Owner/operator of heavy construction equipment typically makes $175 an hour or more(maintenance costs are high and work dispatch takes a cut also) yearly salary was usually ~ $150k

- Electricians make between $47-55 an hour, this does not include overtime as my Wife's cousin made 40-50% more due to OT.

- Building engineers pay varies, but a good amount pay $80-90k+.

All salaries are SF bay area, almost everyone mentioned owns their own home. Ages range from low 60's to early 40's. One important point that differs from the Simpsons is that every person mentioned(all are married) the spouse works and also makes a similar salary(no one has more than 2 kids also). So a Simpsons existence is very hard to emulate, but the "trades" pay more than alot of people expect.

> almost everyone mentioned owns their own home. Ages range from low 60's to early 40's

You don't think these two facts are related? What about 20-something tradesmen? Will they ever be able to afford their own home?

All I know is all the people mentioned do not live lavishly, they do not go on expensive vacations, they do not drive Tesla/BMW/Mercedes, eat out constantly, or dress expensively. So having another spouse working and being in the trades I think its very doable as long as you pick your house/condo in the right place, ie. Hayward/east bay, Santa Cruz Mountains, Daly City/South San Francisco. Also saving up for a downpayment for a few years is needed.

>You don't think these two facts are related? What about 20-something tradesmen?

The 20-something tradesmen have mostly not settled down that much yet just like the 20-something software engineers so they live in apartments wherever.

The biggest difference now compared to the 90s is that the blue collar people have been pushed 20-40min farther out of the major cities. Homer Simpson probably commuted 30min. Now the white collar engineer commutes 30min and the electrician commutes 30min farther because that's where the suburb he can afford is. The white collar engineer lives in what used to be the blue collar suburb. Also in my anecdotal experience it seems like stay at home mothers haven't totally gone away with either group but they've become rarer in the white collar group than the blue collar group.

Everyone blue collar I know bought their first house at 30+/- a few. The people that bought sooner were the people who prioritized it because they were popping out a lot of kids or were beginning to build their own business and needed space. If anything it seems like the blue collar crowd buys a little before the white collar crowd simply because they're more open to living farther out in order to make things affordable.

>Will they ever be able to afford their own home?

Yes. It just won't be in the same suburb as the people on HN.

Good observations overall, but I think you're being unfair to the New York Times. It is, after all, one of the local newspapers for New York City, so it's not at all surprising that its content caters to the people who live there. The NYT != The Media.

Especially since he references the Metro section... which is exactly that.

The point being even the largest newspaper (nyt) read countrywide is more regional and local than in other nations and a national paper read by all doesn't exist.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_newspapers_in_the_Unit...

USA today and WSJ have a larger paid circulation. USA today is a national paper. There are also weeklies like Time.

While the NYTimes is based in NYC, I'm not sure you'd refer to it as a local newspaper. If you look at their media kit, they very much are focused on their audience being the US -- not just NYC.

Yep, trades are huge and overlooked by media almost completely. Getting an education isn't the best way to get a non-career-oriented living anymore. I have several friends who are doing as good or better than I am (I'm a CS major with a decent sw job) doing trades related / entrepreneurial work. They actively invest their extra cash in equities and are arguably doing much better than me since I invest mostly in real estate.

I have a few friends from high school who are in the trades, a carpenter, a plumber, and do very well for themselves. My friend who's a welder by far and above does the best out of all of them, and makes well over 100K. High paying blue collar jobs are there; he is constantly telling me if I want a job as a welder, they are always struggling to hire hire qualified people.

Very few on the coasts have $200k college debt, either. Average student loan debt is around $30-40k, and median is around $17.

Generally to get up in the $200k range, you need medical/dental/pharmacy/veterinary/law school debt.

My CS degree from UC cost me ~120k in the end -> $90k of borrowing which accumulated $30k of interest by the time I graduated.

The fact that they used to charge 8% interest on those loans is just plain evil. It's not like it's unsecured, it's the only kind of loan you can't get rid of during bankruptcy.

What rate would be not evil?

The one where the government is simply not involved in lending students money.

Situation A: Government offers unlimited amounts of loan money for students. Colleges increase prices since their customers have infinite money. Children and their parents go into further and further debt as colleges keep raising prices and there is no limit to the amount of debt the government will underwrite.

Situation B: Government does not lend any money. Colleges have to keep tuition at affordable levels, and/or obtain funding from government. Children pay an appropriate amount of money for education and don't waste money on fancy gyms and stadiums and catering halls and ceremonies and extraneous administrators.

As I understand it, the government used to lend money for student loans, but it doesn't do so any longer.

"Federal student loans" are nothing more than a public front for private loan companies. Sounds familiar to another intensely politicized system...

My parents told me federal student loans (actually from the government) had a fraction of a percent interest when they went to college in the late 80's, although neither of their families had any money to speak of.

I'm different in that my parents worked their way (along with a fair amount of luck) to teetering on the edge of entering the upper middle class.

They didn't have enough money to send all of their kids to college, but were able to pay for the non-tuition expenses we couldn't cover ourselves on school jobs.

I don't know what student loans would have looked like for a family in an equivalent position in the late 80's.

My main hope is that barring some form of socialized education system happening in the next 20+ years that I'm able to pay for the educations of any future kids of mine without severely hurting myself financially, and succeed in raising them in such a way where they understand and appreciate the gravity of such a thing.

In my mind it's not so much a specific rate being evil, rather that their justification for its rate being unfounded.

The only way to escape a federal student loan is dying. Loan forgiveness is the government paying the creditor. It's not your average unsecured loan you can shirk through bankruptcy.

It's still unsecured because there is nothing they can repossess. My guess that--without discriminating on a person by person basis--8% is pretty fair. I certainly wouldn't loan 20 year olds 90k dollars for only 8% return.

The real scam artists are the schools, which have bloated the cost of an education beyond all reason.

You borrowed $22.5k per year ($90k/4) and ended up with $30k in interest by the time you graduated with a 4 year degree? Federal loans don't charge you interest until you graduate.

The numbers you are using would need to be a loan at 20% interest with interest charged from the very beginning. Were you using credit cards to borrow money for school?

I probably have the principle off a bit. It's troublesome to keep track of when each year is two separate loans (one in my name, one in my parents'). All I recall for certain is when I refinanced a year after graduation I had to borrow 118k to cover the whole thing. I finish paying it off this year (total of 5.5 years, 4.5 on the refi loan + 1 year of paying before that).

At least at the time I went (2011 to 2016), federal loans had two modes - subsidized and unsubsidized. Subsidized loans don't begin to accrue interest until graduation, the unsubsidized ones start accruing on day 1. They only accrue interest on the principle though, it's not compounded. If you don't pay off the accumulated interest within 6 months following graduation, it's capitalized (added to the principle).

My parents always told me that their gross income determines whether or not you can get the subsidized loans, even for the fraction of the loans in the student's name. They always complained how it didn't take cost of living, home ownership, or how many children you had into consideration. Sure, they were well enough off that they could have probably afforded to pay for me, but my 2 younger siblings and I were all college bound. I would have never assumed or expected them to pay for my schooling anyways. I wasn't raised that entitled.

The first year I attended UC, the Parent Plus loans represented something like 80% of my borrowing. The first year was at 7.8% on my parent plus loan, 5 and something on the ones in my name.

I get that I'm in an enviable position to have been able to easily handle that due to tech industry income, but I work with a ton of European expats, all of whom take jabs at me for coming from a country that doesn't cover higher education for their citizens. Always stings a bit.

Agree with this. It should be considered to be a 'secured' loan, backed by the government. The rate would be determined by the market based on the above. I believe this is how it used to work, way back when. Not sure why it was changed.

> you will find people in the trades who do OK, some with help from a union, some not.

I doubt it, based on retirement saving statistics, opiate addiction statistics, and healthcare related financial issues.

People on and off the coasts don’t have sufficient retirement savings, emergency savings, nor income security especially when they hit years 50 to 65 (soon to be 70 as social security and Medicare ages rise).

People in the trades might be doing fine if you ignore the health costs associated with driving long distances and manual labor, especially ones that rear their head in people’s 50s.

Right. If you look at the distribution of savings [0] you realize very few people are in a strong finical position.

[0 https://www.fool.com/the-ascent/research/average-savings-acc...

Savings account (which is measured in that link) is different than savings. It wouldn't account for money in a checking account or other investments.

Holding sbustnaitail money in a savings account is pretty dumb with interest rates being so low for at least the last entire generation.

Though I suspect net worth and retirement savings are still pretty low.

> every kind of engineering other than "software engineering" requires occupational licensing

No, it doesn't.[1] Licensure is required for an engineer to provide engineering services "to the public". The largest group who do not require licensure are those who fit into the "industrial exemption", engineers employed by a company to work on products manufactured and sold by said company. This particularly affects electrical and mechanical engineers.

I was an electrical engineer for four years to start my career, and I never even took the FE exam. It likely would have limited my career progression at some point, but it never would stop me from working as an engineer.

[1] In the US. Since this article is from The Atlantic and is about "Life in the Simpsons", I am going to assume the US for the context of everything I say.

> thus they imagine they don't exist or "can't make it"...if you are willing to go 50 miles from the coasts you will find people in the trades who do OK

So it's the white collar folks who are ignorant and think that lifestyle doesn't exist...but also that lifestyle doesn't exist where the white collar folks live? It seems like you are saying that this lifestyle still exists in other places than the place depicted on the Simpsons. Another way to say that is "The Life in the Simpsons is No Longer Attainable."

Saying that someone could have a similar lifestyle somewhere else doesn't mean people are wrong when they imagine they can't have it where they are now. It seems like you agree with that? Also, FWIW, working in the trades pays pretty damn good in cities too.

> * a heavy involvement of illegal aliens in "services", the "trades" and "agriculture" in places like California. These people work hard at being "invisible" because if they become visible they get deported; a result of it is that people don't have a realistic image of this work and in the people that do it

Good point. This is a big problem when it comes to COVID. This invisible sector has been been working hard and that sector of the economy going. But they don't have health insurance. Because of the invisibility requirement, they don't have access to the same medical resources, and definitely would not have the same health seeking behaviour as 'non-invisible' people. Are these people even in the COVID vaccination plans?

Did you mean to say "It's not that inequality isn't a problem"?

Are you agreeing or disagreeing with the premise of the article?

What you say may be true, but it's time we all faced up to a fact in these discussions in which "the trades" always comes up: not everybody can be a plumber. That is, there is a finite demand for every sort of tradesperson, be they plumbers, electricians, carpenters, etc. For example, it looks like we will probably need somewhere in the neighborhood of 82,000 plumbers in the US over the next 10 years. [0]

That's fabulous if you get to be one of those 82,000 people who gets to become a plumber. You certainly can earn a good living that way:

> [A]bout 55 occupations are identified as skilled trades, which accounted for over 19 million jobs in 2014. The average job growth rate outlook from 2014-2024 is eight percent, with an average median wage in 2016 of $46,146; the median annual wage for all workers in 2016 was $37,040. [1]

But, that's really about where the good news ends.

Let's look at what actual demand for skilled trades really is.

We can approximate which are the highest growth trades by those which pay the most. Multiple Google searches have told me that electricians are among the top paying skilled trades, due to a large shortage of qualified employees. The job outlook over the next 10 years for electricians is projected to grow by about 8%, for a total of about 62,000 additional jobs added. [2]

If we place that in context with the number given earlier for plumbers, it seems reasonable to estimate that each of the skilled trades could experience job growth of up to about 100,000 jobs over the next 10 years. Multiply that by 55 occupations, and, we see that 5.5M people get to live the secure, skilled trades life that we fetishize so much these days. (Really, it's almost like "learn a trade" has become the new "learn to code.")

Anybody see the problem yet?

The US is projected to have around 360M people in 2030, and we've found jobs for 5.5M of them in this extremely oversimplified analysis.

So, sure, the whole "learn a trade" meme works, but it only works for the ~2% of people who are going to be able to get into those occupations in the next 10 years. Skilled trades are not going to save future generations from systemic problems like the decline of real wages and declining union membership anytime soon without something else to go along with it. My nephew can't even aspire to be Homer Simpson, and that's certainly not what I, or my brother, ever wanted for him.

---

[0]: https://www.careerexplorer.com/careers/plumber/job-market/

[1]: https://www.stlouisfed.org/publications/bridges/fall-2017/ap...

[2]: https://www.bls.gov/ooh/construction-and-extraction/electric...