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Comment by flubert | Hacker News Reader

I wonder what the complete curve looks like. At some point I'd expect the wealth number to be zero (and then head negative). So if you had $1 to your name, you might be richer than the bottom 20% combined.

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It's a survey, but according to GOBanking 69% of Americans do not have even a thousand dollars in savings[1] (Almost half of respondents — 45% — said they have $0 in a savings account. Another 24% said they have less than $1,000 in savings. From 829 random respondents)

[1] https://www.gobankingrates.com/saving-money/savings-advice/a...

At the same time what % of Americans have an iPhone? What % drive a car < 3 years old? What % have the latest $200 Nikes, $500 purses or $2K MacBooks?

There is certainly a problem with income inequality in the world, but it's hardly Elon Musk's fault that people that aren't making very much spend their money so poorly. There is a social stigma with appearing rich to your friends so you spend poorly...social media has made this so much worse in the last decade.

This problem extends to many different aspects of life...from taking out student loans to pay for a useless degree to letting people buy shitty food on food stamps. People could be doing a lot better for themselves, but it's rarely seen as a function of personal responsibility to do so (it's always society that has to change to help them).

I suspect that a lot of the financially awful decisions come from relationship troubles.

If you think your spouse will waste the money, you might try to spend it first. Of course, that is probably waste in your spouse's eyes, so your spouse is incentivized to spend the money first. That justifies your suspicion that the money would be wasted by your spouse if you didn't spend it first.

Especially after divorce, people can get into a bidding war for being the favorite parent. Christmas has just had a huge impact, but it goes on year round.

Somebody who is hopelessly behind on child support might not see any point in having assets that are easy to seize.

This trope is always getting trotted out by fiscal conservatives without any actual evidence. It's an imaginative extension of the "being poor means you have poor character" trope.

Also, when it extends beyond actual luxuries to basics like having a refrigerator (yes, I've actually heard this one) or the classic "an HD TV" (when was the last time you saw a non-HD TV for sale?), or in this case an iPhone (smartphones are no longer optional luxuries, and a used iPhone is one of the better investments in that category), it suggests that poor people should be robots who totally forego the very most fundamental creature-comforts until they've managed to turn their world around completely. It's dehumanizing.

I don't know if it suggests that poorer people should be robots, but that they should take more care in their purchasing. TV's are absolutely not a necessity nor really a good use of your income in any form (though not really that expensive, what is expensive are subscription plans).

I think it's interesting to describe things like TV's as "very most fundamental creature comforts" when someone has less than 1000$ in savings. If you are that strapped for cash you should recognize that every dollar you do have is extremely valuable and should be used to put you in a better financial situation.

I don't agree with the idea that being poor means having poor character, it's often out of situational issues or ignorance, but the issue arises when we start to defend legitimate misuses of money and say "well people deserve to live comfortably"

You can easily get a medium-sized TV these days for $200. You need an internet connection for utilitarian purposes anyway, and with that you can watch a number of cheap or free streaming services, not to mention old-fashioned airwaves TV.

I would say that having a modicum of entertainment/escapism at the end of the day is a reasonably fundamental creature-comfort that we shouldn't be judging people for spending their limited money on.

You've repeated fundamental as if that makes it any more correct. There are also other, much cheaper and potentially more rewarding things such as reading, drawing, cooking (which helps save money too) that can take up your time and save your wallet.

I'm merely responding to the idea that somehow we have gotten it in our heads that we "need" to have some level of comfort which for most of human existence would be considered insane luxury. (I'm aware you called out people pointing out fridges are a luxury but it is indeed true and it's great that technology has made them so ubiquitous that our lives are that much better)

What I'm getting at is, having grown up very poor, put myself through college, coming out with no debt and creating an extremely sizeable nest egg for myself, all while forgoing basic "creature comforts" such as a TV, smart phone, even a nice bed (I found free mattresses on craigslist, which I still sleep on to this day), living in co-ops and other alternative forms of housing, I can't shake the feeling that we are in a sense enabling poor choices.

This is not to say my experience proves my point, but that I'm less sympathetic to claims of inequality when they are also followed up with notions that we should redistribute wealth in some way. The problems that exist are systemic in the legal-systems, tax-systems, and educations systems of the US, redistributing wealth seems like making some people bleed because others are also bleeding.

There is a material difference between a $1K smart phone and a $100 smart phone.

There is a material difference between shoes that cost $200 and shoes that cost $20.

These things add up and acting like they don't is just silly.

> There is a material difference

Of course there is. I'm saying poor people shouldn't be judged for buying the $100/$20 versions, and also that it's an unsubstantiated myth that they're broadly wasting money by buying the $1000/$200 versions.

The poster you’re replying to had a valid point about the meaning of this data—it’s not some trope or judgement. Calculating someone’s net worth in this way is not considering these things on which money is being spent. In the most non-judge mental way possible, I would love to see some deeper analysis here. Two different households could have the same income, but one could save more (at the expense of missing out on a lot of things that increase quality of life) and another could save less. I don’t at all think badly of the family who saves less, but it is a valid factor to consider in an objective analysis of income inequality’s effect on households.

I can't exactly exchange iphone for Healthcare.

This is a survey of amounts in a savings account, which is not the same as savings. Right now, typical savings accounts are higher friction than checking accounts with no meaningful interest, while high-yield savings accounts are even higher friction (because typically not offered by banks with the same broad range of consumer services people look to for checking accounts) but with barely-meaningful interest. Savings accounts almost never make sense.

If you need the lack of friction of a demand deposit account, you probably want it all in checking, and for actual savings where you don't need frictionless access, you probably want it invested somewhere with returns better than a savings account.

The Fed site has a lot of charts for this. For example, top 1% of households owns 30% of wealth today, while the bottom 50% - only 2%. For liabilities, the chart is almost the reverse of this: top 1% owes 4%, while the bottom 50% owes 30%.

https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/distr...

There must be a similar chart for individuals somewhere.

Edit: Btw, in 2010, the bottom 50% owned the least share of wealth - only 0.4%. This is also when the Fed started to increase the M1 money supply at the rate never seen before.

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