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Comment by mercy_dude | Hacker News Reader

I find these polls are biased and not represent equally well the entire spectrum of population. I am from Greenboro, WI and I can tell you it’s the opposite among the population in the areas I grew up. Most young people like me who had more than a high school degree have moved away and ones that are left there are either in some kind of struggling business or are plain into dark places dealing with addictions (alcohol and opioid). Even people like me who did move to the cities, I don’t see how the optimism can be so high. I mean I work in tech and have pretty much accepted that I am forever priced out of the housing market I am in. The school district system of where I live also doesn’t look very promising so my kids will have a better education (and future). Starting a family with a single income in Bay Area, meeting ends meet is hard even with a tech job.

Like every other news these days, I take these polls with a grain of salt.

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> I find these polls are biased and not represent equally well the entire spectrum of population.

It's easy to confuse our own personal bubbles with the general population. There's nothing inconsistent about you living in an area with low life satisfaction and a poll that says 60% of people across the entire country have high life satisfaction.

The way you describe your home town sounds depressing and it's easy to believe that they wouldn't be part of the 60% of Americans rating themselves as thriving in this poll. However, what you're describing is very far from the norm for towns in America. Occurs too often, yes, but it's not what life in the average American city looks like.

> Starting a family with a single income in Bay Area, meeting ends meet is hard even with a tech job.

The entire Bay Area represents around 2% of the US population. It's not expected that a national poll would reflect the realities of a single geographic region.

That said, I have several friends and extended families starting families in the Bay Area who are very happy with their circumstances.

> Like every other news these days, I take these polls with a grain of salt.

The poll said 60% of Americans see themselves as "thriving". That doesn't meant that no one is struggling. It's important to look at these polls as ways to get a glimpse of life outside of our own bubbles. It's also important to view them as a distribution rather than a binary outcome.

Love this take!

Every now and again I read a comment like this and tell myself, "this is why I read Hacker News".

Ironically, it's the parent to that post that makes me think, "This is why I should give up Hacker News".

A post of the form "This must be biased, because my anecdote is X". Your specific experience is the most biased thing there can be.

I think they're trying to get at "deliberately altered for political ends", but with no basis for that statement. It feels like projection: "I know what I want the result to be therefore you must be deliberately saying the opposite".

To see it expressed so baldly like that really takes the wind out of my sails, regardless of the cogent and coherent reply.

Meanwhile I’m an older millennial with kids and live in a suburban community with lots of kids. Most people seem pretty happy. People in Iowa, where my wife went to high school, and Oregon, where she grew up, seem pretty happy too.

Rust Belt decay is obviously less conducive to happiness, but I think “boom towns” (where a marquee industry makes a small percentage of the population very rich) also aren’t conductive to happiness. Might explain why the politics out of place as like San Francisco is so apocalyptic. People want to have a normal life but the economy of the city has bifurcated the population into “rich but stressed out” and “struggling to get by.”

To be fair I get the sentiment. DC was the same way. In DC it was childless wealthy professionals on one side (mostly white and Asian) and service workers on the other (mostly Black and Latino). It was depressing as hell and we had to get out.

Population isn’t evenly distributed. Iowa has a little over 1/3 or NYC’s population even excluding everything over the Hudson. Your “boom towns” represent a large chunk of everyone in the US.

You seem to be conflating "boom town" and "large city". NYC is not a boom town.

Why not? It seems like finance fills the “marquee industry makes a small percentage of the population very rich” for NYC.

And many other industries make other small percentages of the population rich. It's not a one industry town like many places in the rust belt were and Silicon Valley currently is

Silicon Valley goes beyond tech with finance being a solid example. In the end many people are getting rich from other industries as all cities need a wide range of services like plumbing and heating/AC which opens up a lot of opportunities to start and grow a business in those industries.

There’s only a handful of cities that I’d call “boom towns” (in that a singular industry creates intense income inequality). Dallas is booming, but it’s got a well-diversified economy with prosperous but affordable suburbs. Same thing for Atlanta, Kansas City, etc.

Lots of rural areas and small cities have broadly shared prosperity too. I was very surprised when I went to East Texas and saw the brand new strip malls and shiny pickup trucks everywhere. (Along with a very racially diverse and integrated population driving those trucks and eating at the new big box restaurants. I was completely unsurprised to see Trump doing better than expected among Latinos in Texas.)

NYC, DC, and SF are probably the only cities I’d put in that category. Maybe Seattle. That’s only 12% of the population.

Those shiny pickup trucks are short term before the repo man shows up.

In towns whose livelihood depends on a feast-or-famine industry like oil, yes. In cities with strong, diversified economies, it's just people spending disposable income on stuff they want.

The median household income in Jefferson County, Texas is $51,000. The median home price is $135,000. That's under 3x.

The median household income in San Francisco is $120,000, but the median home price is $1.5-2 million, depending on source. That's 12-16x.

A $500/month truck payment isn't putting people on the edge of financial ruin when you're talking about an $800/month mortgage versus a $6,500/month mortgage.

Wages on the low-end are starting to rise for the first time in decades. Employers are having to compete for every kind of worker which is making them nicer and more agreeable.

When people see an upward trendline in their lives and can imagine it continuing they're more apt to lean in push harder. I'd imagine that even in the bay area, wages are probably rising fast for your typical worker and rents have tapered off due to the pandemic.

While in many cases we built a society where having a family is financially impractical to impossible - it's not hard to imagine that changing with a 20-30 dollar/hr 10th percentile wage ( which we get to in under ~5-10 years if the bottom quintile sees a 10% annual bump ).

Why stay in the Bay Area in that case? A good number of tech companies will allow you to work remotely, and even with a moderate cost of living pay cut you can go from not being able to afford a house in the Bay Area to being able to buy a nice house in a great neighborhood with good schools somewhere else.

It may seem counterintuitive but 60% is not so much for this to be noticed “everywhere”. Even less when your own area is not much populated.

Nothing stopping the elites from pumping out fake polls to keep us distracted from how bad things are getting.

A new flavor of bread and circuses with added "appeal to authority" goodness.

Do you have evidence the poll is faked, or does it just go against your confirmation bias?

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