The Average Canadian is Now Richer than the Average American | Hacker News Reader

The Average Canadian is Now Richer than the Average American

newsfeed.time.com

17 pointsjoeyespo12 comments

So an article in TIME is three paragraphs now.

More like Time Pamphlet, am I right?

Isn't there a housing bubble going on in Canada right now? http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-18155405

Yes ....

House prices are rising, but condo prices are not. The cranes (in your video) are putting up lots of space so the demand is being met. Houses (as in I have a basement) prices are still rising.

Lots of foreign investment. People are buying house with CASH. 1 million dollar crappy places with cash. We even have a tumblr about how crappy some of the situation is http://fmlistings.tumblr.com/. Toronto is perceived as a safe place to invest. I agree that we have better regulation of the finance markets, but it's starting to get out of hand.

But ....

There are still cheaper places available. You just can't live in the city. You live in the suburbs and commute. Pickering, Milton, Barrie, etc. It's like living in Manhattan. You most likely can't afford it. So queens, brooklyn are cheaper options.

Prices in Toronto (IMO) were low to start with. Vancouver prices were higher than us, but there was no justifiable reason for it other than it was "nice". Economically, Toronto is a better place for jobs. My thought is that we are catching up to what it should have been and ...

The government is intervening. They are removing the easy credit without raising interest rates, by making it harder to afford a mortgage. If the market doesn't respond in kind, They will continue to make efforts to slow the market. I have faith in the Bank of Canada. The governor has repeatedly put us on notice that he will intervene if it is necessary and if we don't reign in our personal debts.

With paper money, mostly. Canadian real estate prices are hitting new highs, which is arguably unsustainable.

The government recently changed the rules to make it more difficult to get a cheap mortgage, hopefully this will keep things from spiralling out of control.

(‘Average net worth' measures the total combined value of a household’s liquid and real estate assets, minus debt.)

That's only one side of the story, maybe Americans have more leverage?

Unless you work as a software dev in which case you get 65k/year here.

Sigh.

What are the variance and median?

Here's a cool chart showing Gini coefficient versus GDP.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/78/Gini_coe...

Cool? I found it confusing. Not to mention there are clear rendering problems with the fonts (not just in my browser, but in the original if you look at the Wikipedia PNG equivalents). I think the diagram needs "Tufte attention".

The text is a bit mangled, but it's still better than doing CAPTCHAs. There's a table on Wikipedia if you want to make your own chart.

It helps if you understand Gini coefficients. But in short, they attempt to represent wealth distribution as a scalar from 0 to 1, where 0 is a uniform homogeneous distribution.

So to read the chart, you can tell how big the pie is by how long the bar is, and the non-uniformity in the distribution by how toppled the bar is.

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