Americans own less cars per captia than western europeans | Hacker News Reader

Americans own less cars per captia than western europeans

theatlantic.com

4 pointskghose9 comments

The report authors seem to be arguing that income inequality in USA is so bad that an emerging lower/middle class cannot afford cars and the rich have all the cars they will need.

This strikes me as plausible.

The Atlantic is saying actually our young people aren't poor, they just want iphones instead.

This strikes me as implausible platitudes.

Is the Atlantic a Left / right wing paper (it appears on HN a lot so I would like to know)

I think the Atlantic is regarded as vaguely liberal/left. The important thing in the article - far more important than car ownership is the energy usage figures. The US uses a lot more fossil fuel per capita than Western Europeans - even if they have fewer cars.

I think the idea that car ownership is falling due to income inequality is staggering - that points to one direction only - enclaves of super-rich in a sea of poverty. It is not the way anyone expected USA to meet its Kyoto targets.

But the evidence of increasing income inequality is persuasive.

My favourite quote from somewhere recently:

  A society is fair if you are willing to enter it at the top or the bottom.  
  If you dont want to join Western society at the bottom of the pile, 
  its not a fair society.

Edit: far too snarky.

There is some truth to that. Different parts of the U.S. are vastly different in wealth, and most people have very little conception of what norms are outside their peer group, both their geographical peer group and their sociocultural one. For example, living in Silicon Valley and working in tech, you might think that $100k+ is a common white-collar salary, something that most educated professionals would make—if not as starting salary, then at least after a few years.

What percentage of American salaries do you think are $100k+, though? I've heard people guess as high as 20-30%. Some people, both Americans and foreigners, seem to imagine it as this super-rich country where everyone is making those kinds of salaries. But the real number is 7%.

(About 20% of American households do make 6 figures, but most of those are two-income families that are adding together two 5-figure incomes, e.g. husband and wife each making $60k.)

Sure. Though if oil consumption isn't falling/remains high, the US isn't going to be reducing carbon dioxide emissions.

Historically it's a literary magazine. It's changed focus in the last 5-10 years. Andrew Sullivan was an editor there. Sullivan is an "openly gay Catholic" conservative. Jeffrey Goldberg is a writer there. He was at The New Yorker, wrote about international human rights, and Castro invited him to Cuba. James Bennet is the editor-in-chief. He was at the New York Times for about 15 years before then. As editor he "featured a cover story on Britney Spears, a change from The Atlantic's tradition in higher culture." (All cribbed from Wikipedia.)

I would say it's literary and good journalism. If Colbert is right, and reality as a well-known liberal bias, then it's liberal. Or, see the Talk section of the WP page for a rather lengthy discussion: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:The_Atlantic .

I think it's shifting to include more technology coverage under its traditional cultural commentary/literary style. Sort of somewhere like a mix of the Economist and Wired.

While I would like that, I'm irritated with them for spamming various sites, including HN and Reddit. See http://www.dailydot.com/society/atlantic-slaterhearst-jared-... . I've commented on some of their self-posted links here on HN, including questions about the article, and got no followup, which tells me it's more spam than trying to engage in dialog. So I tend to ignore links to their site.

While I agree that the Atlantic tends to have good journalism, that's most true of its feature-length articles from the magazine proper. Imo these blog-style posts that they also do have more mixed quality.

I didn't actually follow the link. For the reason I mentioned. :)

The numbers seem to exclude pickup trucks and such. The U.S. seems to have more of those than most similarly wealthy countries (Yes, the blag author disputes this; every appearance is that he is wrong twice (lots of people are linking convincing U.S. gov data that sensibly describes daily drivers at ~800/1000)).

Also, the report authors don't say much of anything about income inequality in the USA. They do note that high income inequality tends to signal lower rates of car ownership.

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