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> About 41% of American workers earning between $300,001 and $500,000—and 40% of those making over $500,000—say they’re living paycheck to paycheck, according to a new report from Goldman Sachs.

https://am.gs.com/en-us/advisors/insights/report-survey/reti...

The only reasonable conclusion is "are you living paycheck to paycheck" is a useless survey question.

Another reasonable conclusion is that many people are foolishly over-leveraged. If you buy the biggest/nicest/best house and the priciest you can possibly manage, you will be living paycheck to paycheck almost by definition, since your house/car/etc payments will be eating up all your paycheck.

I don't know how often this actually happens, but it certainly not an unreasonable conclusion.

I'm surprised FIRE hasn't killed the luxury car and McMansion market yet.

Hmm... What do I wanna do more? Keep up with the Joneses, or flip the bird to my boss? Hmm...

HN/FIRE is in no way representative of the general population.

One of the central evils of consumer advertising is that it implants the idea in everyone's heads that buying more material things = happiness.

And the ideal consumer is one which only stops buying when they've reached their income...

I don't think that kind of advertising is directly advertising happiness. Luxury car ads advertise status more than anything. They're more subtle about it than Equinox gym marketing with its weird, sexualized elf people, but the product they're really selling you is being better than your peers.

> but the product they're really selling you is being better than your peers.

Which they suggest will make you happier.

The most toxic high-income advertising is all based around creating a need and then fulfilling it... because it turns out wealthy people tend to already have enough things to make themselves happy, if they looked at them differently.

I don't thing we fundamentally disagree on anything, I'm just saying every product advertisement tries to convince you the product will make you happier, and sometimes it not a bad thing- like Japanese McDonald's (where they don't use hydrogenated oils).

All advertising is based around creating a need and fulfilling it, but not all of those needs are toxic. Imagine getting an advertisement for a concert for some musicians you've never even heard of. You hear their music, and maybe they even have some showmanship. You like what you see and hear, and now you have a need you didn't have before, whether that's going to a KISS concert or whatever kinda music floats your boat.

Toxic ads encouraging you to indulge in toxic behavior, like an Instagram ad making you think you don't matter if you don't publicize every hour of your life, are a different animal.

That's all I'm trying to say, I'm not trying to be pedantic or anything. I just don't think putting out a Disney World ad of a happy family eating breakfast with Mickey Mouse is promoting or exploiting toxic values even though it convinces you that you need something you weren't aware of yesterday.

I suppose my distilled point was that the FI in FIRE stands diametrically opposed to the consumption-growth radiation of advertising.

So in order for FIRE to kill off McMansions and luxury cars most people would have to become resistant to advertising (or advertising would need to be limited).

When you put it that way, I think whether culture is upstream of business or vice versa and whether people have free will or are merely conduits for things their senses receive are unanswerable questions. All I know is this:

"If you treat people as they are, they will become worse. If you treat them as they could be, they will become better.

If we treat people as if they were what they ought to be, we help them become what they are capable of becoming."

-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship

I'm convinced that treating most people as if they have free will is more likely to get them to at least consider my ways.

I'm a bit more ambivalent towards free will en masse -- to what extent it exists doesn't matter to me, if there are still statistically significant trends.

Mostly because there are infinite ways to misunderstand an individual's motivations and thus arrive at a 'should' prediction that conflicts with observed reality.

Versus reasoning in from 'a lot of people ____, do they still after we ____?'

Don't forget cheap bulk transport. Without that, cheap remote food from global competitors becomes expensive fast.

Which is to say ocean trade (and to a lesser extent rail).

The Maritime industry can run into this too. Tug companies, barge companies. The level of consolidation vs the size of the labour pool is what does it.

} There's a reason that even if you pay (relatively) obscene wages, there will be no domestic employees willing to pick up these jobs - the work conditions are usually horrible because there are few industries as cut-throat and cost-sensitive as anything related to food.

This sentence is rather self contradictory...

Yeah I am not sure that is true either. People will work at these facilities but we all know the conditions there are horrible because they can get away with it - you can't threaten an American with deportation for whistle blowing. As long as companies get away with abusing immigrants then the labor market will always keep them in demand.

As long as consumers expect certain foods to be cheap(beef, for example) - you'll get this issue.

Kale in US is about as expensive as the cheapest cut of beef. Despite one taking 2-3 years of labor and the other is 60 days.

Competition and subsidies. Nearly every country has a system to help farmers "compete", which drives down prices even more imho.

I know plenty of Americans who choose to live paycheck to paycheck. That said, I agree that the food industry is cut throat.

Of course you do: estimates via survey show that roughly 60% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. This is an 2x increase from 30y ago.

The problem is that these are usually measuring self described rates. And people aren't using the same definition when self describing. Have come across plenty of people who claim to be living paycheck-to-paycheck because they have nothing left over after maxing out 401k & IRA, socking away $1K in a savings account, paying for their posh apartment, and more. But of course that's not what it's supposed to mean.