"…around 60% of rich-world respondents say they would be willing to give up 0.5% of their income if that were enough to end extreme poverty."
That really is sad. We're talking 0.5% and only 60% were okay with that?
That really is sad. We're talking 0.5% and only 60% were okay with that?
Some people also think that we should spend that money on other stuff that they’re interested in like cool space stuff and just don’t care about poor people and never will.
Mind you, they still think poverty is bad, but they'd object to something like paying for basic infrastructure and be happy to create the modern-day equivalent of CCC camps to pay the poor people to build that infrastructure. That sort of thing.
Poverty is a relative concept. Even among billionaires, there are poor billionaires that would find it painful to give up any part of what they have.
No. The median American household net worth is $193k, and of that, $8k in checkings/savings accounts. 54% of adults have cash savings that can pay for 3 months of expenses (this excludes non-cash savings, and obviously an even greater percentage have cash savings that would cover 1-2 months of expenses, which is still not paycheck-to-paycheck).
- Median net worth is $193k, of which $185k is in their home. Suppose a $10k emergency crops up. Well...you're fucked. If you're lucky you can take out a loan against the accrued value relatively quickly, but otherwise you're taking a 10% haircut having to sell quickly, another 10% in transaction fees, and another $10k in the sudden move/storage/renting/loss-of-work/etc situation you found yourself in liquidating your home to cover an extortionist colonoscopy+lawyer pricing or something. You're _fine_, but when minor road bumps can cause $45k setbacks ($55k if we count the $10k expense this depended on) you're not not living paycheck to paycheck.
- You can't compare the median savings to the median net worth. They're not the same person, and the cross-terms can take almost any distribution.
- The 54% stat is based on self-reported vibes and is pretty blatantly wrong. The median household also has $5200 in unavoidable (without delinquency, losing your home, etc) expenses, which doesn't jive very well with $8k in savings somehow lasting 3 months (assuming the cross terms I complained about aren't too terribly distributed). You would expect 2+ paychecks of stability (which, incidentally, is also the usual prompt for "paycheck-to-paycheck" stability -- not whether it takes one paycheck to be screwed but two), but then you're hosed.
And so on.
You're _right_; the median US household won't go broke missing a paycheck; but 2-3 paychecks is enough to cause major problems at the 50th percentile, give or take friends and family stepping in to soften the blow.