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Comment by annjose | Hacker News Reader

Whenever I see a claim that "x% of adults do y", my brain goes:

- "x% of what? what is the denominator?". Without that number, the claim is meaningless. - surely it cannot be the entire population, so it has to be a survey. - how many people participated in the survey? what was the distribution?

Here is that info for this study. I found this in the PDF version of the study report [0] referred to at the end of the Northwestern page [1].

> Methodology The Harris Poll conducted a total of 4,375 online interviews among the general U.S. adult (18+) population between January 5th and January 21st, 2026. Included in this overall total is a sample of 816 High-Net-Worth individuals (those with total household investable assets, excluding pensions, retirement plans and property, greater than $1,000,000).

[0] https://filecache.mediaroom.com/mr5mr_nwmutual/179168/2026%2...

[1] https://news.northwesternmutual.com/planning-and-progress-st...

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> "conducted a total of 4,375 online interviews"

How? Mechanical Turk? Ads? This sort of survey is biased toward people who click on lots of stuff.

I love mental rule of thumbs / heuristics that we can install into our brain to avoid getting caught up in cognitive biases or other mistakes.

An easy one that I would expect most HN readers probably do already is: When shopping, always round up to the nearest dollar before even mentally storing it or operating on it. The usual cognitive bias is that many people end up storing the listed price of $4.96 in a lossy manner, as $4.xx, and end up thinking of it as $4 when in reality they could be skipping straight to keeping it as $5 in their head.

it blows my mind when anyone ever reads $x.99 as $x out loud. i often cant keep myself from muttering "$x+1" and its taken decades of practice to keep myself from looking at them like they have 2 heads

figured it out since i learned to read so it seems so childish to hear adults make it

turns out ppl like me are the weird ones and most people just truncate at the period

> Whenever I see a claim that "x% of adults do y", my brain goes

Would that everyone employed this level of skepticism before commenting on figures.

> (those with total household investable assets, excluding pensions, retirement plans and property, greater than $1,000,000).

Am I reading this wrong, is this about trust fund kids?

Sure seems like it if you are excluding property.

> total of 4,375 online interviews

> Included in this overall total is a sample of 816 High-Net-Worth

Looks like about 1/5 are in the trust fund kid category.

You are reading gp’s comment correctly as it was written, but it omits the next line in the source study:

> Data for the general U.S. population (including the High Net Worth oversample) were weighted to Census targets for education, age, gender, race/ethnicity, region and household income.

They oversampled in major markets where they work and in high-net-worth populations (who they service), but their claims are for the overall US adult population.

Oversampling like this is pretty routine in survey research. It improves the precision of any subgroup analyses you might want to do, and, to a first approximation, it doesn’t tend to bias the weighted overall-population claims in one direction or another.

I think about it like Google Earth or something. I happen to have much-higher-res imagery of London than of the Cotswolds. That doesn’t mean my view, when zoomed out to “the whole United Kingdom,” is necessarily misleading. It does mean I can additionally make more detailed claims about Piccadilly Circus than about the sheep fields or whatever.

Typically surveys are adjusted for sampling biases before reporting. That appears to be the case here. So there is usually some attempt to account for the biases in the sampled population.

The impulse to ask "what population was sampled?" is good but its not always a straight line from there to "these results directly reflect that sampling bias."

In fact, from the page you posted: "Data for the general U.S. population (including the High Net Worth oversample) were weighted to Census targets for education, age, gender, race/ethnicity, region and household income. A full methodology is available."

I would presume that the headline number attempts to account for sampling bias.

I agree with you - there’s usually some adjustment for sampling bias, and this study says it is matching Census targets. But I had to go three levels down to see that info before I derive any meaning from the number.

My concern is that headlines like “x% of adults do y” get repeated without anyone (sometimes even journalists writing the article) seeing the methodology or nuance behind them. Context matters.

Still, it lowers the resolution of the results if you have to throw out a significant portion of the interviews.

You're not just throwing them out though, those responses do have input. Their input is just weighted.

https://www.pewresearch.org/methods/2018/01/26/how-different...

If you look into Italy its like 60% to 70%.

Europe in general maybe outside of some CEE, DACH, Nordics/Benelux is pretty fucked for the youth. Without help from parents or inherited housing you're fucked. You get American CoL with African wages. Joking of course, but you get the point.

> "x% of what? what is the denominator?"

Another reason the denominator is important is that "parents" are (hopefully) completely a subset of "adults". And not all adults have living parents. So who is counted:

    - All adults
    - Adults with living parents
    - Adults within an age range
    - Adults without children

or what? This really belongs in the title. Without it, as you say, the statistic is meaningless.

Came here looking for this response.

My follow-up question is "What percentage of the 'totally independent' group, are parents with adult children?"

i.e. there's almost an interesting statistic here about what percentage of adults have "no option" in relying on their parents for financial help, and what percentage of the remainder still do rely on their parents.

But once I had this question, I realized that I needed to be suspicious of the % itself.

A 4k sample size is more than enough to be statistically significant for the population of the US. So what's the actual problem you have?

Related - any time a study is based on gathering the opinions of a random subset of the population, I also instantly dismiss it. The average person is a moron. I don't care about random people's subjective opinions, I only care about objective data. People polled in the 16th century would have said the sun orbits the earth; that doesn't make it true.

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