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Comment by RickJWagner | Hacker News Reader

A visit to Disney World introduces some questions that bring doubts to this article. The park is overrun with young families, with a great many speaking English as a second language. They don’t seem to be top percenters, but they’ve got cash for tickets and food. ( The food seems to be priced about 5x what I’d imagine it to be at a real store. )

If they truly are poor, they’re surely living YOLO.

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The Disney World visitors are a specific group of people. The vast majority of them do not go there every week, nor every month. So the behavior you observe in there is not representative of the routine behavior of those people.

In other words, yes, they may pay 5x the price for a meal in an amusement park that they visit once a year. That does not mean they are willing to pay anything close to that for a meal every week or every day.

Most families I personally know who have gone it’s far from an annual trip. This will be their once in a lifetime or maybe once in a decade trip to Disney World. Literally saved up and planned for years for that “dream” family vacation.

Like when I was poor living in a trailer park with my parents going out to eat at Olive Garden or Red Lobster was a special occasion. We got to go to the “nice” restaurant and splurge. I doubt anyone who frequents HN from the US considers those to be “nice” or “high quality” restaurants. To some on HN Disney World is or could be an annual trip. For most others it’s a major event. I’m sure a significant amount of debt is accrued in a many cases to make their vacation a reality.

It's my observation over time that there has been a sharp increase in the what people would call the "bare minimum" life. I think it's a combination of credit, a loss of stoicism, and social media pushing a distortion of reality.

Evaluating the financial situation of a group of people by visiting Disney World is about as canonical example of sampling bias as you can get. The people who are at Disney World are the people who can afford to be at Disney World.

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