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Comment by rtpg | Hacker News Reader

> (we don't have gypsies and therefore the bottom 50% will not adopt gypsy cultural indicators, Am I misreading this or are you throwing the "gypsies are like this because of culture making them lazy" argument?

> and our inequality seems to be merely differing rates of positive growth)

Then why has median purchasing power gone down for the past fifteen years? It doesn't matter if the dollar value goes up when prices go up faster.

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Am I misreading this or are you throwing the "gypsies are like this because of culture making them lazy" argument?

I'm more referring to child marriage than anything else.

Then why has median purchasing power gone down for the past fifteen years?

This begs the question - if purchasing power went down over the past 15 years, people should be purchasing fewer goods and services than in 1998. What goods/services do you believe people have less of now than they did in 1998?

Upper education, health care, healthy food? It is easy to ignore if you are not at the bottom, but all of these things are less available to a growing number of people.

Higher education is incorrect. I'd love to cite the census, but the servers are shut down as part of the Washington Monument strategy. So here are news reports instead:

http://www.popecenter.org/commentaries/article.html?id=2511

http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2009/10/29/college-enrollment...

Health care is also incorrect: http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/search?st=personal+cons...

As for "healthy" food, unfortunately I don't know where to get good stats on that. Even if I did it would probably be shut down.

Education outcomes, not debt fueled enrollments:

http://www.brookings.edu/research/reports/2013/06/13-facts-h... (in particular check the graducation rates based on income quartile).

Access to health care:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1483879/

Food is a harder thing to pin down. There is no doubt that americans of most any income level have access to sufficient calories, but trying to purchase healthy fresh fruits and vegetables takes up a significant portion of my monthly income (family of 5, a long distance from the bottom income levels), but I could buy huge quantities of bread and rice for much less :-)

You derive such a different lesson than I do from the same facts.

You're mentioning areas in the economy that have had drastic price increases that far outpace inflation. Coincidentally, these are all areas that have seen heavy state and federal government involvement over the last 40 years.

Even the food disaster is easily attributed to the government's horrible misunderstanding of diet in the 70's and drive to create cheap low-fat (but high fcs) products.

While you see lessons of inequality, I see lessons of the danger of government interference in the economy and our daily lives.

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