Instead, the Chinese are financially responsible and save between 25% and 50% of their income. They accomplish this by reducing their consumption.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/moneybuilder/2010/06/24/one-big-...
[edit: I misread, apparently it's urban Chinese. A little more googling gives similar numbers, so I stand by the point I'm making. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-03-09/here-s-wh... http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2016-01/21/content_231834... ]
The sad thing to me the past few years has been food pricing... it just seems to be several times what it was even a decade ago, and very little reason behind it from a production standpoint. It feels like I don't really save any money when I cook, though the food is usually better, and I do get more portions (portion control is actually harder though).
2. they have significantly lower cost of living
3. fta:
>in both China and the U.S., the average family’s assets were about eight times its average income.
4. seems this was a study of 2000 urban chinese, not all chinese. a sample of 2000 urbanites probably doesnt scale to over a billion people....
5. china has undergone several decades of large economic growth. if you compared china today with theUS in the late 1950s theyd probably seem pretty similar...
6. only 12% of chinese (from the 2000 person sample) owned a car
2) The numbers provided are adjusted for PPP.
4) Whether urban or overall, it illustrates that far poorer people than Americans are able to save money. The savings rates across the country don't differ significantly. India also has a very high savings rate.
5) Yes, and it's still poor by US standards. So was 1950's USA. If 1950's Americans could save (did they), why can't vastly richer 2016 Americans?
6) As I noted, Chinese people save money by reducing consumption.
The fact is that Chinese people earn low wages and still save money in the United States.
[edit: removed the last sentence, apparently I misread.]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boskin_Commission
It's actually still overstated; for example, there is no hedonic adjustment to health care in CPI. In 1950, I'd be a cripple. In 2014 I had surgery and now I'm in great shape. Since surgery costs more than a doctor saying "you're fucked", the BLS treated it as inflation.
And really, this claim just doesn't pass the smell test. And by "smell", I mean the smell of an outhouse. In 1950 the bottom 16-32% (depending on which set of numbers you look at) lacked full indoor plumbing.
https://books.google.com/books?id=_nY9LFtlqygC&pg=PA180&lpg=...
http://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/updates/2015/09/23...
I'm obviously not making an argument that technology hasn't advanced since the 1950s. Don't be silly.
Just because I feel like something should be a particular way doesn't mean it is.
Put another way:
Just because you disagree with something personally, does not give you the right, as a well educated, smart, rich person, to look at it for 15 seconds and throw it out as garbage.
Every one of us does this all the goddamn time and its intellectually dishonest at best.
I know that many of us make reasonably good money. I know that most of us are friends with people of a similar education and income level.
This doesn't mean that the reason 69% of Americans have no savings is because they are sagely putting their money in the market or some other better structured investment vehicle.
The vast majority of those people are broke.
What's more, there's an entire group of people in this country that give up 10% of their income to their church. They're called Mormons. If they can get along, then so can everybody else, saving 10% of income per year.
The reason they don't is because they choose to.