The correlation between wealth and Internet usage. | Hacker News Reader

The correlation between wealth and Internet usage.

fastcompany.com

23 pointscwan12 comments

Could not this be correlated to education instead of money? Assuming that people with higher education get on average higher salaries (assumption on which I don't have data), then higher educated people are more likely to know and understand the broad services and benefits the internet brings. Anecdotally I see this at home. My parents, which have really low education, could not care less of the Internet. My brother with just high school degree just uses a few things: some email, some job search and Facebook. Me and my other brother, which have both master degrees, use the Internet a lot.

Another possibility - most high-paying jobs require home internet.

The original report has a bit of additional information: http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2010/Better-off-households/Re...

Or perhaps: More income = more work = less time = more incentive to do things online to save time.

Paying bills and online banking have ~25% difference between the lowest and highest income. These are time-saving but you're essentially paying off money you already spent.

The bigger disproportion is in spending money online; 30% for buying products and ~35% for travel reservations. I bet buying products has a bigger disproportion if the price approaches the $1000 mark.

The lowest difference is in research ~20%. This narrower difference is likely because people are saving time, but also trying to save money. People in the lower income are likely using a greater proportion of store fliers as they're not intending on spending money online.

Anecdotally I've noticed people with lower incomes tend to be more distrustful of using credit/debit cards online.

People with higher incomes also tend to have better access to credit cards and are have more disposable income to make purchases in the first place (especially when it comes to things like booking flights). They also probably have fewer qualms about buying the $500 TV without physically picking it up and carrying it out of the store because they're not awaiting delivery of something that represents most of that month's disposable income. The [possibly inaccurate] perception that internet transactions are inherently riskier than offline ones is much more of a concern if you can't afford the loss, and higher paid people are on average savvier about avoiding scams in the first place.

I'm usually the guy saying the causation is really correlation, but it could be in this case that increased internet use is the cause of the wealth, perhaps it is a causal link. I do appreciate the scientific integrity of the article by starting off with correlation, and not jumping immediately to causation.

The internet is a fantastic way to find new opportunities, those that spend more time on it have access to more and better opportunities. I could go knock on a hundred doors around my town, or I could post on craigslist, or on twitter, etc. A hundred postings on forums is far better marketing than 100 cold calls.

And anyway, how do you A/B test a cold call on the phone?

For example when I was looking for a job, I could pretty much guarantee a call a week from a head hunter if my resume was visible on Monster. It gets to the point where you don't even bother replying to job ads, you just change a setting on monster and wait for the calls to start. And yes, there are far better ways of marketing yourself than having a resume on monster.

Just today I've gotten two warm leads for iPhone apps from a two line posting on CL.

So I guess now we're going to be treated to, "If you use the internet so much, why aren't you rich?"

What about scientists? - they are not the richest category of population (< 75k a person; usually 40-50k), but I am sure they use Internet a lot more often than let's say businessmen.

Scientists aren't rich, but the ones I've worked with (quite a few) all made considerably more than 75K.

Other than postdocs (which is a temporary state), when do scientists make under 75K? Any tenure track prof at a decent/big university or private industry PhD researcher makes than that, no?

PhD researchers yes, but there are a bunch of more "working-class" science jobs, like lab technician, which are commonly filled by people with science bachelor's degrees, and don't usually pay more than $75k. For example, a geologist or hydrologist who works for the Bureau of Land Management, or a chemist who works for DuPont, will typically start around $40-50k.

I am talking about _computer_ scientists. Take biochemists for example. Or biologists.

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