Kudos to the NYC administration for putting this together so quickly.
Edit: took a look at your source.
>“The survey shows that a very significant minority of American households apparently don’t have the resources to pay for an unexpected expense of around $1,000,” says Stephen Brobeck, executive director of the Consumer Federation of America.
Interesting how this morphed into the claim that a majority of Americans can't afford a $500 expense.
Median household savings discluding a house, at retirement age, is just barely $100k (that is, enough to support retirement income above social security of a wopping ~$5k/year).
If you owe 300k on your house that's worth 400k, you might have a liquidity problem but you aren't poor.
There's also a colloquial phrase for it - house poor.
Another chunk of that $100k is probably tied up in a car, which has the same problems.
People have learned to be wary I think of nutritional "studies" but it's taking them longer to catch on to the farcical nature of modern psychology. Which really IMO hasn't come that far from psychoanalysis of a few decades ago.
And how could it? All of psychology is based on subjective, non-experimental, non-verifiable, non-reproducable data.
We're watching all of our institutions collapse because it turns out not only are they (and individuals in our society) excessively interdependent, but they're also houses of cards...