Hacker News Reader

Comment by ashtonkem | Hacker News Reader

That very much depends on who you’re talking about. Top quintile of American society? Sure. Bottom quintile of American society? Definitely not. America is a pretty tough place to be poor in, and I think calling the working poor in America “the global 1%” is a pretty hard to defend statement.

View on HN

>"To make it into the richest 1 percent globally, all you need is an income of around $34,000, according to World Bank economist Branko Milanovic. "

.... The median average salary for workers in the United States is $49,764 per year.

The median salary tells you nothing about impoverished Americans. 20th percentile household income in the USA in 2018 was $25k. Comparing incomes between countries as straightforwardly as this ignores differences in cost of living, too.

You aren't accounting for purchasing power. In most countries, medicine costs half as much (or less), education is much cheaper, and the cost of food and housing is much lower.

And in many of those countries expensive things like cars and smartphones are usually discretionary items, not absolutely or near-absolutely necessary to get and keep a job, pay taxes, get your children to school and so on.

> You aren't accounting for purchasing power.

Which is pretty easy to account for if one is being serious: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purchasing_power_parity

And Milanovic does so in his figures. It's "unserious" (and bizarre) to assume that an economist failed to make this adjustment, and then claim that it's super easy to do so; the latter statement should mean that your baseline assumption is that PPP adjustment was performed.

> You aren't accounting for purchasing power. In most countries, medicine costs half as much (or less), education is much cheaper, and the cost of food and housing is much lower.

Milanovic's figures do account for overall purchasing power. It would be pretty amateurish of an economist not to.

The distribution of the price level among verticals is a separate question though, and it's possible that it's suboptimally skewed in the US

What quintile do you think the median salary is in? Hint: it’s not the bottom one.

The bottom quintile of US households made anywhere between $0 and $25,600 in 2018, with the mean being $13,258. All of these numbers are well outside “global 1%” range you quoted.

And that’s before we begin to adjust for cost of living, because you can’t just compare income without considering the cost of food, housing, health care, and transit.

That's not possible. There are 7.5 bullion people in the world, so 1% is 75 million people. Ipso facto it's impossible for most people in the US to be the one percent because 170 million is more than 75 million.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com