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Comment by pydry | Hacker News Reader

He's saying that this is a misleading figure because a lot of people have a lot of negative wealth.

That's apparently supposed to ameliorate how bad this looks but as far as I can see it only serves to emphasize how bad the problem is.

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It’s not just that though. It’s also because a lot of people with $0 or subzero wealth have reasonable incomes, and a lot of people with a small but positive amount of wealth have very little income (China in particular). The overall well-being depends more on income including the imputed value of social services, not the stock of wealth.

Wealth comparisons generally are fraught even besides this. The most valuable asset of the average human, by far, is their human capital. These and social services and purchasing power parities can be measured and compared for a more meaningful result, and highlight the truly poor, but this piece isn’t it. It’s just agitprop.

>The most valuable asset of the average human, by far, is their human capital

Yes, and if you are a doctor saving lives with a high income and high negative wealth that human capital is being parasitically extracted via the rent you pay, via student loan repayments, via eye watering malpractice insurance rates and laundered via the financial system to make somebody else even richer.

Dont you see how this makes it even worse? The greater wealth inequality grows the less you get to keep the output of your own human capital.

And yea, maybe you can still do all of that and live a decent enough life. That isnt the point.

This isnt a revolt against productivity. It's a revolt against parasites.

> The overall well-being depends more on income including the imputed value of social services, not the stock of wealth.

That's an assumption that needs to be backed up.

Many high-net worth individuals have almost zero nominal income - yet they are still extremely wealthy, enjoy a high standard of living and have significant influence. This can make income-only "wealth" statistics look a lot more balanced than the reality is.

On the other hand, debt absolutely has an effect on your quality of living and the degree of freedom you have in your decisions. E.g., if someone barely manages to pay off a mortgage, they will have little disposable income for other expenses, such as medical emergencies - even though, on the face of it, they may have a decent middle-class income.

Just take expected value of everything including work, just like you evaluate assets. That is the most balanced approach. So a guy making 100k a year has a higher expected networth than a guy having 500k in wealth, but the guy with 500k in wealth still has significantly more than a person with 10k a year in income.

This is somewhat beside the point since income inequality is also very high and growing.

Combining them and crystallizing future income into a theoretical asset wont materially affect the picture.

Newly graduated doctors American doctors are then one of the poorest groups in the world according to this measure. This doesn't doesn't seem to make much sense to call them poor though, since the wealth of rich people includes expected future income of their assets you need to also include the expected future income of workers, and then young American doctors would no longer be considered poorer than anyone in Africa which makes sense.

More relevantly, there are a lot of people who have negative wealth and excellent quality of life.

Can you give examples of people in that situation?

Take an average American CS grad who got a job a year ago. Great quality of life, high income, but among the poorest in the world wealth wise. But you want to make it look like he is worse off than an African sheepherder.

When you count % of income spent on SF rent and student loan repayments they're probably paying a greater net % of their productive capacity to financial leeches than that goat herder.

This is the outcome we're supposed to be celebrating? Sky high productivity having huge chunks taken out of it and being handed over to non-working landlords and creditors?

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