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How Rich And Poor Spend (And Earn) Their Money

FYI: For many Americans, the rise in food and housing prices is a tough squeeze. That’s because—even in an era with low overall inflation—low-income Americans spend a disproportionate share of their money on food and housing.

New data from the Labor Department show the extent of the discrepancy. The bottom 10% of Americans, by income, devote 42% of their spending to housing and an additional 17% to food–nearly 60% of their total spending, according to the Consumer Expenditures Survey. By contrast, the wealthiest 10% of Americans dedicate only 31% of their spending to housing and 11% to food–closer to 40% of total spending
Regards,
Ted
http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2015/04/06/how-the-rich-and-poor-spend-and-earn-their-money/tab/print/?mg=blogs-wsj&url=http%3A%2F%2Fblogs.wsj.com%2Feconomics%2F2015%2F04%2F06%2Fhow-the-rich-and-poor-spend-and-earn-their-money%2Ftab%2Fprint&fpid=2,121

Comments

  • I could write a Whole book on this topic....but one quick one..
    Poor People want to be payed for their Time and are payed based on their Skills per Hour
    Rich People are not interested in being payed for Time they want to be payed on results,
    Ever ask a Rich person how much he makes an Hour? Ever ask How much are you worth?
    Ever ask a poor person how much he is worth?
    poor people earn (work) enough to survive, Rich earn and work as much as they have to grow, that is get wealthier.....and
    No matter How much people like Obama would like to change that...It will never happen
    So is economic Life...
  • edited April 2015
    Just when I thought you might have reached your limits of bigotry, foolishness and idiocy I now know there is no bottom to that hole. What a disgusting human being.
  • edited April 2015
    There's a great quote in this morning's SF Chronicle: "He's intoxicated with his own essence".
    Whoever said that surely must have had tb in mind.

    As far as "I could write a Whole book", he can barely write a sentence, as clearly shown above.
  • Mark, you know the First sign of ignorance its "Name Calling" Your ignorant as demonstrated by YOU not by me giving you that title and I'm correct in any of the above statements, If you think otherwise...lets hear it...something of intelligence......go for it
  • @Tampabay, I have no idea of what you have just said.
  • I can imagine that...you miss alot
  • Unfortunately, I cannot flag you on the mobile platform.

    Perhaps this thread should be locked.
  • From the article: "...This underscores one reason that inflation feels different (comma needed here! Alas! Punctuation has been thrown by the wayside,) household to household: People spend their money in such different ways. A parent with children in college or daycare might scoff at the notion that inflation has been low for the last five years. Conversely, someone with no car payment and no mortgage but who does a lot of driving may be feeling flush from the plunge in gas prices..."

    There's a 20 or 21% gap between the statistical groups in terms of how much it takes PROPORTIONALLY simply to stay housed and fed.
  • A Flag? what, no detention? I used to get those a lot from miss guided teachers
  • Quit trying to prove stuff to yourself and to the rest of us, and just add to the conversation.
  • edited April 2015
    A note to other board members:

    With respect to terminating ("locking") conversations on this site, while I can understand the desire to simply make this person shut up, it perversely also empowers him to shut down conversations simply because he is so obnoxious that others prefer no conversation at all to one destroyed by his crude boorishness.

    I believe that he is quite aware of this "power", and abuses this forum by deliberately taunting to see how much others can tolerate. In effect, he finds it amusing to indirectly limit the free speech of the other posters by causing a termination.

    I encourage others to mention the continuing deliberate perversion of this site to David Snowball, and request that something be done to protect civilized discussion from being terminated because of him.

    Edit: I've deliberately flagged this post, to bring the situation to the attention of the moderators.

    Respectfully, Old Joe
  • >> If you think otherwise...lets hear it...something of intelligence

    Well, Tb, it ain't easy to think of anything intelligent say in response to this:

    >> Poor People want to be payed for their Time and are payed based on their Skills per Hour
    >> Rich People are not interested in being payed for Time they want to be payed on results,
    ... >> poor people earn (work) enough to survive, Rich earn and work as much as they have to grow, that is get wealthier.....and
    >> No matter How much people like Obama would like to change that...It will never happen

    1) You would do well to get to know actual poor people, working and otherwise. It would truly open your bootstrapping eyes. This has been suggested before, more than once. I am sure you can find volunteer opportunities. No one denies that improving oneself is a worthy idea, by the way.

    What charities are you involved in, or give moneys to?

    2) You also would do well to read thoughtful analyses and proposals for addressing opportunity and other inequalities. Just for starters --- and these do not at all conclude the same things, just so you know:

    http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/04/23/evening-the-odds
    http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/03/16/richer-and-poorer
    http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2014/apr/24/inequality-not-problem/
    http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2014/jun/26/inequality-begins-at-birth/
    http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/may/08/thomas-piketty-new-gilded-age/

    That's enough of an assignment for you for now. I did not list analyses of what it is that the president actually has proposed, and why, but your characterization is, as so often, laughable. Yet I really really do not want to mock, or turn you away; I just wish to try and get you to modulate your thinking and not respond in such crude and inaccurate fashion, whether it's 'blackman's game' or 'so is economic life'.
  • "Per the OED, the only two senses that allow payed are: “13. Naut. a. (trans.) To let out (a rope or chain) by slackening it, to allow or cause to run out. (Also in reference to something let out by the rope.) Now always with out or away. Also transf. 14. Naut. a. (trans.) To cause (a ship) to fall to leeward, or fall away from the wind."

    Is there a subtle message here? Perhaps someone's chain has finally -- well -- "payed out" -- even causing a fall----
  • @Tampa: interesting thoughts. I think there is a lot there and the relationships are hard to tease out. I have known profligate wealthy people, and deliberate growth-oriented but perpetually poor people. I think analyses of aggregate patterns (Michelle Lamont may of done something along these lines, from an ethnographic perspective), corroborate a bit of what you seem to indicate. The quant/statistical analyses are more mixed.

    Regardless, I have always found this to be an interesting question.
  • Piketty is droll on the usual meritocratic arguments, citing Lamont (emphasis added):

    \\\ In 1881, Paul Leroy-Beaulieu explained that the state went too far by raising only the lowest salaries. He vigorously defended the high civil servants of his day, most of whom received little more than “15,000 to 20,000 francs a year”; these were “figures that might seem enormous to the common man” but actually “make it impossible to live with elegance or amass savings of any size.” The most worrisome aspect of this defense of meritocracy is that one finds the same type of argument in the wealthiest societies, where Jane Austen’s points about need and dignity make little sense. In the United States in recent years, one frequently has heard this type of justification for the stratospheric pay of supermanagers (50–100 times average income, if not more). Proponents of such high pay argued that without it, only the heirs of large fortunes would be able to achieve true wealth, which would be unfair. In the end, therefore, the millions or tens of millions of dollars a year paid to supermanagers contribute to greater social justice. This kind of argument could well lay the groundwork for greater and more violent inequality in the future. The world to come may well combine the worst of two past worlds: both very large inequality of inherited wealth and very high wage inequalities justified in terms of merit and productivity (claims with very little factual basis, as noted). Meritocratic extremism can thus lead to a race between supermanagers and rentiers, to the detriment of those who are neither. It also bears emphasizing that the role of meritocratic beliefs in justifying inequality in modern societies is evident not only at the top of hierarchy but lower down as well, as an explanation for the disparity between the lower and middle classes. In the late 1980s, Michèle Lamont conducted several hundred in-depth interviews with representatives of the “upper middle class” in the United States and France, not only in large cities such as New York and Paris but also in smaller cities such as Indianapolis and Clermont-Ferrand. She asked about their careers, how they saw their social identity and place in society, and what differentiated them from other social groups and categories. One of the main conclusions of her study was that in both countries, the “educated elite” placed primary emphasis on their personal merit and moral qualities, which they described using terms such as rigor, patience, work, effort, and so on (but also tolerance, kindness, etc.). The heroes and heroines in the novels of Austen and Balzac would never have seen the need to compare their personal qualities to those of their servants (who go unmentioned in their texts).
  • Interesting, and thanks David. I try to be eloquent when possible but lose it sometimes.
  • Piketty may very well be correct. I'd never be able to slog through an entire book that reads THAT way. It IS possible to be thorough but not tedious.
  • Two of my former students wrote a dissection on one of Descartes' arguments. They included the aside, "He is French, therefore wrong."

    The key seems to be the norms of French academic discourse: all French historians write from the assumption that you've already read all the other French historians on the subject. You end up with text that strikes the rest of us as impenetrably convoluted and dense, full of unexplained references to untranslated scholars.

    David
  • Gosh, that Piketty passage is clearer and more flowing than much of what I read every day, and in some respects better than what I write.

    It is true that academics (and others) necessarily make assumptions about what the reader knows and ought to know, as do we when we talk about beta, allocations, etc.
  • edited April 2015
    It may be "clear and flowing", but it is one hell of a long paragraph, and could be made a lot easier to assimilate by judiciously separating it into several stand-alone thought-sections. For example:

    \\\ In 1881, Paul Leroy-Beaulieu explained that the state went too far by raising only the lowest salaries. He vigorously defended the high civil servants of his day, most of whom received little more than “15,000 to 20,000 francs a year”; these were “figures that might seem enormous to the common man” but actually “make it impossible to live with elegance or amass savings of any size.” The most worrisome aspect of this defense of meritocracy is that one finds the same type of argument in the wealthiest societies, where Jane Austen’s points about need and dignity make little sense. In the United States in recent years, one frequently has heard this type of justification for the stratospheric pay of supermanagers (50–100 times average income, if not more).

    Proponents of such high pay argued that without it, only the heirs of large fortunes would be able to achieve true wealth, which would be unfair. In the end, therefore, the millions or tens of millions of dollars a year paid to supermanagers contribute to greater social justice.

    This kind of argument could well lay the groundwork for greater and more violent inequality in the future. The world to come may well combine the worst of two past worlds: both very large inequality of inherited wealth and very high wage inequalities justified in terms of merit and productivity (claims with very little factual basis, as noted). Meritocratic extremism can thus lead to a race between supermanagers and rentiers, to the detriment of those who are neither.

    It also bears emphasizing that the role of meritocratic beliefs in justifying inequality in modern societies is evident not only at the top of hierarchy but lower down as well, as an explanation for the disparity between the lower and middle classes. In the late 1980s, Michèle Lamont conducted several hundred in-depth interviews with representatives of the “upper middle class” in the United States and France, not only in large cities such as New York and Paris but also in smaller cities such as Indianapolis and Clermont-Ferrand. She asked about their careers, how they saw their social identity and place in society, and what differentiated them from other social groups and categories.

    One of the main conclusions of her study was that in both countries, the “educated elite” placed primary emphasis on their personal merit and moral qualities, which they described using terms such as rigor, patience, work, effort, and so on (but also tolerance, kindness, etc.). The heroes and heroines in the novels of Austen and Balzac would never have seen the need to compare their personal qualities to those of their servants (who go unmentioned in their texts).

    By separating the text into smaller sections, it encourages understanding because it makes it visually easier to assimilate one section of thought at a time, and to re-read that section if necessary.

    Not having read the original text, it's possible that it originally appeared differently than as shown above by davidmoran.

    Edit/Add: It's worth noting that even when subdivided as shown each section exceeds our new lowest-common denominator 40-word limit as imposed by Donald Jr.
  • @David: At a wedding I attended in France the members of the wedding party, including the groom (who is a high level civil servant), made the most elaborate speeches I've ever heard at such an event. I know French and French culture, but I was severely tested by their references and allusions. Come to think of it, it was like a test.
  • Oh, sorry, sure, and don't disagree about length. My copy/paste did indeed glom three paras into one.

    http://resistir.info/livros/piketty_capital_in_the_21_century_2014.pdf ; see Meritocratic Extremism in Wealthy Societies, three paras.

    The sentence before this, fwiw, is:

    \\\ Modern meritocratic society, especially in the United States, is much harder on the losers, because it seeks to justify domination on the grounds of justice, virtue, and merit, to say nothing of the insufficient productivity of those at the bottom.
  • And of course there is this, if wingnuts continue to have their way:

    http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-rush-to-humiliate-the-poor/2015/04/07/8795b192-dd67-11e4-a500-1c5bb1d8ff6a_story.html

    http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2015/04/07/the-double-standard-of-making-poor-people-prove-theyre-worthy-of-government-benefits/

    Quite incredible, but in keeping with the new times in this country. Anyone receiving assistance must be notably better than the rest of us. The undeserving rich, not so much.
  • I'm certainly and firmly in sympathy with you, there!
  • @Tampabay, I have no idea of what you have just said.

    Unfortunately, I cannot flag you on the mobile platform.

    Perhaps this thread should be locked.

    John it is a Badge of honor to be on opposite side of an illiterate, ill mannered post.
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