Date: Fri, 19 Jun 1998 03:05:47 +0000 From: "Frank Pawlak" <fpawlak@execpc.com> To: "Jason C. Wells" <jcwells@u.washington.edu> Cc: chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Lifestyles of the rich and shameless (no longer US Immigration) Message-ID: <980619030547.ZM16696@darkstar.connect.com> In-Reply-To: "Jason C. Wells" <jcwells@u.washington.edu> "Re: Lifestyles of the rich and shameless (no longer US Immigration)" (Jun 18, 7:04pm) References: <Pine.BSF.3.96.980618184937.767C-100000@s8-37-26.student.washington.edu>
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On Jun 18, 7:04pm, Jason C. Wells wrote: > Subject: Re: Lifestyles of the rich and shameless (no longer US Immigratio > On Fri, 19 Jun 1998, Frank Pawlak wrote: > > >In any country where 20% of the population owns 80% of the nation's wealth > >there is a problem. That is exactly the case here in the USA. > > I read an editorial by a fellow who was commenting on a book (The > Millionaire Next Door) that had a stat that I can't really remember but > the point was there are few people with a net worth of one million dollars > than you might think. (3.5% I think) We could debate this forever. I find those numbers very hard to believe. I spent the major portion of my university career in the study of Labor Economics and the numbers you quote in noway represent anything that I've ever seen. > > Think of how rare billionares are in light of that 3.5% number. > > So the rest of us 96.5 percent aren't millionares. But the huge chunk of > those people aren't impoverished either. If you can recall your gaussian > distribution, three standard deviations from the norm encompasses 99% of > the distribution. Yes, I do remember some of this stuff. Where are you drawing your sample from? How wide is the standard deviation? The shape of the bell curve does matter. In saying this, I am not accusing you: there is an old saying to the effect "figures don't lie but liers sure can figure". Or statistics don't lie, but liers sure can use statistics. > > So when people tell me that America is becoming highly polarized in terms > of wealth I have to agree that the richest are richer, BUT, there is a > _tremendous_ portion of the population in between. I agree that "there is a tremendous_portion of the population in between". But, so what? The facts of this issue are that the real wages of the American worker has fallen since the early 1970's. Which means that the average worker is less well off than they were in the early 1970's. Real wages are the dollar wage adjusted for inflation, or adjusted for the cost of living. Frank > > Perhaps the reporting of the difference between rich and poor is > disproportianate to the actual situation. > > Catchya Later, | UW Mechanical Engineering > Jason Wells | http://weber.u.washington.edu/~jcwells/ > | 206-633-5994 >-- End of excerpt from Jason C. Wells To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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