French books don’t really sell abroad. BBC News asks why.
More than 20% of Americans will be income-rich at some point, but it often doesn’t last. Which I consider depressing, for some reason.
Previous research has suggested that Americans think that our perceptions of wealth inequality are skewed. Anyway, some new research from Saint Louis University suggests that we actually overestimate income inequality. Which mostly goes to show how poorly the entire conversation conveys the important distinction between wealth inequality and income inequality.
Women who make career sacrifices to spend more time at home are happier. What about men?
Ebenezer Scrooge was a forward-thinking liberal.
A Japanese soldier continued to fight World War II for almost 30 years after it ended because he couldn’t believe that Japan had lost.
Japan is looking at building a real-life Gundam!
Teen pregnancy, abortion, and sex rates decline. Thanks, Obama.
Our patent system is out of control. Thanks, Carter.
Old maps don’t actually say “here be dragons” though a globe maybe does.
What are the next new countries? Maybe these are. Here are some odd national borders.
What would the United States look like if every state secessionist movement (not including North Colorado) were successful? Adam Ozimek considers the repercussions. I myself can barely conceptualize a 248-seat senate with equal representation among states.
Mapping weird sex laws in the United States.
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11 Responses to Linkluster 2^2*61
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HuffPo uses the ridiculously low threshold of $250k for “income rich.” That’s one of the reasons that so many people who earn that amount don’t stay “rich.” It’s a lot harder for the people clustered around that threshold to accumulate wealth than it is for those who earn $500k+ per year. That’s espcially the case if they have families to support and/or graduate school loans to pay off. Yet the progressives are always howling for taxes to get much steeper at that relatively low threshold. Hearing someone like Buffett chear that on always raises my blood pressure as these income tax adjustments barely affect him, yet they can really hobble people at the low end of the upper middle class.
I think $250k does count as “income-rich” at least in most of the country. Not super-rich, but still quite well off. I’d entertain evidence that the bulk of these people actually live in places where $250k doesn’t actually take you very far, though.
We made significantly less (more than 33% less, more than half as much, though) than that in our highest-income years, and while I didn’t feel “rich” I felt that we were income-rich. Comfortable accumulating savings and paying off debt.
We certainly didn’t feel “rich” though as we didn’t have much savings and had student loans and such… but that’s the difference between being “income-rich” and “wealthy-ruch” (or “rich-rich” or just “rich”)
Paying off debt and accumulating modest savings are middle class behaviors, or at least they used to be in not so distant memory. That it is no longer the case is a lamentable sign of the nation’s economic decline. The best policies to help the U.S. working and middle classes would involve limiting immigration, tariffs on foreign goods, penalties for off-shoring, and taking a sober look at the likely impact of future automation technologies on labor force participation. Punitive income re-distribution is only treating a symptom of economic decline (inequality) without addressing the causes. Moreover, it would just incentivize more bad behavior. Why save when the government will force someone else to do it for you? Why shouldn’t a single unemployed woman have five children she can’t afford when the state will just shovel more of someone else’s money at her?
Most of the things you’re referring to, though, strike me as wealth-rich and not-wealth-rich distinctions. One can be under a sea of debt and still be income-rich. To be fair, the article itself (as do so many articles on the subject) elide the distinction.
I suspect that they came up with the $250k cutoff due to some polling on what people in generally consider to be rich. As indicated in the post, of course, popular perception may not be an accurate barometer, though.
Japanese holdouts were enough of a thing in the 70s to make it into a children’s movie, The Last Flight of Noah’s Ark, which I remember seeing in the theater (because that’s how we saw movies back then).
The CDC data quoted in the article concerned “teen pregnancy”, but the more important metric is illegitimacy. Has the needle moved on that? Because I haven’t heard anything good.
My understanding is that illegitimacy rates have not been moving in the right direction.
Not to justify increasing taxes on anyone, but where I work, people start at about $10/hour. So, the idea that $250k a year doesn’t qualify one as rich seems absurd.
A Map of the 124 United States of America That Could Have Been
While I didn’t cross-reference it with Trumanverse, I do notice that both maps have a Cascadia.
It’s a pretty natural name for the state. Second only to Deseret in its naturalness.