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Piketty: the poorest half of Americans saw a "total collapse" in their share of the country's wealth
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Exactly- People can’t comprehend that kind of wealth.
Yeah- Being rich means you have a bigger house and a nicer car and don’t need to worry so much about how you’re going to retire. It’s pretty easy to translate to your own poor or working class existence.
But being wealthy- It’s a different thing. That means being able to more or less ignore things like international borders or most laws. It’s universal access to anything anywhere. It’s the point where money literally no longer matters, except as a measurement of power or how well you’re winning the game.
That’s why all these poor-who-think-they’re-middle-class people making $30k-$50k keep hating on the middle-class-they-think-are-rich folks bringing in $250k- Because their life is just like yours only better. They don’t hate the guy who owns a dozen private islands they’ve never even been to, because they literally can’t imagine the life those people live.
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It’s like this: Think of how stupid the average person is.
By definition, half of them are going to be dumber than that.
THAT’S THE MEDIAN, NOT THE AVERAGE.
Discourse pleasing filler here
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[quote=“ChickieD, post:12, topic:94849, full:true”]
One of the biggest problems I’ve had in discussing wealth inequality is that people really can’t imagine outrageous sums of wealth.[/quote]
They’re only familiar with the cartoonish TV version of the wealthy person, usually portrayed as being beset by moral turpitude or another shortcoming that makes all that luxury (which exists only in material expression) “not worth it” to a good average American. These media portrayals contribute to a lot of that inability to imagine real-life wealth and what it really buys.
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The median is a type of average. You’re thinking of the (arithmetic) mean. 
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It’s not going to be half.
Population IQ isn’t some straight line where there’s just a few people hanging out at the halfway point. It’s more of a lump in the middle with outliers above and below.
Saying “half the population is below average” is more drama than fact. Besides, there’s stupid, and then there’s stupid to vote for Trump. A lot of his supporters are more deluded than stupid.
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It’s imperfect in reality, but the IQ distribution is designed to be roughly normal (i.e. a bell curve). Lots in the centre, tails out each end, and yes, the median bang in the middle.
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Which means for every one of us that tests two or more standard deviations above the mean, there is a corresponding person two or more standard deviations below it. That frightens me because I know a lot of smart people.
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In reality, the distribution is right-skewed, thanks to the floor effect. We can test IQ 200 better than IQ 0.
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You’ve got it backwards.
Could you expand on that?
Because it is my understanding that ‘average’ is a purely colloquial term, that is to say with no standardized definition unlike median, arithmetic mean, and such mathematical/statistical terms. Note that Merriam-Webster defines it in the first definition as “a single value (such as a mean, mode, or median) that summarizes or represents the general significance of a set of unequal values”, although the second definition (1b) does simply say “mean”. Median and arithmetic mean, on the other hand, have specific mathematical definitions.
In other shorter terms, my contention is that “average” is a general term that can be used as a replacement for not just the arithmetic mean, but the median as long as specificity is not required.
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Average means boring, Pops. Squaresville, you dig?
May all your series be unpredictable, and all your polygons irregular.
The way I was taught, average means mean, and using it to mean median is mean. And M-W are notorious descriptivists.
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Interestingly, yes, my intuitive estimate of where the equator would be on that map is about 10° off. And generally the north is farther north than the south is south (in terms of settled land) by more than I thought. 
Looks like the southern bits of Australia (which have most of the population?) are about the flip latitude of the deep south in the U.S., so if things tend to be better in Australia that makes my idea somewhat invalid.
Interesting idea, measuring success by happiness instead of GNP, sounds ahead of its time.
The weather is misleading as well.
Thanks to the Gulf Stream, Western Europe and North America are much warmer than they “should” be. Thanks to the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, southern Australia is substantially cooler than it “should” be.
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I thought South Australia’s coolness was because of
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That is only if you don’t consider the possibility that bigotry, like all social constructs, could be rooted into economic competition for resources. It’s not just that “the other” is different; it’s that s/he is now competing for the same scarce things as you, often successfully: a good degree, a good job, a nice house, even the Presidency… Every time you make the game fairer, you are effectively reducing the odds for white conservative males, at a time when such odds are already going down globally. The resulting backlash, imho, is as rooted in economics as anything else.
Original fascist movements in Europe were deeply linked to the fall from grace of the middle-class, squeezed between the unforgiving upper class and the working class demanding new rights. The demonisation of Jews in Germany had a lot to do with stopping them from competing for roles that the “native” middle-class wanted for itself. You cannot expect to fix bigotry until you find a way to improve an individual’s economic odds to a point where enough people don’t care about sharing them.
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Bigotry is obviously a big part of Trump’s win, but it must have been a big part of support for McCain and Romney too. Sure the white supremacists came out in force to back Trump, but did they not come out in force to vote against a black man?
The election wasn’t determined just by how many people worry about “immigration” as a dog whistle for “brown people”, knowing that 64% of those would vote for Trump. It’s also about why that number was 64% instead of 63% because that difference alone would have given Clinton the win. If Clinton got 54% of people under $30 instead of 53% she would have won. If she’s got 47% of $50k-$99k instead of 46 she would have won. If Clinton could trade 100 votes in California for 1 vote in the rust belt she would have won.
I don’t like blaming the election result on bigotry because what that lead to, in the immediate aftermath of the election, was a bunch of pundits saying that the democrats needed to stop with all the “identity politics” (that is, they need to forget about racism, sexism, homophobia, etc). But that’s not remotely true. Donald Trump was not helped into the white house by being racist or by being sexist. If he had presented himself as a change candidate, a candidate who was going to remake the government and drain the swamp, but had done so without being racist, I think he would have gotten more votes. If he had done so without constantly insulting women (and without sexually assaulting women), he would have soared into the white house.
Contribution towards racism via apathy is a problem of the majority. Frothing-at-the-mouth pro-racism is a much smaller demographic and a demographic that is going to vote Republican anyway (unless they perceive the candidate as a race-traitor). Anti-racism is a winning strategy that Democrats have to double down on. At the same time, they need to stop representing a status quo that keeps saying “The economy is doing great!” while more than half of Americans are worse off than they were 16 years ago.
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