coffeetable posted:

C'mon, there's no need to pull numbers out of your rear end:

Jeffrey of YOSPOS posted:

I found that but I didn't think it was all that great a visual representation - particularly it doesn't seem to take debt into account. It also is a log-log scale with base 10 and 10,000 to 100,000 is a pretty big bucket as far as incomes go. It certainly looks like there's a huge amount of wealth variance for people in that range, but it's hard to tell the density at any point. It certainly appears at a glance to indicate that people in the middle of that bucket, making ~31,000/year have mostly have wealth varying from $1000 to ~$300,000, which is a pretty huge range. (All I can really do here is eyeball standard deviation, sorry.) I imagine that disparity would have a decently large impact on satisfaction. Separating it further by age sounds interesting for sure.

Rereading, the article later says the r^2 is about 33%, which seems reasonable given the image. They provide a github link to the data also which is pretty awesome, probably will check out this blog in more detail.

baquerd posted:

If it's net worth, surely that takes debt into account? Otherwise, they would just be labeled "assets" I'd think.

Jeffrey of YOSPOS posted:

It can't take debt into account because there are no negative numbers. Maybe it just pushes them to 0 since there are a bunch there, but that's kinda weird...

coffeetable posted:

quick what's the log of -$1

shrike82 posted:

My views on money and happiness have changed over the past 5 years. My partner and I make just above 300K in our mid thirties with a peer group working in finance/tech in NY making the same. I used to buy into libertarianism ie low taxes and personal responsibility where you deserve your wealth. This is rampant in those two industries and honestly the FI movement. But after spending a stint in London and Berlin, I think US society is fundamentally hosed when it comes to wealth and views around it. We've actually been thinking of moving to Berlin because of that.

quote:

Survivalism, the practice of preparing for a crackup of civilization, tends to evoke a certain picture: the woodsman in the tinfoil hat, the hysteric with the hoard of beans, the religious doomsayer. But in recent years survivalism has expanded to more affluent quarters, taking root in Silicon Valley and New York City, among technology executives, hedge-fund managers, and others in their economic cohort.

Last spring, as the Presidential campaign exposed increasingly toxic divisions in America, Antonio García Martínez, a forty-year-old former Facebook product manager living in San Francisco, bought five wooded acres on an island in the Pacific Northwest and brought in generators, solar panels, and thousands of rounds of ammunition. “When society loses a healthy founding myth, it descends into chaos,” he told me. The author of “Chaos Monkeys,” an acerbic Silicon Valley memoir, García Martínez wanted a refuge that would be far from cities but not entirely isolated. “All these dudes think that one guy alone could somehow withstand the roving mob,” he said. “No, you’re going to need to form a local militia. You just need so many things to actually ride out the apocalypse.” Once he started telling peers in the Bay Area about his “little island project,” they came “out of the woodwork” to describe their own preparations, he said. “I think people who are particularly attuned to the levers by which society actually works understand that we are skating on really thin cultural ice right now.”

In private Facebook groups, wealthy survivalists swap tips on gas masks, bunkers, and locations safe from the effects of climate change. One member, the head of an investment firm, told me, “I keep a helicopter gassed up all the time, and I have an underground bunker with an air-filtration system.” He said that his preparations probably put him at the “extreme” end among his peers. But he added, “A lot of my friends do the guns and the motorcycles and the gold coins. That’s not too rare anymore.”

quote:

One measure of survivalism’s spread is that some people are starting to speak out against it. Max Levchin, a founder of PayPal and of Affirm, a lending startup, told me, “It’s one of the few things about Silicon Valley that I actively dislike—the sense that we are superior giants who move the needle and, even if it’s our own failure, must be spared.”

To Levchin, prepping for survival is a moral miscalculation; he prefers to “shut down party conversations” on the topic. “I typically ask people, ‘So you’re worried about the pitchforks. How much money have you donated to your local homeless shelter?’ This connects the most, in my mind, to the realities of the income gap. All the other forms of fear that people bring up are artificial.” In his view, this is the time to invest in solutions, not escape. “At the moment, we’re actually at a relatively benign point of the economy. When the economy heads south, you will have a bunch of people that are in really bad shape. What do we expect then?”

pig slut lisa posted:

This paragraph made me think of the recent New Yorker article about "Doomsday Prep for the Super-Rich". The dynamic you describe re: feelings about one's wealth, collective vs. individual responsibility, etc. play out in a fascinating way for some of the super wealthy:

shrike82 posted:

My views on money and happiness have changed over the past 5 years. My partner and I make just above 300K in our mid thirties with a peer group working in finance/tech in NY making the same. I used to buy into libertarianism ie low taxes and personal responsibility where you deserve your wealth. This is rampant in those two industries and honestly the FI movement. But after spending a stint in London and Berlin, I think US society is fundamentally hosed when it comes to wealth and views around it. We've actually been thinking of moving to Berlin because of that.

shrike82 posted:

Has anyone told you about the group of tech billionaires that have been pouring money into R&D whether we live in a simulation and if so, how to escape it? Or that Peter Thiel wants to inject himself with young people's blood?

Crazy Mike posted:

As a poor middle class guy I would like to know more about your insights into the difference in wealth attitudes between the US, London, and Berlin. In what ways are London and Berlin better or worse? I've heard there is a lot of real estate and too many immigrants problems in London and that Berlin favors renters more than owners significantly.

I've noticed that the more wealth I get the less charitable I become. I've read this is normal for people who have some money but are not super rich and will change when my wealth climbs to a number much larger than I could use and then I will tend to think more altruistically and big picture. At what point did you realize being significantly more altruistic was more important than maximizing your personal comforts?

shrike82 posted:

1) I don't think I've become more 'altruistic'. I'm just sick of the FYGM libertarian bro-ism rampant in finance/tech, partially due to my loss of faith in the belief that sweat and intelligence = success.

shrike82 posted:

Not sure Hillary is a great example considering her long-term ties to finance. Anyway D&D is a better forum if you're still bitter about the elections.

shrike82 posted:

I used to buy into libertarianism ie low taxes and personal responsibility where you deserve your wealth. This is rampant in those two industries and honestly the FI movement. But after spending a stint in London and Berlin, I think US society is fundamentally hosed when it comes to wealth and views around it. We've actually been thinking of moving to Berlin because of that.

EAT FASTER!!!!!! posted:

More evidence pointing toward the end of growth. I don't know why you're estimating 7% returns over time, because you're not going to be able to achieve those kinds of returns.

EAT FASTER!!!!!! posted:

More evidence pointing toward the end of growth. I don't know why you're estimating 7% returns over time, because you're not going to be able to achieve those kinds of returns.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/death-rates-rise-for-wide-swath-of-white-adults-1490240740

Combine this with evidence that, over a 3 month period, fully 1 in 10 adult Ohioans was prescribed opioids and we're in the midst of an epidemic of unprecedented proportions. Labor force participation among men aged 25-55 is down to nearly 60%. Who cares what the unemployment rate is when your population suffers this kind of malaise. When nearly 4 in 10 men in their prime working years is not even seeking work, you're going to have a bad time.

EAT FASTER!!!!!! posted:

Dwight Eisenhower posted:

No man, you don't understand.

After all the decades of socialist prediction at the unsustainable growth of Capitalism that didn't call the end date accurately, THIS TIME IT'S DIFFERENT

coffeetable posted:

here's a quick way to decide whether an event is likely to endanger capitalism:

• is the event more destructive than the second world war?
  

EAT FASTER!!!!!! posted:

I mean, I hope it's not, but we don't have any real clear reason why growth continues unabating in the face of demographic shifts and cultural changes over the last (depending on your perspective) 200(ish) years. It certainly didn't carry on at this clip much before that.

EAT FASTER!!!!!! posted:

Fair enough, I don't really want to sound like some nutty gold bug or yell myself hoarse that the sky is falling but the ongoing abandonment of the labor market by men in their working primes (and the slight uptick in their untimely death) does seem to me somewhat spooky, like in late '07 when people started failing to pay their phone bills and you wondered, "wait a second are we about to go into a recess-OH HOLY poo poo."

And rather conveniently, with a nice stable job in the prime of my life I don't really have to be sure about it one way or another, but it's a little menacing.

Dwight Eisenhower posted:

You are getting a reinforcing influence from your macroecon professor yelling at the sky; you need to counterbalance that with examining evidence that contradicts his thesis.

The U.S. is unhealthy and needs some serious policy adjustments to get healthy from moral imperatives.

But a reduction in labor pool combined with a high mortality rate in middle age can go lots of places in terms of economic consequence. It might lead to a reduction in economic consumption and stymied growth of GDP. It might lead to a reduction in long term liabilities for e.g. SS and Medicare. It might lead to increased wages for those workers who are available in the labor pool. An increase in wages for a cohort of individuals who have been largely experiencing economic starvation may lead to less disciplined consumption when that cohort's incomes increase. It might lead to extended frugality for their lifespans that kneecaps consumption and consequently economic growth.

So yeah, it's worth contemplating an end to growth, but it's not a sure thing and it's definitely not like there's any evidence that Millenials are doing a better job of not spending to their incomes than any other generation.

Dwight Eisenhower posted:

- 2008 Financial Crisis is peak capitalism, it's gonna burn down from here!
- Oil is running out and only getting more expensive, it undergirds all our growth, we're hosed!
- All this growth is propped up by a housing bubble we're in the middle of, if that bubble bursts, so will the growth!
- Noone's buying American anymore, when everyone's buying Japanese cars growth will stop in the U.S.!
- Computers are taking people's jobs, can't continue growth with high unemployment!
- The national debt is growing so fast it will overwhelm our GDP, and growth will stagnate with it!

shrike82 posted:

A common model for forecasting equity returns either on an individual level or market level is based on dividend yield + div growth (with adjustments for stock buybacks).

Mofabio posted:

- Somebody invents a machine that captures carbon and turns it into food, millions globally quit their jobs without starving to death, economy shrinks, banks go under, people are thrown out of work, more people use machine for survival, capitalism dies, factories are re-entered under conditions of socialism

lol

Jeffrey of YOSPOS posted:

I'm not sure what we're talking about here - my point is mostly that dividend payouts aren't really relevant to whether or not you make money trading equities. If you're talking about using them as a predictive factor rather than the income you get from the dividend payout itself, perhaps, but if there's no growth, there's not going to be dividend growth either. I don't think that's what the poster was talking about.

shrike82 posted:

You seem to be under the misapprehension that growth (earnings or economic) is the only source of equity returns. That's not true. To use a contrived example, you could have a firm with zero real growth still showing positive total equity returns, div + capital appreciation.

Also, over the entire history of US equities 1870 till now, if you look at the building blocks of equity returns, div yields have been a larger component of returns than earnings growth or P/E expansion.

Jeffrey of YOSPOS posted:

I'm not sure what we're talking about here - my point is mostly that dividend payouts aren't really relevant to whether or not you make money trading equities. If you're talking about using them as a predictive factor rather than the income you get from the dividend payout itself, perhaps, but if there's no growth, there's not going to be dividend growth either. I don't think that's what the poster was talking about.

Cast_No_Shadow posted:

The insta price drop for divi payment is also interesting. It make sense in our world. The company has declined in value by the amount paid out and cannot use that capital for other things (ie. More growth). In a hypothetical zero growth situation though it looks strage. Say my company sells an insurance product. This year I sold 5 million policies and made $1bn profit and pay $500m divi. My stock drops. Im in a no growth hypothetical but I manage to keep all my customers so next year I also pay 500m dividend. Logically (aside from any residual priced in growth) my stock price must have recovered or i will dividend myself to 0, despite the total lack of growth.