But that poster appears (according to the customer review at least) to be based on a totally different measure: income. One based on net worth might be the same, or it might not.
As stated above, net worth dramatically ‘penalizes’ the young, who may have significant negative net worth regardless of income; as such it isn’t necessarily a very good measure for social stratification, at least on its own.
IIRC (lost my copy years ago) the poster also reflects net worth, but only for the highest strata. It does not, however, break people down by age (except WRT retirees), only by income, gender, ethnicity, and broad occupational category. Which are very good measures for social stratification.
Certainly; though I thought the point being made in the post you quoted was that net worth isn’t a particularly meaningful measure, not that social stratification isn’t important.
I think the rest of your post akes some good points, but this part is bunk. The tax code encourages paying mortgage interest as opposed to paying rent, but not as opposed to not paying mortgage interest.
Where my mind went: One black woman is worth five black men? Yeah, probably. :d&r:
“A lot like” is not “the same.” There’s a world of difference between worth one already has & worth one can conceivably earn assuming a) continued health, b) additional full-time labor, & c) a market for that labor.
An annuity is simply owned, no matter what one does. Future potential earnings are very very conditional.
Do you understand that your first post in this thread (reproduced below) belies that?
All of which can be used to adjust the value of the “annuity,” as I pointed out in my post.
They are not saying that lower class single women have a low net worth; obviously lower class people of any demographic will have a lower net worth. They are saying that black single women have a low net worth. The shocking part is how different black women are than white women. In my mind, the questions this raises are really why do black women have so many children out of wedlock as compared to white women when it clearly is disadvantageous to do so.
You people are completely overstating the potential for a high income but low net worth. It’s really just an artifact of the recent college graduate that may have student loan debt. The older you get, the more that a low net worth with correlate to a poor lifestyle. High income doesn’t last forever. At some point these people are going to have to retire.
More an artifact of mortgage debt for folks in middle life, I’d have thought. It is easy to have a negative net worth if you own a $500,000 house, with 10% paid down & the rest borrowed.
Edit: following the recent housing bubble crash.
I don’t because it doesn’t. Please explain.
This statistic is for ages 36 to 49. If at the person’s current income level, they haven’t been able to accumulate any wealth why would you expect their remaining working years to be much better? If you are saving $0 every year, the NPV over the remaining working years isn’t going to amount to much of an asset.
Its only easy in light of recent developments.
Historically that $450,000 mortgage would be attached to a $500,000 house (with the $50K down payment being equity) and the house adding $15,000 (or more) of net worth annually to the homeowner.
They could be saving more than $0 a year, just not enough to outpace liabilities they’ve already incurred.
I wonder how much the number would fluctuate if we removed Oprah from the equation? 
The primary debt that should be causing younger people to have a negative net worth is student loan debt. I’m not an expert on them, but I believe that most student loans have terms from 7 to 15 years. Even if you went to law school for three years following undergrad, you should have paid off that debt by the time you are 40.
I know you are joking, but even if Oprah was included in the sample, the number would not fluctuate really at all considering the study used the median and not the mean.
Because at some point they can no longer reproduce.
No, I’m quite confident that Rand Rover’s point in the post I quoted was that social stratification isn’t important – that is, that (1) social stratification is inevitable, (2) therefore the details and the sociological and economic causes of any particular instance of it are “not really worthy of thinking a whole lot about.” The first is debatable; the second is flat wrong.
I did some quick math. If a person was incredibly unlucky and bought at the peak of the housing market (June 2006) and used a 30 year fixed rate loan (6.67% in June 2006), then they would be under water by $68,941.48. This uses the Case-Schiller Home Price Index which has the national home price at 72.2% of what it was at June 2006 as of December 2009. You would have paid down $20,058.52 in additional principal as of March 2010.