Normally too easy of a target, but this one post on this threadtakes him to a whole new level:
What does having a $5 net worth have to do with averages? A $5 net worth is something you’d expect of Haiti, not a first world country. That’s the “shocker” point of the article.
There seems to be an implicit assumption that a measurement must necessarily involve separating minority groups from the other. Fine, we understand that 50% of people are average or below average by any given measure. That has f-all to do with why demographics are overrepresented at the bottom or whatever, which Rand Rover seem to be implying must always be the case.
You are a psychologist’s wet dream, Rand Rover, with your head so far stuck up your ass that you actually think you’ll never lose your job, so you deal with this (and all your other fears) by saying that every bit of misfortune is everyone else’s fault, and therefore, misfortune can never happen to you. It must be a sad existence living with all that fear instead of dealing with these very real possibilities.
Where’s he wrong? First of all, $5 worth doesn’t say much about one’s lot in life, as has been pointed out in that thread. My girlfriend and I have the same lifestyle, but $40,000 difference in wealth, for one.
Second, if you start out by classifying things by the demographic they fall under, then yes, it IS an assumption that some demographic will be on the bottom- whether it’s a race, age, gender, or religion. SOMETHING has to be on the bottom.
Does he also hang the toilet paper so it comes off from under the roll?
Does he drive with one foot on the brakes, and constantly tap his foot on the brake to make the brake lights come on and annoy anyone driving behind him? (He should be killed, NOW, if he does this)
Heh, of all the things RR’s ever said, he’s being pitted for the most innocent.
All he’s saying here is that the statistic used isn’t a very meaningful measure (why is explained further in the thread by other people).
I dunno if he’s right, that’s the sort of thing accountants argue about and I’m not one. I asked whether it could be argued that “net worth” is a surrogate marker for financial health on average.
Heh. Granted, I could be totally misinterpreting his intent of that one particular post.
What actually pisses me off is his general ongoing attitude of “every bit of misfortune is 100% the individual’s responsibility, therefore it can’t happen to me” which is obviously borne from a coping mechanism to deal with a fear of failure, but I picked the wrong post to represent that. It’s a total and complete twisting of individualism – IMO, a big part of individualism is preparing for the worst. Rand Rover will be the first one to beg for socialism if Ayn Rand came back to life and became dictator.
I’ll readily admit that I picked the total wrong post to express my outrage. I should’ve picked the enchilada post instead.
The factoid as presented isn’t a statistical artifact - is that what bothers you?
But that is the point - it is hardly “shocking” to find out that poverty in the US has causes.
Single black women in the US in the age range presented are poor mostly for the same reasons other people are poor in the US - because they do stupid things like have children out of wedlock. I suppose RR is technically correct, in that somebody would end up at the bottom of any distribution of net wealth. So what?
That is the great thing about America, or one of them at least - poverty is an anomaly, something that is to be explained, instead of the normal human condition for most of recorded history. If you act like a poor person, by and large you wind up as a poor person. If you act like a middle class person, you wind up middle class.
True, but there are quite a few other countries where poverty is even more of an anomaly. I wouldn’t say that our relatively low poverty rate is anything to chest thump about.
