There’s not enough written about the basic problem with democracy and libertarianism: a large number of humans are incompetent at understanding the world well enough to make sane plans for any reasonable goals, and are unable to follow them even when they do.
“raising the sanity waterline” is a topic that comes up occasionally, but it’s overwhelming and depressing, and I know of no good ways to accelerate it.
By the way, it makes me angry that we talk about median and quintile incomes, and compare that to average debt. Comparing a stock to a flow is bad, and using an average for a non-normal distribution is a crime. We should compare income to median/quintile finance charges (in addition to total debt).
$1,000 to cover an emergency isn’t a measure of wealth, it’s a measure of liquidity. For this reason it makes sense to compare it to income. If you have $200,000 in student debt but still have a couple thousand in your checking account in case your car breaks down, you would count as having the money the way the survey was run. Using the word “savings” in that sentence was probably a bad choice on my part.
There’s not enough written about the basic problem with democracy and libertarianism: a large number of humans are incompetent at understanding the world well enough to make sane plans for any reasonable goals, and are unable to follow them even when they do.
“raising the sanity waterline” is a topic that comes up occasionally, but it’s overwhelming and depressing, and I know of no good ways to accelerate it.
By the way, it makes me angry that we talk about median and quintile incomes, and compare that to average debt. Comparing a stock to a flow is bad, and using an average for a non-normal distribution is a crime. We should compare income to median/quintile finance charges (in addition to total debt).
$1,000 to cover an emergency isn’t a measure of wealth, it’s a measure of liquidity. For this reason it makes sense to compare it to income. If you have $200,000 in student debt but still have a couple thousand in your checking account in case your car breaks down, you would count as having the money the way the survey was run. Using the word “savings” in that sentence was probably a bad choice on my part.