This is the issue with the genre of "the poverty line is too low" -- fine, maybe it's 1.5x the SPM threshold or whatever. When you adjust it back that just means that *even more* people were poor according to that anchored threshold in the past

(guy standing up meme) saying true facts about the world is an expression of values, as is rejecting true facts about the world, and the former set of values is better

You are probably not going to write down the correct model. You might not even know you are writing down a model (implicitly)!

Much easier (I mean this sincerely) to just pay the fixed costs of figuring out how to access the microdata

There's also a fun lesson here for the microdata heads: trying to answer these types of questions with just aggregate data is *way harder* than just using appropriate microdata. If you have the microdata, all you need to do is calculate some summary stats, if you don't you need to build a model.

The other fun thing is how much dude *almost* gets to some fundamental insights -- he comes close to learning about how to capture relative poverty, the differences in the distributions of consumption vs income, savings rates, etc. but keeps trucking ahead with bad math until he lands in absurdia

There are regional price differences applied under the hood on the SPM, but this is an active area of research, definitely can be improved (as the various CNSTAT committees have noted)

The SPM threshold for a family of 4 (as in OP) is around 40k -- this ends up being about 1/3 of median income for this family size, which is a pretty typical way of capturing relative poverty in the literature.

This is not what tech guy is saying,l (because that would require subject matter expertise), but there is a smart version of this where you assign lifecycle and family size specific poverty thresholds and do redistribution based on that -- which probably does back you into subsidizing child care

I support moving the department of energy to Detroit solely so that the first secretary to hold an all hands town hall can say "what up doe?" And it would be culturally appropriate

Composition matters though, the people who are gone are largely either the newest youngest employees or longer term people who have tons of org-specific human capital

The twist is that at least millenarian evangelical Christianity has an ethos, AGI discourse is just vaguely spiritual brain rot -- rapture for nerds gives it too much credit

Gotta fit in now that I'm back working in Ann arbor

If lower income young adults are increasingly living at home or with roommates, then the remaining young adult householders are compositionally different. If this effect is strong enough, it can lead to a sign change

This sort of effort to avoid human contact in any other context would rightly be a sign of debilitating mental illness

When people say they believe in meritocracy they are just saying that they believe themselves to be meritorious