chaosCruiser

A completely unrelated idea just popped in my head. There’s a reason why the Russian army is targeting the Ukrainian power grid.

Or maybe there are laws or regulations that would be triggered if you move the goal post. If you start reporting the number of poor people or their income in a different way, that could affect government spending. If that’s the case, there could be a lot of friction in trying to update the calculations.

The distribution will also give you a specific dollar value corresponding to that percentile, and then you can use the cost of living statistics to interpret it. If you say that 20% of households earn less than 35 k$ is that 35 big or small? The income distribution alone won’t tell you that. In relation to the rest of the population, it’s small, but what can you actually buy with that? Interpretation requires digging into the cost of living statistics. Once you combine the two, you’ll be able to tell that the lowest 20% are struggling.

Percentile based classification is good because it is simple and it won’t do the interpreting for you. If you can afford to eat, but you’re not eating meat every week, is that really poverty or not? If you can travel, but you’re not doing that driving a Ferrari or sitting on a private jet, are you really rich at that point? These are the kinds of questions the percentile approach avoids.

BTW the 2/3 median approach is really weird. The number of people it involves changes every year, but at least it’s tied to a median which actually tells you something. Using the highest income as a benchmark makes even less sense, because that number changes radically every year based on what a few billionaires are doing. It won’t tell you anything about the rest of the population. Using a wild number like that as a basis of any kind is pretty much useless. Besides, the highest income of the population is really far from the rest, because the distribution has an extremely long tail.

The lowest 20% could be referring to the distribution, instead of specific dollar values. This way, 20% of the people are always in that category regardless how much they make. In statistics, this is called the twentieth percentile, and it’s a handy way of dealing with messy distributions like this.

In a society with great wealth inequality, the 20th percentile will be very low. If there’s more equality, it will be higher.

I would say it’s probably close to zero, depending on what physics actually allows. If FTL travel turns out to be completely impossible, then it’s exactly zero. If some sort of FTL travel is possible, it’s slightly above zero. If you can travel faster than 10^9 c, that’s when distances stop being a huge problem. Before that though, distance ruins my dreams.

Care to elaborate? Why is it zero?

But the other planets are probably absurdly far away. The space happens to be expanding as well, so that distance is also growing rapidly. If FTL travel isn’t possible, nobody will ever visit those worlds, and they can’t visit us. Just travelling at 1c or even 1000c won’t be much help either. The distances sure truly vast.

Even when you want to shoot some pigs? I always thought that being a mafia boss would be ideal for that.

Really? I should totally watch that.

So, if you’re gay, there would be a clear incentive to become a cop. If another gay guy breaks your heart one day, you can just throw him in jail as a part of doing your job.