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signal comments on The Market for Lemons: Quality Uncertainty on Less Wrong - Less Wrong
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I conclude from the discussion that the term "rich" is too vague. The following is mine: I should be surprised to find many LWers who don't find themselves in the top percentage of the Global Richlist and who could not afford cryonics if they made it their lives' goal.
It looks like MOST of the descriptions people are using for "richness" are pretty vague, which I find to be weird since we actually have readily available numbers.
Median US individual income is $26,695 . Unless you want to claim that half of Americans are "poor" or lower class, you should probably start your middle class no lower than that.
(ETA: For a full-time worker over the age of 25 it's $39k, so you could maybe push it up to that, but it disregards a lot of people who are stuck in part time jobs, or are kept working at just below full time so that they don't have to be given benefits)
10%ers start at $82k. I think it would be silly to say someone in the top 10% of US earners isn't rich. Almost all STEM LWers I've met either make well above this, or work for a non-profit.
Not that I suggest that everyone adopt these definitions, but I usually use these words in the following meaning:
Rich -- "financially independent", you don't have to work if you don't want to and still have at least upper-middle-class lifestyle.
Upper-middle -- not worry about money too much, it's sufficient for comfortable and socially adequate lifestyle, but you need a high-paying job and can't really afford expensive extravagances.
Middle -- money is kinda OK, you can afford all the necessities and some (but not many) luxuries.
Lower-middle -- money is tight, you can afford most necessities, but few if any luxuries
Lower -- Paycheck to paycheck (if you have a job), no reserves, any crisis can thoroughly screw you up.
I just split people into "spends less than half of what I do," "reasonable," and "spends more than twice what I do." [/joke]
Yeah, these are also known as "poor bastards", "regular people", and "rich bastards" :-D
There are three different variables: income, consumption, and wealth, which confuse any discussion of economic class. Someone who is high-income, high-consumption, and low-wealth is probably working >40 hours a week at a professional job and worried about money, but also might be driving a fancy car and living in an expensive house.
In terms of life satisfaction, I get the sense that the primary variable that matters is wealth, but in terms of social status (for most groups), the primary variable that matters is consumption.
All true, but I wasn't trying to construct some sort of a comprehensive social stratification scheme. It's really just a quick list of what I mean when I'm using certain words.
I'm with you. I believe we use different meaning of rich. What do you mean by your own "rich"?
I can't really give a reason for this, but 100k dollars would be "rich" for me, and that includes a lot of luxuries, too.
The context was the famous observation that subjects of psychological studies etc. tend to be WEIRD (Western, educated, from industrialized, rich, and democratic countries). So "rich in comparison with most of the world's population" is probably the relevant criterion, and actually individual wealth as opposed to the wealth of the country you're in isn't really the point.
Although, if LW is mostly read by the WEIRD, having its content mostly written by and targeted at the WEIRD isn't necessarily a bad thing.
Just out of curiosity, do you mean $100k/year income or $100k assets or what?
(Looking again at the definition of WEIRD, it occurs to me that it's immensely redundant, which isn't terribly surprising since the items in the list were presumably designed to make the WEIRD acronym possible. Industrialized nations and rich nations are more or less the same thing. Both correlate highly with being democratic. "Western" more or less implies all three. Most people in Western nations are highly educated by global standards, though I guess it's also true that subjects of psychology studies are better-educated than average even among Westerners. But "Psychology is WE" wouldn't have sounded as good as "Psychology is WEIRD".)
100k saved somewhere is the baseline, I don't know enough about American prices to say about how much extra stuff should be worth. The most reasonable addition I can come with is no debt, or payments.
On a side note, I never really understood the whole "$x a year" thing. There are so many expenses during the year itself that what you made the whole year is pretty much irrelevant.