Lumifer comments on On Walmart, And Who Bears Responsibility For the Poor - LessWrong

13 Post author: ChrisHallquist 27 November 2013 05:08AM

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Comment author: Lumifer 23 September 2015 06:12:10PM *  2 points [-]

having more savings

I don't know. You're talking about the propensity to save and -- at the minimum-wage levels of income -- it's not obvious to me that it's correlated with income.

We can throw images back and forth ("Now she has money left after buying food and she'll put into a savings account!" vs. "Now she'll just buy a bigger TV and fancier clothes ending with the same credit card debt!"), but I suspect that economics papers with relevant data exist. I also suspect that the results will show high variance and dependence on the prevailing culture (e.g. compare average savings rates in the US and China).

Comment author: gjm 24 September 2015 02:01:30AM 0 points [-]

propensity to save

And ability. The higher your income, the more of it is somewhat discretionary and the easier it is to save more.

I agree that there is almost certainly real research on this, but evidently neither of us has read it yet :-).