A post for one reason. While I was reading https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-plutocrats-who-cried-commie, I had a thought which felt significant, and after closing the page, I remembered the thought but had no one to say it to.
Now, New York isn’t such a great place to live if you aren’t very affluent. Why? The problem isn’t crime, which is historically low. Nor is it the large number of immigrants, who clearly make the city better in many ways. No, it’s all about affordability, especially the cost of housing.
My thought was about the role that housing has in inequality. I think I pointed out in 2012 that housing costs are sensitive to inequality because it's like a bunch of tiny monopolies on the housing in a particular location (isn't there a saying that the most important things in real estate are location, location, location?). So: I have spent probably 80%+ 70%+ of my lifetime income on housing. Most of the money I earned was from the military, with about $30k savings when I left. My housing costs were around $500 per month; my food costs were less than $150 per month (I remember emailing my friend saying that my costs were about what a middle-income family in China spent); my phone bill was probably $5 per month; and my Internet costs were around $70 per month, lower at the start. (I continued to pay this Internet bill while I was living outside, due to the difficulty of cancelling my contract.) This lasted me two and a half years (I guess a significant amount was spent on hotels during the two weeks after I tried to meet Mei in 2010; $60 to $100 per night, or over $1k).
So, of course I was aware that poor people can be be poor because housing costs are high. But other people might not truly understand this, or know that I know it.
Paul Krugman's last post on his New York Times blog:
It says,
to a first approximation, workers are paid their marginal product.
I would disagree: the basic assumption is that people are paid in rough proportion to the value they generate for a business, but the work that a business does may provide negative value to society (like a scam center), and describing it as a "first approximation" exaggerates the accuracy of this relationship. (A recent bookmark: What's the most creative employee misconduct you've seen? : r/work)
This means that if increased transfers induce some people to work less, it also causes them to earn less, so that the rest of society isn’t any worse off
I didn't understand this at first, but I guess "not worse off" is about the fact of people working less (with the title as context); it is not talking about the wealth transfers themselves.
aside from the taxes they pay, increased effort by the very rich to a first approximation makes no difference to everyone else, because the increase in output is fully captured by higher top incomes.
I think this shows that Paul Krugman did not have an understanding of why "rich people working less helps the poor" when he wrote this.
I did not include taxes in my simple model, but I note that in a recent paper I came across, Inequality’s drag on aggregate demand: The macroeconomic and fiscal effects of rising income shares of the rich | Economic Policy Institute, it said that the very rich save money at 60 times the rate of poor people.
by 2018, the top 1% were securing 16.4% of income (income before taxes and benefits), up from 8.9% in 1979. And they were saving 30.6% of their income, over 60 times as much as the bottom fifth of households.
In checking Paul Krugman's posts, I also saw he had promoted Jared Bernstein, on whose posts I commented in 2011 and 2012 and whom I also tried emailing again a year ago. I must comment on the fact that Jared Bernstein only has 1.3k followers on Chirp Club with his new account, and many of his posts have zero engagement. (I had to ask an 'AI' what "sup/dem" in one of his posts meant, and I am sure some other people who read it were also confused.)
In doing so, I saw https://econjared.substack.com/p/whos-spending-and-what-does-that which quotes that,
The highest-earning 10 percent of households are responsible for 22 percent of personal consumption. The top 20 percent of households spend 35 percent of the total. [...] The bottom 60 percent of earners represent 45 percent of consumption and hold only 15 percent of wealth.Grouped this way, the top 10% only spend 3 times as much as the bottom 60% on average, which shows how the rich can save "60 times as much" as the poor.
So: this is with current taxes. One could think of taxes as enforced spending, but even with this enforced spending, the rich save a lot more, and spend a lower share of their income (naturally, or they would not be rich).
So I am justified in omitting taxes from the model and still asserting that it is relevant to the real world.
This was a lot of words to describe one thought: the fact that I spent most of my income on housing.
Robin Wells does have her own English Wikipedia page, but the last 50 edits go back to 2012 and it's in only 6 other languages, while Paul Krugman's article has 500 edits since 2019 and has 75 languages (not surprising when he has a Nobel prize). I think she is 'black' and native American, but her Wikipedia article does not really say and isn't that important. (Her article does say, "For The Occupy Handbook, Wells served as guest editor and contributed an original article.")
Looking at history, one can identify winners and losers. Those people might not have felt like they were winners at the time — who won when the Black Death struck Europe? — but just as history is written by the winners of wars, history is also written by the people who are alive when that history is written, and most of history is about things in the distant past.
So if you were to look at the world now, and compare it to the world 14 years ago when I first shared this idea, you could identify people or groups who have 'won on average'. Individual people might die, and groups might lose when looking at the chance of someone in the group dying, but there is also quality of life which could be worse for a group with a lower chance of dying, and a high death rate can be balanced by a high birth rate.
How can one prove that people in a group that has been winning for the past 14 years (whichever groups those are) is stupid? Basically, you can't. But I still think it; that people who didn't share this idea are stupid. There is not much more to say about this.
Oh, before I published this, though: remember when I said that Sherine was stupid? The reader might ask themselves how I was able to conclude this. But then, I called other people stupid as well, like everyone in my email contacts who didn't share the idea, which to my knowledge at the time was all of them. But I said that Sherine was stupid even though I knew it was possible she had shared the idea. (Sherine said a certain thing after I said this to her, which someone who was reading her Chirp Club account at the time would have known, although I don't know if my message that she was stupid was publicly visible.)
The previous post has 86 views, if anyone cares about how this number has changed.
Edit: well, I wanted to say something about Jamie Johnson, so I will, even in an edit. My name: I probably used the name Misaki when commenting on his posts, not Taemojitsu. I remember looking him up a few years later, like maybe 2013~2018, and saw that he had gone to some event with an Asian female whom he didn't really know that well.
I wouldn't really say that I had the goal of making any males who saw this name think that I was female. I may have had the goal of making females think that I was female. But I will say that I think it would have been nice if people had a positive evaluation of Asian females.
When I saw news articles in 2014 that copies of the book about Anne Frank in Japanese libraries had been damaged by someone cutting them up, I thought it might have been the Japanese female that I sent some messages to on Chirp Club, who used the handle @TmkWarpaint, a reference to a band. It was almost certainly done by a Japanese person, not a foreigner. It seemed obvious that the message was that someone was opposed to secrecy and secret actions; Anne Frank (I never read the book about her) lived in secret for some time, illegally hiding from the authorities.
But other than that collection of incidents, which might have been done by someone who is female, and the events in Korea which have no incontrovertible connection to this idea such as the 'nut rage' incident, I do not see anything by anyone who is Asian and female that people would find praiseworthy. I had said to Mei that I thought she might be smarter than I was, but to my knowledge she has never said anything on the topic of this idea to anyone, including of course to me.
So there is nothing that would support my wish that people would see Asian females more favourably.
Second edit: I tried the automatic Google Search links feature, and one of the links it made was to "perceptions of Asian females", which gave a featured snippet of "In media, East Asian women may be stereotyped as exceptionally feminine and delicate "Lotus Blossoms", or as Dragon Ladies," which like all non-offensive stereotypes is just so funny. Like, the 'frail princess' tactic. Anyway. When I first moved to Seattle to live with my oldest sister in 2005, I remember she commented that on a certain street, one street away from her place of work, a murder had occurred within the previous year and this was her basis to recommend avoiding that street.
I was recently re-recommended [332K views, 12 Aug 2025]Inside America's Robbery Capital - YouTube, which now has 1m+ views, and checked it again to read the comments. Like, someone saying how they knew an ambulance driver who worked there, and how they had stopped asking that friend what they saw on the job. Or another person saying how they had stopped doing service calls to homes in a dangerous area. This is an extreme, but my sister had suggested she viewed even a single murder as unacceptable. So, I don't know what crime is like in New York now, but I still think of Kitty Genovese who died there in 1964. Some people can still enjoy life in the robbery capital of the US; others can enjoy life while there is a lower, but still significant rate of violent death. Others feel compelled to reduce the risk of crime even when it already seems low.
I don't know if my sister fits into the last category. She did email me the link around Nov or Dec 2012 about lowered work efficiency from long hours. And she did, in the last 10 years, buy me a box of Cheez-its when I moved back to California, after I had suggested in an email that a $2 or $3 box of Cheez-its was better than a $10 restaurant meal, and she bought me a tooth brush after I forgot mine when I went to Hawaii for my sister's wedding — showing an understanding of the fact that I was poor. And, more to the point, I don't know who else might fit into the category of viewing a murder rate that's 10 times the rate in Japan as unacceptable. (I just checked, and it would seem New York has a rate of ~15 times Japan.)
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