[kayaeb]

Living paycheck to payckeck with a new phone every 2 years, a new car lease upgrade every 5, a mortgage on a 3 bedroom house, and eating out 4 times a week, and 1000 TV channels is hardly what someone would consider 'poor.' It's just sustainably stressful and largely optional. This is why I feel the paycheck-to-paycheck metric/rhetoric is obnoxious, on 100k a year I can live paycheck-to-paycheck if I so desire, on 20k a year I can live at 75% of my means and save 400$+ as well. People's personal choices are not a comment on the economy, they're a comment on the fiscal education system. I personally save about 33% of my paycheck on 32k per year in one of the top 10 most expensive global cities.

[salty_biscuits]

Look at health outcomes, us has a declining life expectancy, china has almost caught up and will probably overtake soon. Is that just fiscal education?

[kayaeb]

I said that not having 400$ is a failure of fiscal planning and doesn't indicate that the population is poor.

Declining life expectancy is not an indication that the population is poor either. Consider that obesity, which is linked to higher mortality rates, did not become an issue until the 1900s in countries that passed wealth thresholds allowing such a problem at scale. Similarly with allergies, car crash fatalities, lead poisoning in paint, any number of life-shortening effects come from wealth in a society and are counterbalanced by improving health care levels.

[salty_biscuits]

I would expect that declining life expectancy is over-represented in the poorest stratum of society (but I will look this up to be sure). It is not going to be rich kids getting anaphylaxis that are making up the numbers. Even obesity prevalence will be a function of the SES of the individual within the population. Same with drug abuse etc, etc. If these things are getting worse while economic indicators for the country overall are positive, then it shows that inequality within the country is getting worse in real ways.

[ineedasername]

I was with you on car crashes & lead paint, but how do allergies come from a wealthy society? Or do you mean that only in a wealthy society are there resources/medical infrastructure available to diagnose them?

[salty_biscuits]

It would be a reference to the hygiene hypothesis, that being too "clean" leads to lack of exposure to things we evolved to encounter in the environment (worms mostly) which causes the immune system to go a bit wrong, causing allergies and autoimmune conditions.

[ineedasername]

Ah, okay. I've heard that before but thought it was basically fringe science. My assumption has simply been that allergies always existed like this, but those with more severe ones died off very young and the concept of "allergy" somewhat non existent. I'll admit the possibility though, ever if I'm very reluctant to lump it together with more obvious wealth-associatated issues.

[rayiner]

Life expectancy for Asian Americans is 87 years. That’s about a decade longer than China, and longer than Singapore, Japan, etc.

[adventured]

> Is that just fiscal education?

Given how small the US decline is, were China to stop the massive supplies of fentanyl they're intentionally allowing to pour into the US, that decline would probably arrest. The Chinese fentanyl is killing people at a young age, which hammers the life expectancy calculations.

Remind me how China feels about what was done to them in the Opium Wars.

The US isn't alone in this however. Britain is starting to see declining life expectancies. Is China better off than Britain? It's laughable.

"UK life expectancy drops while other western countries improve"

https://www.nhs.uk/news/medical-practice/uk-life-expectancy-...

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/mar/07/life-expecta...