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by kens 611 days ago
Author here if anyone has questions. This is a bit different from my usual posts...
4 comments

Have you come cross more fine-grained data of wealth or income data? (i.e histograms with many bins across whole range).
Unfortunately, no. Wealth data is usually very coarse (quartiles or quintiles) or one data point, which makes it hard to do most of the analysis that I'd like to do.
Have you tried plotting it in log scale?
Why? So massive differences in wealth look significantly smaller? By graphing this in log scale you are admitting there is an "exponentially growing delta between rich and poor" and log makes it easier to even visualize (which is insane to begin with).
Now, it looks almost like a binomial distribution. Yet, an Uber driver may not feel like being in the same bucket as someone worth $499M.

The diagram makes the point but misses subtlety.

Disagree, the point is to visually show there is an exponential difference between LITERALLY EVERYONE (uber driver to Google engineer to VP) and like 100 people who have insane amounts of wealth. I agree Uber driver is not in the same bucket, but the way to fix it isn't going after VP its going after the other hump in the binomial where the wealth is being hoarded for generations.
I think the diagram on a linear scale makes the stark point that to Elon Musk, there is not really a difference between someone worth $499 and someone worth $499M, even though to me there is a massive difference between those people.
Additional wealth has diminishing marginal returns, obviously.
No, according to economic theory, the law of diminishing marginal utility generally does not apply to money. Please cite a source that says having more AUM somehow decreases potential yield. Sounds retarded. People say stuff that needs evidence then say obviously like its a source.
I think GP doesn't mean "returns" as in investment returns. I think they're talking about like... living. The utility of buying a second (or tenth) house/car/whatever is drastically lower return than the utility of buying your first one.
However, the utility of money starts to drastically increase once you reach a tipping point where it can start allowing you to wield real political power.

The graph of monetary utility may look like a logarithmic graph at first glance, but that's just because it's more like a C1 + (x-C2)^3 graph where you haven't followed x far enough to the right.

"The Marginal Utility of Income"

> We have thus confirmed the (cardinalist) assumption of nineteenth century economists that marginal utility of income declines with income.

https://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/dp0784.pdf

People say stuff that needs evidence then say "according to economic theory" like its a source.

(fwiw I agree that this isn't a good argument for a log scale)

oops, this thread's just been censored off the front page, better luck next time
Yeah, the "controversial" filter kicked in because the post has more comments than upvotes. I reverse-engineered the HN algorithm a few years ago: https://www.righto.com/2013/11/how-hacker-news-ranking-reall...
why?
Why is it dropping, or why 'better luck next time'?

The former is easy to answer. It's a hot, emotional topic and getting comments way faster than it's getting upvoted.

I meant why "censored". I guess I don't know how the algorithm works - I guess being downvoted or flagged.
I don't think it's getting censored intentionally, in the sense someone is taking that action specifically. It's falling quickly off the front page because the algorithm is biased against this kind of discussion. If it was getting killed by flags it would end up saying [flagged] in the headline as it disappeared. And you can't downvote submissions, so it's inferred from lack of upvotes.
Um, anyway for me to put in my money and see where I rank? I'd just love to know how bad things really are.