[lxgr]

Coming from a fan of the blog/newsletter, and with all due respect for publishing negative results and long-form writing about money as an aesthetic as much as a journalistic/educational endeavor:

This would have really benefited from a "tl;dr: I was wrong; that one bank branch really has a teller window on the second floor".

Still a worthwhile read if you enjoy the genre, but a small part of me wants my lunch break back that I spent reading this…

[pchristensen]

The point was that the mention of the 2nd floor teller window was an inconsequential detail that was enough to identify the branch in question, and a gateway to show off his obsessiveness for researching minutiae. But definitely a "genre" article more than his other, more informative ones.

[danso]

What's not clear to me is: why the confirmation that the NYMag writer's bank has a 2nd floor teller window is enough to mollify Patrick's intense skepticism that her $50k transaction happened like she asserts. If she was already going to torch her own reputation and journalism career to fabricate this scam story, why wouldn't she have the intrepidness to research what various Brooklyn banks look like? Or actually, why would a purported fabricator even bother to give that specific detail at all, which would make it easier for anyone (as Patrick attempted) to narrow down where the fakery did/didn't happen?

I mean the NYMag story was incredibly dumb and far-fetched, even compared to most scam stories. But the fact that she didn't write it pseudonymously, and gave the specific date that it happened, and also claimed to have called the police, that felt enough for me to give her the benefit of the doubt her story was more or less rooted in reality.

[BryantD]

It wasn't; the key part of the piece is the revelation that $50K was not in fact a huge sum of money for someone in her socio-economic class. The thing that caught Patrick's eye originally, if I'm reading correctly, was that she didn't get the usual "come back in a day so we can get the funds together" message.

I suspect although I can't be sure that this is one reason why he's elliptical in this piece. The core piece of information is that she misrepresented her wealth in the original article. Personally if I'd just been scammed I would also want to minimize myself as a target, so I can't blame her, but it's the discrepancy that caught his eye.

[danso]

> The core piece of information is that she misrepresented her wealth in the original article.

She does not misrepresent her wealth in her article. At no point does she claim to be scraping by. She states upfront that she has a gainfully-employed husband and a child and they live in Brooklyn, that she has $50k stowed away in an emergency savings account, and that she's been a financial columnist for the NYT and NYMag for around a decade.

Is it possible that such a New Yorker could have all those things while barely making in the middle-class? Sure, but an easy assumption in New York, and even Chicago, is that such a person is provided for means beyond their job income, e.g. maybe she or her husband worked at Goldman Sachs before their current careers, or come from rich families.

I too assumed that $50k was too big of a cash draw for any non-business account, but it didn't seem like a stretch to imagine that she fit the bank's profile of a wealthy customer (esp. at her young age). Patrick knows far more about the financial system than I do, so I have to assume his skepticism was founded in what he thought were widely applicable hard-coded rules and policy. I wish he would have spent a fraction of his word count telling us the assumptions/knowledge about bank rules that he had been misinformed on. Because this year-long multi-thousand dollar fraud investigation of his couldn't have just been because he didn't imagine a NYMag financial columnist might be wealthy?

[patio11]

She does not misrepresent her wealth in her article. At no point does she claim to be scraping by.

A direct quote:

> Initially, I was afraid that I wouldn’t be able to afford my taxes this year, but then my accountant told me I could write off losses due to theft. So from a financial standpoint, I’ll survive, as long as I don’t have another emergency — a real one — anytime soon.

I quote several more bits from the piece verbatim.

[danso]

And how is that a misrepresentation? How people feel about their own financial situations and risk exposure is very famously and firmly in the realm of "that's just your opinion". There's no clear or correct interpretation of what "from a financial standpoint, I'll survive, as long as I don't have another emergency", unless you know her personally and know what she considers to be an "emergency".

A much better signal is that when she reflects on how the stolen $50k could have been used, she imagines: "I could have paid for over a year’s worth of child care up front. I could have put it toward the master’s degree I’ve always wanted. I could have housed multiple families for months." Sure, just because she didn't say "I could have paid off my mortgage/student/car loans" doesn't mean she doesn't have those. But it's a far stretch to assert that her written viewpoint sounds like a typical middle-class/upper-middle-class American, nevermind definitively excludes her from being rich (or at least belonging to one of the hundreds of thousands of millionaire households in New York).

[jldugger]

> Sure, but an easy assumption in New York, and even Chicago, is that such a person is provided for means beyond their job income

Probably the biggest giveaway in the article was the $50,000 inheritance from a grandparent. When my grandparents died, they left the grandchildren a small amount ($500 each, IIRC), and the vast majority to their direct children. This seems standard to me, and if the ratios hold then she presumably stands to inherit far, far more in the future.

I find it hard to fault anyone for assuming people are like themselves in most ways. But maybe don't follow his twitter hot takes. Or twitter in general?

[rsynnott]

> The core piece of information is that she misrepresented her wealth in the original article

From the article:

> When recounted these same statements, my friend Byrne Hobart, who has actually lived among this social milieu before, laughed knowingly and said “Ah, family money.”

It wasn't a misrepresentation; it was just vague, and the author read it wrong.

[patio11]

You can put theses in the third paragraph but you can't force everyone to actually read them.

[lxgr]

Well, the phrase "I now doubt that account less" didn't evoke "this article outlines the non-refutation of a null hypothesis" for me when I initially read it.

After reading the article, sure, I can see that that's what was implied, but I can only say that it wasn't clear enough for me. I still enjoyed it for what it is, but I think I could have enjoyed it more if primed differently.