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vgr's profile
Venkatesh Rao
Venkatesh Rao
Venkatesh Rao
@vgr

Tweets

Venkatesh Rao

@vgr

Conversational account. For work follow @ribbonfarm, @breaking_smart, @artofgig. Tweets are 90% vacuous views, apathetically held. Mediocritopian. IKEA builder.

Los Angeles, CA
venkateshrao.com
Joined August 2007

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    1. Scott Allen‏ @ScottAllen Oct 13
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      Replying to @vgr

      A $1.6M home on a $400K household income, w/young kids, is how you end up house poor. The conventional wisdom that your mortgage should be up to 25% of your gross income is ridiculous. More like your total housing costs. That house is about 20% more than they can afford. (1/n)

      1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes
    2. Scott Allen‏ @ScottAllen Oct 13
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      Replying to @ScottAllen @vgr

      And those daycare and preschool costs are off the charts. That's high-end even for Manhattan or San Francisco. (2/n)

      1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes
    3. Scott Allen‏ @ScottAllen Oct 13
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      Replying to @ScottAllen @vgr

      The rest is actually all pretty reasonable for a middle class family of four. (Actually, a $350 car payment sounds pretty good. And even that assumes only one car payment at a time.) (3/n)

      1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes
    4. Scott Allen‏ @ScottAllen Oct 13
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      Replying to @ScottAllen @vgr

      But just a slightly less expensive home and more reasonable childcare choices would shave $1,500-$2,000 off that budget. At which point they're hardly "barely scraping by". (4/n)

      1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes
    5. Scott Allen‏ @ScottAllen Oct 13
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      Replying to @ScottAllen @vgr

      Of course, none of that takes into account what happens when you get laid off, can't find suitable work for 12+ months, coronavirus hits, COBRA coverage runs out, you have unexpected major medical expenses, etc. It sounds wealthy, until suddently it isn't. (5/5)

      1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes
    6. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Oct 13
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      Replying to @ScottAllen

      The point is, there's people making an order of magnitude less and still staying alive and complaining less, who could use more humane taxpayer-funded support. It's a no-brainer that it's better to save one family from starvation than another from bank repo of a too-big house

      1 reply 0 retweets 1 like
    7. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Oct 13
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      Replying to @vgr @ScottAllen

      The people in this notional family have made choices as you point out -- too much home, too-high-end childcare etc etc. They've been enabled to make these bad (for them and society) choices by bad incentives. They're not helpless. They can make new choices under new incentives.

      1 reply 0 retweets 1 like
    8. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Oct 13
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      Replying to @vgr @ScottAllen

      I honestly find the presumption in the original that this notional 400k lifestyle should somehow have a privileged level of security and immune to the precarities that affect the rest of us almost offensive. Yeah shit happens. Jobs are lost. Incomes are lost. Welcome to life.

      1 reply 0 retweets 1 like
    9. Scott Allen‏ @ScottAllen Oct 13
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      Replying to @vgr

      True. But the counter-argument is that at that level, neither are they worthy of any special obligation or penalty. I can honestly make the case for either side of this argument.

      2 replies 0 retweets 0 likes
    10. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Oct 13
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      Replying to @ScottAllen

      Under normal circumstances I’d be inclined to bothsides this too, and give some of the benefit of doubt to the wealthy but we happen to be at a historically high level of social stress (cf Turchin theories) that correlate to serious breakdown.

      1 reply 0 retweets 1 like
      Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Oct 13
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      Replying to @vgr @ScottAllen

      Ie I think it’s time to load ALL the benefit of doubt in one direction. For 30 years it’s been loaded the other way, cf welfare-queen type narratives. The socially safety net has been systematically dismantled.

      2:34 PM - 13 Oct 2020
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      • Scott Allen
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        2. Scott Allen‏ @ScottAllen Oct 13
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          Replying to @vgr

          Yup. I agree. I was already starting to lean that way seeing the dark side of economic disparity. @AndrewYang's campaign opened my eyes to how much worse it's likely to get w/o drastic measures. The pandemic is just a small taste of it.

          1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes
        3. Scott Allen‏ @ScottAllen Oct 13
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          Replying to @ScottAllen @vgr @AndrewYang

          Capitalism assumes the premise that there will always be a viable market for labor as axiomatic. Might go up or down a bit, but still a fundamental truth. But what happens when the market value of 1/3 of the workforce goes to ZERO? That challenges a 1st principle of capitalism.

          1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes
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