Now I’d be tempted to use median home price of the lowest quartile.
Just considering the oozy squishy rubber band of prices the housing market represents in different economic strata is giving me some indigestion. There is very little bedrock in any economic number. The unit of account we think of as the dollar or of value is quite nebulous
@GhostOnTheHalfShell
Exactly, it's really important for people who want to understand the economic conditions of real people to struggle with this issue! There will always be some compromise, but the default used by most economists is far from optimal. @economics-that-works
@GhostOnTheHalfShell
In my mind what we ideally want is a kind of "minimal acceptable standard of living" price. Like, a 1 room 200sqft room with shared bathroom on a different floor and mold growth while eating dog kibble is straight up deep poverty level stuff. But at some point you're on the edge of "this is not poverty but it's not much more", and that's the number of dollars per day we want to use ideally. In general its not any fixed quantile. @economics-that-works
@GhostOnTheHalfShell
Even the lowest quartile in the Hamptons or Snowmass CO or whatever is luxury... So you have to come up with an estimate that's not quantile based. @economics-that-works
Hm. I would first ask why these are being grouped by locale that way. They’d be fit into a national level quantile (new word for me), then inspected from there (?)
@GhostOnTheHalfShell
The problem is that that sort of thing leads to looking at a family of four in San Francisco making $105,000 a year and saying these people are well above the national median income so they're upper middle class but in fact they can't survive without food stamps. @economics-that-works
There is no easy way out is there… Because now it’s Los Altos (because even more snooty) or SF bottom percentile vs somebody in rural Kentucky, Bakersfield or Button Willow.
@GhostOnTheHalfShell
That's exactly right. There is no easy way out, but there is the not-easy way out, and that's to start thinking about the definition you would like to use and to figure out how to estimate that quantity at least approximately. If no one is lower middle class in Snowmass then the lower middle class people commute to the lower middle class jobs and so there's geography and transportation that substitute etc... @economics-that-works
@GhostOnTheHalfShell
Here's another question of interest, if you look at say median dimensionless income vs age, in any given year it is some shape... But in the next year it's a new slightly different shape... What does the curve's evolution in time look like and what factors affect the trajectory. @economics-that-works
The graph is even more disquieting when you go to deciles. The real spread becomes absurd. I think @blair_fix did some article that sliced the data that way.