“laughable,” arguing that you can’t declare the majority of Americans impoverished because the suburbs they choose to live in are expensive, which is what Green did when he used the middle class suburb of Caldwell, New Jersey, as his median.
Yeah you’re right, this is verging on dishonest. The whole point of him picking Caldwell, NJ was to find an extremely median place to live and avoid accusations of cherry-picking San Francisco or Manhattan prices. Essex county is 13th out of 21 counties in NJ for income, NJ is the 11th largest state by population. I’m sure you could find something more mundane, but not that would affect the final numbers to any significant degree unless you were cherry-picking in the other direction.
Sure there’s lots of states with much lower property values, but you have to weight it based on where people actually live. Telling poor people to move to Buttfuck, ID and get a job there instead doesn’t work.
Yeah you’re right, this is verging on dishonest. The whole point of him picking Caldwell, NJ was to find an extremely median place to live and avoid accusations of cherry-picking San Francisco or Manhattan prices. Essex county is 13th out of 21 counties in NJ for income, NJ is the 11th largest state by population. I’m sure you could find something more mundane, but not that would affect the final numbers to any significant degree unless you were cherry-picking in the other direction.
Sure there’s lots of states with much lower property values, but you have to weight it based on where people actually live. Telling poor people to move to Buttfuck, ID and get a job there instead doesn’t work.