----- Original Message ----- From: "Russell Sherman" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Monday, September 23, 2002 6:37 PM Subject: Re: Housing Out of Reach
> > >From: "Rik Burke" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > >Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > >To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > >Subject: Re: Housing Out of Reach > >Date: Tue, 24 Sep 2002 00:32:13 +0100 > > > >Erik said: > > > > > > Well, it's not quite random. It's relevant, in the way I argued. Do > >you > > > > disagree with the conclusions I drew from it? > > > > > > Yes. As I said, it is irrelevant. Maybe I should have been less > > > glib. I'll try again. You had my interest until you started quoting > > > irrelevant statistics. Then you lost it. It is better to give no > > > statistics that irrelvant statistics. If you want to make a point to me, > > > you'll need to quote relevant statistics. Otherwise, I will probably bow > > > out of the discussion. > > > >Fair enough. But glib is also thowing back an argument in someone's face > >without explanation, to my mind. > > > >I don't mind you taking issue with my extrapolations (and I note you've not > >taken issue with anything else I raised in my original mail). I fully > >admitted what I'd said wasn't *directly* applicable as soon as you and > >others asked. My point, however, I think still stands. Which was that 60% > >of > >the US population earn les than twice the minimum wage, or thereabouts. And > >the fact that they aren't a one-parent family doesn't mean that it's easy > >for a single person with no kids to survive. If you want to take issue with > >that, fair enough, I'm interested to hear your views on this. I'm not > >claiming I know everything about the matter. But coming at me all verbal > >guns blazing isn't convincing. > > > >Convince me that the orginal stat was irrelevant. I don't want a slanging > >match here, I want to learn. > > > >And if I'm sure enough about my position, then to educate. But believe me > >when I say I'm feel on the back foot. > > > >Rik. > > > Just a run-down: > The original stat is irrelevant because: > - Less than 40% of the US is single-parent two-child househoulds, > therefore there's no proven overlap. > > "60% of the US population earns less than twice the minimum wage" is a > relevant statistic, if you can show that the majority or even more than 40% > of people cannot live on that. Actually, that statistic alone is worth > something, but the addendum of the one-parent two-child comment made it seem > (to me at least) like you were trying to prove something that wasn't there. > > Sum up: > "60% of people under 2x minimum wage" = bad > "A Family of one parent and two children cannot subsist on that" = > irrelevant > > The conclusion you drew was also rather unsubstantiated, as it depended on > the one-parent two-child required income. That's (I believe) why it's not a > fair conclusion. > > -Russell Well, let me try to extrapolate from some numbers. We have the mean income for a single mom with children: There are 12.5 million of these families, and their mean income was 28.1k in 2000. This is a tremendous increase from 1998, when it was just 24.4k. Now, we don't know have the mean size of the family from this statistic. But, I'd bet dollars to donuts its close to 2. I can give all sorts of reasons for that, including the mean fertility rate (2.1), and the number of women who don't have children. The data are at http://www.census.gov/hhes/income/income00/inctab1.html Dan M. _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
