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Owning an iPhone is the Number-One Way To Guess if You're Rich or Not, Research Finds (businessinsider.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: In the United States, if you have an Apple iPhone or iPad, it's a strong sign that you make a lot of money. That's one of the takeaways from a new National Bureau of Economic Research working paper from University of Chicago economists Marianne Bertrand and Emir Kamenica. "Across all years in our data, no individual brand is as predictive of being high-income as owning an Apple iPhone in 2016," the researchers wrote. There are details and caveats to the research, but the economists found that owning an iPhone gave them a 69% chance to correctly infer that the owner was "high-income," which they defined as being in the top quartile of income for households of that type -- like single adult or couple with dependents, for example.
I know a better way: owning a Ferrari is definitely even more precise! I am pretty sure the correlation for Ferrari -> rich is close to 100%.
And on my one person sample (me), it's 100% more accurate since I don't own an iPhone (yuck!) but do have a Ferrari (albeit an old one.)
Black holes occur when God divides by zero.
"no individual brand is as predictive of being high-income as owning an Apple iPhone in 2016,"
Seriously? Owning a Bentley is a worse predictor of being high-income than owning an Apple iPhone? Are we sure there are no further qualifications here?
Attitudes make the difference between Space and Time: we want to MAX our temporal, and MIN our spatial extension.
It seems to me that owning an iPhone shows that you are more concerned about image over function/capability. Which is also a pretty strong indicator of being rich
If you're shopping online with your user agent set as
Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 6_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/536.26 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/6.0 Mobile/10A5376e Safari/8536.25
You might pay more than someone coming from Firefox or Chrome. This wont impact IE or Edge users as they prefer to shop in person for the most flavorful brand of crayon.
Good people go to bed earlier.
In Europe, it's mainly a sign that you're an obnoxious douche that wants others to think that you earn a lot of money.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Both iphones and Ferraris sometimes only predict that your parents are high income.
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The survey is based on HOUSEHOLD income. So kids living with their parents count as "rich" if the parents are "rich". Since all income counts, if the kids are employed, even in low wage jobs, they likely push their household over the threshold.
The main difference between households in the top quartile and bottom quartile is not wage or salary level, but NUMBER OF PEOPLE WORKING. In the bottom quartile, an average of 0.4 people are in full time employment. In the top quartile, an average of 2.1 people are employed full time.
So just rent a big house and live with lots of other employed people under one roof, and *POOF* you are rich. At least statistically.
You could've taken a few years off and traveled the world at your leisure, but you decided to buy an airplane and new car and iphone instead. You're simply a rich person choosing financial struggle.
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Ferraris, feh. Owning a senator is how to tell if you're rich or not.
Owning a Ferrari is a sign that you are going bald and have a small dick.
It has been that forever.
Owning a Bentley is a worse predictor of being high-income than owning an Apple iPhone?
Yup, because you might be seeing a 25%-er that owns a Ferrari instead. Or one who own a Maseratti. Or one who owns a Tesla Roadster with all the stupid options like SpaceX rockets. Or a Porsche. etc.
But all of them happen to own an iPhone, just like a significant chunk of all the other 25%ers (including that 25%ers who doesn't own any car and entirely relies on professional driver services (you know the services that UberBlack drivers actually do for a living when they're not moonlighting on Uber) )
--
More seriously : we're speaking about the to 25%ers here, not the trop 1%ers.
Given the way income inequality goes in the US (..or at least how it seems to us, when we read news in northern Europe...), that basically covers most of the people who aren't completely broke.
Not all of them happen to own super-car, and some of them aren't rich enough to afford one.
But all of the people in that range happen to have enough disposable income to afford an overpriced smartphone just because they like its design and the model is trendy. (So lots of people in that income bracket will pick an iPhone).
Below this range, people have less disposable income and will more thoroughly think benefits-vs-costs when picking up a smartphone. If they can afford one, they'll go with something surely less expensive and sometimes perhaps even with more features.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I live in Europe. I can roam the whole continent and probably a lot further too with the same SIM card.
-- Cheers!
They're talking about wealth - not income. And thanks to the low class mobility in the U.S., the number one way to become rich is to be born to rich parents.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
First you are right, conspicuous consumption like a Ferrari is a status symbol of the wealthy. The Iphone can be that too of course but that would not really account for it's ubiquity. Instead the greater your income the more you are aware that time/money substitutions. The greater you pay rate the more it makes sense to Rather than use your own time to do something you purchase a product that does it. With iphones there's no big surprises and they work well and if they don't apple has great service centers and there's even lots of other people who can service it too, parts are widely available, and whatever problem you have is probably been seen before since there's a wide userbase. So it's a wise choice if you prefer no hassles in your life.
Consider that almost nothing else in your life gets handles 50 times a day or engages your attention in so many ways. a 700 phone is $1 per day over 2 years . $1 per day for a hassle free phone ithat uses a lot of your time is a no-brainier. Besides that you probably have a $90 a month cell bill which means the cost of the phone is only 25% of the cost of cellular communications for you, so not a big factor. Incrementally, it's even less since you probably were going to get at least $350 phone.
One the otherhand if you earn minimum wage, you probably don't have that big cell bill, and if you have a cell it's going to be a cheap one.
So iphones make sense not as a status symbol (is it a status symbol if everyone around you also has one?) but as the right tool for the lifestyle of the upper income brackets.
thus same correlation but different logical path
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Ferraris, feh. Owning a senator is how to tell if you're rich or not.
In Russia, owning a President is how to tell if you're super-rich or not.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Iphones are not a status symbol, the only people who think they are status symbols are hopeless Apple fanboys.
Actually I'd say the only people who think (or hope) they are status symbols are people who are Apple haters. Given that each and every one of my grand parents (and yours too I'm betting) owns an iPhone or an iPad or both, I think we can pretty safely dispense with the myth that they are some sort of status symbol. There's nothing exclusive about them when my grandmother whose only income is Social Security has one.
Owning a Ferrari is a sign that you are going bald and have a small dick. It has been that forever.
Can confirm: Thick hair, big dick, no Ferrari.
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
Eh, 70% or so of families lose their wealth in a single generation link. This narrative that there is no churn or mobility in the US seems like nonsense to me. Sure if you want to be middle class it is probably more of a struggle than in the past but it isn't like the rich are some separate species.
And they're more reliable.
I mean, a total household income of $78,000 qualifies you as in the "top quantile"? I know this gets a bit off-topic of how good an iPhone is as an indicator of being part of that group.... but I find it a bit depressing that our collective incomes have dropped enough to make this a reality.
This isn't talking about individual incomes, mind you - but total household income. 2 parent families with kids and so forth.
That means a husband and wife could each have jobs paying less than $40,000/yr. and yet they're among the "richest" in America that these marketing people are interested in zeroing in on?
I know ..... differences in cost of living by geography and all that. But STILL? My very first "career job" in the early 2000's was doing computer support/helpdesk type work for a small to mid-sized family owned business and I was earning $40,000-ish/yr. pay back then, in the midwest where cost of living was low.
If you're married and the two of you, together, aren't earning at least this "top quantile" of income or darn close to it? It's not even realistic to imagine you can handle paying the typical mortgage for a small home, a couple of car payments so the two of you have vehicles to get to/from work, and paying everything else while saving the minimum recommended amount towards retirement. (If I'm way off base, please explain! I keep reading the economic advice from the people telling us we shouldn't be putting down more than X% of our income on a car payment, and Y% on a mortgage payment, and yet should be putting Z% into a 401K or IRA ... and none of that adds up as possible with a $78K household income, from what I've seen.)
You're good for 5 years or so with a new iPhone before an OS comes along that it can't use. If you cant afford to update your phone at lease every 5 years, you're nowhere near wealthy. So you fit the correlation nicely.
Well, that claim was never about price, but ease of use. The Mac was for "the rest of us" who didn't want to deal with MS-DOS.
Circumcision is child abuse.
This is actually a serious philosophical question - the Raven paradox.
Let's say you want to prove a statement like "All ravens are black". This statement is logically equivalent to saying "If something is not black, it's not a raven."
Now let's say you find an apple, and it's green. That is a non-black object, which is not a raven. So the existence of a green apple is evidence in favor of the second statement ("If something is not black, it's not a raven"), which in turn supports the first statement.
But how can finding a green apple teach you something about ravens?
See above link for attempted resolutions.