It's _the opposite_ of what I said.
All I want is to control for age, or use some other technique to improve the data.
Sorry if I laid out that point in a confusing way, maybe this is on me. But saying someone has no empathy is calling them a sociopath. If you're going to lean into personal attacks, don't you at least owe them the common courtesy of re-reading their comment in full to make sure you understand their point?
Then I sincerely apologize. What you wrote sounded like excuse making for why the poor don't really have it so bad and why the inexorably increasing income inequality in our society isn't a problem.
If it's not, and you're merely making a dry critique of the analysis... meh. It's still not really helping anyone now, is it? "We need better data" is what climate denialists like to say too.
Grad school pushed me way below the -$6k median for the bottom quintile.[0] I pulled that quintile's average down for years, but I wasn't in trouble or part of some kind of social problem.
To be clear -- I don't mean this as a values critique. I definitely want to help those that haven't had the opportunities to succeed like I have, and support charities and programs that I think will have the most impact.
But I still have a methodological quibble. If we want to address poverty, it's important to understand it. For that, we need to separate out the people moving through quintiles due to life stages, and isolate those that are really stuck.
I'm not sure the best way to do that. It'd be nice to see this data separated out by age, I guess, that might be one way.
[0] https://www.thebalance.com/american-net-worth-by-state-metro...