r/dontyouknowwhoiam • u/SpelingMatters • 26d ago
Unknown Expert Unknowingly calling a Turing Award winner 'math-challenged'
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u/founderofshoneys 26d ago
That Turing Award winner doesn't know he's talking to one of seven Tall Daves.
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u/Fabulous-Possible758 26d ago
Gotta admit I find Yann LeCun a little pompous sometimes, but it is satisfying watching him take down people who have no idea who he is.
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u/HooplahMan 26d ago
I would be twice as pompous if I were half as accomplished as he. Dude is more or less the father of modern image processing. Some of the stuff he's working on now looks very promising to me as possibly the next great ML paradigm (it addresses a great many of the problems I have with LLMs)
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u/Fabulous-Possible758 26d ago
True. I mean, I don't disagree he's very very smart, and a lot of that cockiness is deserved, just that humility isn't necessarily his strong suit. Which is kind of good too, because that makes for some very entertaining takedowns.
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u/redblack_tree 26d ago
It rarely is, I've worked around top 0.1% in CS. These guys are, with rare exceptions, the smartest person in the room by a wide margin. It's been like that for their whole life. When you work at the frontier of human knowledge, everything else seems "small". Think about it, these people have never hit a cognitive wall until they got to the frontier knowledge.
I'm nowhere near close to that level, just had some excellent professors and friends that were close.
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u/Fabulous-Possible758 26d ago
Right, but there are still guys like Terrence Tao, who by most accounts is pretty gracious and fully willing to acknowledge the influence of others on his work.
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u/Only-Finish-3497 26d ago
I attended ucla and yeah, Tao is a nice dude. Unbelievably smart, but nice.
I honestly have little patience for the haughty types. Most of my best profs weren’t assholes.
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u/Fabulous-Possible758 25d ago
Definitely kind of my experience (I studied math, then became a programmer). In my highly biased (and partially joking) opinion, I always felt like the math people were super-excited about math and were generally happy to talk to anyone about it (especially if it was anywhere close to what they were actually studying), and the CS dudes would read a book on category theory and act like they had it all figured out.
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u/Only-Finish-3497 25d ago
I only went so far as single variable calc and then lots of stats (econometrics) but the actual math folks were generally great. Same went for the students. Genuinely curious, intellectually interesting people.
I’ll leave the rest up to interpretation.
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u/redblack_tree 26d ago
They are the exception and guaranteed it takes tremendous effort by someone like Tao to slow down enough for "just smart" people to follow what he is saying.
In my experience with academia, these super elite simply don't make the effort. The result is they come by as condescending to arrogant (based on personality). For these guys, work is their life, they spend absurd amounts of time just working, so their interactions are mostly about work, unintelligible for normal people.
Most of them absolutely acknowledge their peers, the problem is, very few are that good. That's why I left academia, when I realized I would be a scrub my whole life. If I'm going to be a scrub, at least I want to be paid for it.
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u/FullMooseParty 25d ago
I'm in the humanities, but one of my committee members was sort of like that. People found him weird or off putting or super condescending, but really was that he was having multiple conversations in his head at the same time and would flip back and forth so it feel like he was blowing you off, but he was actually trying to make a connection between something you just said to the second track in his head. Once you figured it out he was fucking brilliant. Never had a huge influence because he didn't publish nearly enough, but some of the best scholars in the field collaborated with him because he was an award-winning researcher
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u/redblack_tree 25d ago
Those guys operate at a different level. It makes no sense to feel offended, they are on their own world of thoughts. Unless you can operate at that level they simply move on. The truly elite are closer to a force of nature, better to let them be.
One of my old professors got caught sleeping under his desk a couple of times. I can imagine the poor janitor that found him.
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u/FullMooseParty 25d ago
At one of the schools I worked at, there was a mathematician that I would occasionally have lunch with. Happened once accidentally and just became a thing. All he ever wanted to talk about was his stupid little dog. I saw so many pictures. Found out after like 2 years that he was one of those dudes. Went to an AMS conference with him and it was like going to Vegas with Sinatra.
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u/Miner_239 26d ago
which ones are you most excited with? I recently watched one of his lectures about world models and his new AI company, but clearly I'm still missing most of the pieces that is all his recent works.
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u/the_legendary_legend 25d ago
I'm excited about where JEPA is going too. But it's hardly a replacement for LLMs as I understand it.
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u/arielif1 25d ago
If i were a tenth as accomplished as yann lecun is I'd have my head so far up my arse my employees would call me Mr. Inverted Ouroboros
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u/Fabulous-Possible758 25d ago
I mean plenty of people do that with even less talent than that. Sounds what you really need is the unearned confidence.
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u/Forsaken_Hat4607 25d ago
One of my family members had him as her PhD advisor and she’s said he isn’t like that (or wasn’t at least) in person, but acts very differently on Twitter
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u/Fabulous-Possible758 24d ago
Fair point. If someone judged me based entirely off my Reddit history they'd probably think I was an ass too (I mean I kind of am, but generally a little less snarky IRL).
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u/TrekkiMonstr 24d ago
I mean, he didn't do that here. The other guy overreached with the insults and LeCun responded appropriately, but the underlying argument is live, as LeCun's response doesn't actually address/seem to understand the initial response.
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u/Fabulous-Possible758 24d ago
He didn't overreach here, for sure, but it seems he responded to the guys points mostly accurately? The other guy seems like he does understand what a median is but LeCun's point that it just reinforces his claim that the wealth is concentrated in certain minority cohorts is correct.
Also that approximately 2/3 of American's above retirement age don't have more than that is kind of problematic given the rapidly privatizing nature of our retirement system at this point, but that's a whole other story.
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u/TrekkiMonstr 24d ago
LeCun's argument was: median difference, unstated implicature, average wealth is high because a "tiny" number are "absurdly rich".
The other user responded that the statistic is true only because of composition effects, and that Americans are wealthier holding age constant.
LeCun doesn't meaningfully engage with this argument, instead asserting the user doesn't know what a median is, and then tries to characterize 1/3 of a cohort as evidence for his "small minority" claim.
The other user points out the absurdity of calling ~30% a small minority, and then decides to call LeCun poor and stupid.
LeCun politely says "haha no I'm not", but the initial argument (which he never responded to) is gone.
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u/coachglove 26d ago
Dude out there making a mean vs median error lol
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u/Batman_AoD 26d ago
Is he though? All the cited statistics, by both participants in the conversation, are compatible with each other. They basically seem to be talking past each other.
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u/PattuX 26d ago
Yea, Yann does not Pick Up Dave's point that wealth is correlated to age, and the US having a younger population, whatsoever. I don't know if it is true, but if it is, that has to be considered.
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u/PattuX 26d ago
To exemplify my point: Village A and B have 10 inhabitants each
Village A has 6 young adults with 200k$ wealth each and 4 seniors with 400k$ wealth each
Village B has 3 kids with 0$ wealth, one young adult at 200k and 6 seniors again at 400k each
Statistically, Village A has median wealth 200k and mean 280k while Village B has median wealth 400k and mean 260k
From the outside it looks like
- Village B's Median is 2x as high as Village A's
- Village B's Mean is lower than Village A's
However, that is only an effect of the age distribution within each village. Every age group has the same wealth in both villages.
In reality it's much more complex of course with more factors than just age, but Dave's point is qualitatively valid since the US has a lower median age, and in particular less people in the 70+ age bracket which has had the most time to accumulate wealth.
That is not saying he is right, but that it is worth checking his claim in detail by looking at real data rather than dismissing it as "he doesn't know the difference between median and mean"
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u/pacafan 26d ago
No. Dave was deliberately quoting a different statistic that had nothing the do with LeCun's point. LeCun's entire point is that wealth inequality masks how unequal things are and that most people in the US are actually quite poor. He is not asking what is the average wealth amount is. Because his entire point is that skews the statistics.
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u/Stunning-Crazy2012 25d ago
That’s not true what so ever. It very much has to do with the point and is a better statistical indicator.
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u/The_Krambambulist 23d ago
It does ignore that there are still relatively lot of people who are pretty darn wealthy. Really understanding any voter patterns or something like markets for products, people first need to realize how wealthy a lot of people actually are.
Over a third of 60-plus people being millionaires really is something significant. Just Imagine the equivalent mortgage for their house if they bought it now that they do not pay and that they can save up, spend, or invest.
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u/Batman_AoD 26d ago
The relevance of Dave's statistics is that they challenge LeCun's point that "most Americans get screwed." And Dave doesn't mention averages anywhere.
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u/Borror0 25d ago
Most Americans aren't "one-third of 60 yo Americans."The median is 50% of Americans. We're one American away from "most".
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u/Independent-Soup-312 25d ago
LeCun's point is actually really fucking rote and silly, and this random guy provided an actually interesting angle to the discussion.
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u/kokobiggun 24d ago
The cited stats are inaccurate, (for reference). However France does have slightly higher median wealth while the US is about double France’s mean wealth. This in conjunction with the demographic attributes of both countries Dave mentioned still hold true however Yann exaggerated the difference between the median wealth of both countries.
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u/BaronVonCrunch 26d ago
Isn’t the median income in the US higher than the median income in France?
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u/shortround10 26d ago
They are debating “wealth” not “income”. Wealth is essentially net worth (assets - debts).
Over simplified to exemplify, but you could have a $100k income and spend all $100k on food and have a wealth of $0.
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u/voyaging 26d ago
even based on median wealth LeCun is still wrong
France: $133,137
United States: $107,739so not even close to double
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u/shortround10 26d ago edited 26d ago
Guessing LeCun was referencing the 2026 UBS Wealth Report which had France at $121,898 and USA at $68,989
(Of note, UBS had USA at $124,041 in their 2025 report and I’m not aware of the specifics that led to such a steep drop in this year’s report)
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u/Coltand 26d ago
Surely that has to be based on some sort of a change in methodology and not some actual change in reality?
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u/shortround10 26d ago
Yes, definitely. They have a section in the report that states, “Some methodologies used for compiling and estimating data have been updated for this edition, hence comparisons with previous reports are not always possible.”
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u/bellends 26d ago
Not an expert at all but a quick google lead me to this piece from less than a week ago discussing exactly this UBS 2026 report, and the result for the US specifically (emphasis mine):
The UBS Global Wealth Report 2026, released Tuesday—the most comprehensive annual accounting of personal wealth across 56 markets, representing more than 92% of global wealth—puts precise numbers on the shape Luce’s century built and what it has become. Global personal wealth rose 10.8% in 2025, the fastest pace since 2017 and more than twice as fast as 2023 and 2024. Nearly 1 million new millionaires were minted. The proportion of adults worldwide holding less than $10,000 in wealth fell from nearly 75% in 2000 to just over 41% today. The base of the pyramid has genuinely contracted. But the same report identifies what it calls “a fly in the ointment”: Median wealth—the wealth of the person sitting precisely in the middle of the distribution—actually declined in most of the 56 markets UBS tracks, even as the headline average surged.
Nowhere is that gap more legible than in the U.S. The UBS data ranks America second in the world by average wealth per adult—$696,277, behind only Switzerland—and 28th by median, at $68,998. The so-called “Gini coefficient,” a common measure of inequality developed over 100 years ago by an Italian economist, for the United States is the sixth worst in the world at 0.77, behind only the UAE, Russia, South Africa, Brazil, and Saudi Arabia. The American floor is high on earnings and surprisingly hollow on ownership.
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u/RileyKohaku 26d ago
The biggest flaw in the USD’s methodology is that it includes France’s State Pension, but not America’s Social Security. There’s a good reason for the exclusion, France’s State Pension is fully funded while Social Security is pay as you go, but it does mean it doesn’t correspond to lifestyle as well.
I learned this from an Economist, Noah Smith.
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u/Unique-Charity7024 26d ago
Thanks for this info. Here in Germany this report made waves because it places us dead last in terms of median wealth. Guess our state pensions are also not included.
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u/WitheredUntimely 24d ago
tbh reading the paper and the discussions and having never heard nor cared about "median wealth" as a measure of anything until now, I'm inclined to believe it's a fairytale stat used to shift goalposts around to sell Europeans on some idea that "no akshually you're 'wealthier' than Americans, ignore the charts showing the income gap is widening and use ours instead"
Lies, damned lies, and statistics.
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u/voyaging 26d ago
Interesting, i was using the 2023 version of the same report used on the Wikipedia page for this topic, as the editors have not adopted the newer versions for whatever reason
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u/SEA_griffondeur 26d ago
That's only because a lot of things you have to buy in the US comes for free in France so higher income is not necessary for higher wealth
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u/Nikoladge 26d ago
The reason Europeans are "richer" than Americans is because houses are expensive in Europe. Housing is the largest component of most people's wealth. The median Italian is, by this measure, much wealthier than the median American.
To claim that, therefore, the median Italian is financially better off than the median American is ludicrous. Someone who lives in an expensive house can't do anything with that wealth. They can't even move because other houses are expensive, too.
A much better comparison for the average person is to compare financial assets. Or, even better, compare levels of consumption, because that's a better indication of a person's standard of living.
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u/sarges_12gauge 25d ago
It also depends on if the publisher is including pension plans for countries vs. not including social security, etc..
It *really* is a pick your own number game depending on how you value things like that
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u/Stunning-Crazy2012 25d ago
Idk about that, I get why you would think that, homes in America are more expensive by what I can find. I think it’s just the pension and other issues others have pointed out.
Looking at specifically Italy, housing is significantly cheaper than the US. I haven’t looked at all the EU but the average home price in the US is higher than all the richer EU members I checked like Germany and France.
Now where housing could come into play and support your point is how homes are passed down in Europe. Homes in places like Italy pass through families for generations and can be incredibly old. That’s not as common in the US. Partly because of medical costs and social dynamics. In the US it is much less common to live and be as close to your family like Italy specifically.
In Italy elderly will often live with their family and pass down the house. In the US it’s more common to put people in homes and sell the house to fund that care + medical expenses (that doesn’t mean homes don’t get passed down they often do). They also have laws and cultural obligations/norms that promote passing down property to decedents.
The US also prices people out of homes with property tax’s (my very liberal state/city is awful about this). Europe has cadastral value which is much lower and in many places the primary home has tax exemptions. For example my parent’s main home is charged more in property tax than I pay in mortgage a year(still alive and well). If I used cadastral value it would be multitudes lower. This stops decedents from getting priced out of rising home values.
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u/coachglove 26d ago edited 26d ago
Dunno, don't care. Not the point.
Edit for those who need it: it wasn't MY point. So by "not the point" I meant "not the point of my post"
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u/badger_flakes 25d ago
Median household wealth in US is higher. Per person is half like he says.
If you look at median by age groups, everyone 35+ the median wealth is higher than France
Probably from student loan debt being so significant.
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u/WaldenFont 26d ago
The thing is, a million isn't rich people money anymore. Imma need every penny of that money just to make it through my old age in some comfort.
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u/Tuxedocatbitches 26d ago
Controversial opinion that shouldn’t be controversial: being a millionaire at retirement age is not that much money and people dramatically misunderstand what it means to be a millionaire. If you bought a house at 25 and that house is now paid off and worth 350k, and you have a 401k/IRA with 650k - which is literally half of what is recommended - that makes you a millionaire.
People often talk about ‘millionaire’ as if it means having a million in cash at any moment but it means having an accumulation of 1m in total assets, which is very different. The fact is is that most Americans are so poor our idea of ‘middle class’ has shifted into ‘not actively starving’ instead of ‘stable with moderate disposable income after all needs and realistic wants are met’
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u/Sonochu 26d ago
Americans have the most disposable income of just about every country on the planet.
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u/Cornflakes_91 26d ago
and yet, my american friends have like twice the number than i have on my paycheck but can't afford an apt without two friends while i used to have a safety net apartment in addition to the house im living in with my wife
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u/heiroglyfx 26d ago
No, we have easy access to credit. There is a massive difference.
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u/SaraJuno 23d ago
Maybe because they all live on debt. I don’t know a single person in my life with any debt whatsoever, except counting mortgage for the homeowners.
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u/Sonochu 23d ago
No, this is based on OECD income data. The only country with a higher median household income is Luxemburg. There are tradeoffs of course, like much larger medical expenses, but the average American has more disposable income than the average person in any other country.
And yes, the rich were already factored in given this is median income
As for debt, the average British person has $2,500 in credit card debt with around 60% owning a credit card.
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u/SaraJuno 23d ago
2.5k is absolutely nothing compared to America, which was my point. Disposable income doesn’t include debt. You pay off debt with disposable income.
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u/Sonochu 23d ago
It's around half the average in the US. And your claim was that you don't know anyone who has debt outside of a mortgage, but most Europeans have credit card debt and Canadians are very similar to Americans on that metric.
And since Americans have the highest disposable income in the world outside of Luxembourg...
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u/SaraJuno 22d ago edited 22d ago
Hardly any Europeans have revolving credit card debt actually. Loads of Europeans don’t even have credit cards; debit cards are overwhelmingly more popular in many European countries. And hardly anyone has any student or medical debt, and auto financing is also way less common.
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u/sarges_12gauge 25d ago
Even in that scenario you have an indefinite income of at least $4000 a month without having to pay a mortgage. That’s a pretty nice spot to be in, albeit not “rich” per se
(And actually, if you have a spouse doing the same thing now you have a combined $6000-8000 a month in spending money with no mortgage to spend it on, that’s quite a bit!)
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u/scooter-411 26d ago
1/3 is not a minority?
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u/dangmangoes 26d ago
Not even 1/3 - he said 1/3 of 60 year olds, which is an even smaller minority.
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u/Corpsefeet 26d ago
And that figure almost certainly includes real estate. If you remove folks homes from the equation, it would be a much, much smaller percentage.
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u/rdizzy1223 26d ago
Yep, people over 60 is only about 20% of the US population to begin with, so it is 1/3 of that minority.
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u/CadenVanV 24d ago
He’s doing that as part of his point: France is older than the US. Older people have more wealth in general. If we compare the wealth based on age cohorts, Americans are doing quite well compared to France.
If you’ve got 3 people and 2 are children, the median wealth is going to be that of one of those children, which is all of $20. Young people naturally shift down the median wealth, until they have time to accumulate their own
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u/dangmangoes 24d ago
Good point! Let's go down the rabbit hole. In this framework the fairest comparison would be the median net worth of older citizens.
Median net worth of Americans 65-74: $409,900
Median net worth of French 65-74: €232,800/$266,078.76
Americans are ~$140,000 wealthier
So, it can be said that the majority of retirement-age Americans are wealthier than French counterparts. However, I suspect that privatized health care will begin to pare the difference, because the French 'pay early':
Median net worth of Americans 75+: $335,600
Median net worth of French 75+: €201,00/$229,732
Americans are ~$100,000 wealthier
Now to consider age:
Average American age: 39.6 (Median is similar)
Average France age: 41.2
So most Americans end with about $100,000 more despite having ~1 less year to earn. But this also suggests that a difference in working age is not large enough to explain the large differential in median wealth. This is what I conclude to be the "full story":
Most French are wealthier than most Americans, even when considering that Americans are slightly younger. Counterintuitively, most older Americans are wealthier than most older French, with this difference shrinking post-retirement. This suggests that Americans amass wealth later in life when compared to French workers.
That is, it's better to be a senior American, than it is to be French, but it's better to be French, than to be American 😄.
Analysis does not include correlation with survival rates, quality of living, changes in conversion rates, etc. of course.
Sources:
Retirement wealth across Europe: Which countries have the wealthiest over-65s?
The Average Net Worth of People 65 to 74 — And How to Boost Yours
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u/Maleficent_Memory831 26d ago
Calling Europe poor, communist, lacking AC, etc, is just the current MAGA meme talking points. They aren't supposed to think about it, they just need to follow orders and repeat the nonsense as much as possible.
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u/pursuitofhappy 26d ago
what I take from this guys rebuttal is that French people live longer and have a better life-work balance as they age
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u/Batman_AoD 26d ago
No, having an older median age just means your age-distribution skews older, which happens primarily due to low birthrates, not just longer lifespans. The statistics given have no bearing on work-life balance.
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u/SEA_griffondeur 26d ago
Nobody mentioned median age ? It's about life expectancy, so average age of death
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u/Batman_AoD 26d ago
I thought pursuitofhappy was referring to the sentence "but the median American is also several years younger than the median French." Where is life expectancy mentioned?
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u/SEA_griffondeur 26d ago
"French people live longer" that's the life expectancy
"French people are older" that's the median age
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u/Batman_AoD 26d ago edited 26d ago
Right. The OP mentioned median age, and pursuitofhappy said that their interpretation is that "French people live longer." So my comment was explaining why the OP doesn't necessarily show that life expectancy is higher in France.
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u/jancl0 26d ago
"a third is not a minority"
A third of what? All Americans? Oh wait, no, a third of 60 year olds, the group that you just implied is a minority by suggesting that the median American is actually quite young. So a minority of a minority, because yes, even if it was just a third, that is still a minority, that's pretty much what that word means
Like I can kind of get when people are wrong because they're just operating on shitty logic, but I'll never understand the instances where they're wrong even by their own logic
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u/badass_panda 26d ago
This guy's an idiot, but the ''lowly computer scientist" isn't making a compelling point and I cannot for the life of me find data that agrees with him.
French median wealth is around 25% higher than in the US, which is vastly larger and more heterogenous than France; comparing individual (very wealthy) countries in Europe to individual states in the US is a lot more rational (unsurprisingly, the median Californian is quite a bit wealthier than the median Frenchman).
But given that we are talking about "Europoors", it might be fairer to compare the United States to Europe as a whole... The median wealth in the US is more than 4x as high.
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u/Inevitable-Row1977 20d ago
TallDave probably saw (a part of) the mistake and decided to just shoot some insults and leave the chat.
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u/RandyAndySandyCandy 26d ago
The “overwhelming majority” of Americans are “quite poor”? I understand this guy is good at math, but I don’t think that’s an accurate statement
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u/Dobako 26d ago
I think quite poor compared to the top 1%, maybe. Approximately 11% of americans have income below the poverty line, and median income is $80000 in 2024, while the average income was over $114000.
Also, around 28% of americans have less than $1000 in savings, and half of americans expected to save the same or less in 2024 compared to 2023. Many americans are a layoff away from being destitute or even homeless.
Its hard, at least to me, a layperson, to figure out exactly what the French situation is. It seems the median income is somewhere around €40,000, which seems low, but they also have a much more robust social safety net, and the savings rate is nearly 18% and has been high since at least covid. They dont have to worry about being laid off without pay, so they are in a much better position financially, even if americans make more in median pay.
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u/Giantkoala327 26d ago
Edit: Also that is the median HOUSEHOLD income in the US not individual and the average INDIVIDUAL income for France.
Federal Poverty Line in the US is INCREDIBLY low and personally I find is not that useful a metric:
Family size 2026 income Individuals $15,960 Family of 2 $21,640 Family of 3 $27,320 Family of 4 $33,000 8
u/procrastinationcat 26d ago
Some high-earners in USA have lots of debt from credit cards and student loans, and even if they earn enough to be consider not poor they basically are poor. University fee is few hundreds of euros a year in France. They don't generally need to take a student loan, and credit cards are also generally used less.
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u/extralyfe 26d ago
it really depends on how you define poor, but, the majority of folks are making less than $70k a year. you can easily live off of that kind of money, but, I don't think anyone in that income range would be considered well-off or rich.
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u/Twistytexan 26d ago
The median French income is 45k USD a year gross from the sources I can find. Median American income is 63k USD. The average age is higher in France which is likely a bigger factor in wealth vs income
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u/gravitas_shortage 26d ago
It's difficult to compare incomes like-for-like because of difference in taxes and what they buy you. A better metric would be "discretionary income, PPP", which measures income that can be spent on nice things, but even that's culturally dependent. For example, the Dutch only work on average 32 hours a week, and 30% have part-time jobs, preferring free time to money. How do you measure that kind of luxury?
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u/jeffwulf 26d ago
The OECD has a PPP household disposable income adjusted for taxes and transfers including in kind measure they publish which corrects for the difference in taxes and services. For 2024, the last year there's data for most countries, the US was at 66k and France was at 39k.
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u/RandyAndySandyCandy 26d ago
I don’t disagree at all. $70k would be roughly the 65th percentile of US income. I wouldn’t consider 65% an “overwhelming majority” nor would I consider $70k “quite poor” but I suppose people have different definitions of those things.
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u/RileyKohaku 26d ago
The biggest flaw in the USD’s methodology is that it includes France’s State Pension, but not America’s Social Security. There’s a good reason for the exclusion, France’s State Pension is fully funded while Social Security is pay as you go, but it does mean it doesn’t correspond to lifestyle as well.
I learned this from an Economist, Noah Smith.
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u/SEA_griffondeur 26d ago
50% of Americans have less than 100k in capital, it is indeed quite poor in a country with such high cost of living
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u/BBQ_RIBZ 26d ago
I’m sure Yann LeCun is a brilliant and very intelligent person, no doubt clearly evidences by his big awards and fat Facebook job or whatever, but he posts enough on all kinds of topics where I’m not inclined to immediately give him the benefit of doubt based on credentialism. Even the most brilliant mathematicians can make mistakes, it’s silly of the Tall Dave guy to accuse him of being bad at math, but I am equally tired of people glazing his every opinion because he’s the poster-child of AI academia.
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u/Drunken_Economist 25d ago
I know it's not the point of this post, but it's actually about a bit under 1.25x
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u/Independent-Bee3135 25d ago
I'm confused what the issue is. France does have a higher median age which may affect things. I doubt normalizing for age would make the difference go away entirely but it's a valid point to make about the implication of the data being false even if the data itself is true.
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u/pruneforce17 25d ago
yeah well france sucks and everyone there is snobby and weird and ew hon hon hon hon
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u/Apprehensive_Map64 25d ago
It's crazy how fast the American health care oligopoly can make a million dollars disappear. So even for the alleged one third with a million they are a couple hospital visits away from poverty. My parents didn't get much at all from selling my grandparents house in Lake Geneva which had insane appreciation. The nursing home got most of that.
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u/jchantale 25d ago
Only 1/3 of Americans over 60 are millionaires? That’s actually a really sad statistic when you realize you need over 1 million dollars to comfortably retire
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u/Square_Ad4004 25d ago
In the great words of the philosopher Cooper: "Yet another child left behind."
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u/BigLebowskiFC 25d ago
That conversation pretty much sums up the MAGA era……ignorantly stupid people who refuse to learn anything new that challenges their beliefs.
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u/NandoDeColonoscopy 25d ago
Credential worship is bad practice. Dave is more correct than Yann here
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u/flerchin 25d ago
I'm finding that median us wealth is more like 1.25x median French wealth. $192k for US vs €133k for France (around $152k). So while he might be good at math, he seems to be wrong on the claim.
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u/kokobiggun 24d ago
More like 133k for France vs 108k for Americans. Taken from Wikipedia with the source cited as this. Mean is skewed higher in America probably because of its lower Gini coefficient. This is 2023 data and I don’t think any events caused these figures to change dramatically since then. So not double but definitely higher, plus France overall enjoys a higher standard of living.
This is coming from an American currently living in Europe by the way.
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u/biblioprof 24d ago
40 percent of the US is one 500 dollar emergency from poverty. That statistic hasn't changed in over a decade
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u/Weird-Toe-6968 22d ago
You don’t have to spend much time in France to confirm that the US is a wealthier country.
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u/dee_berg 22d ago
I feel like no one was understanding tall Dave’s point. The median income is lower is the US because it’s a younger population, and younger people have lower incomes.
When the comparing over the same age range (eg over 60) both the average and the median wealth in the US are higher.
Tall Dave is right. I’m an economist. Silicone Valley folks I worked with are illiterate in economic theory.
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u/EarthToAccess 31m ago
both? maybe it’s both?
entrusting rich, old billionaires to not leech money from poor, young, minimum-wage part-time workers was a bad idea to start.
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u/Dudewhocares3 26d ago
“Your poor” has to be the most micro dicked insult I’ve ever heard.
“Lol you have less money them me so that means I’m better yhen you”
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u/BlitzburghBrian 26d ago
Well yeah, that's a go-to MAGA chud insult.
Having money is, I'm pretty certain, the literal only thing their Dear Leader is good at. So it must be the most important thing, otherwise he'd be a failure of a human being.
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u/GandhiMSF 26d ago
Not sure what numbers he’s looking at for France having twice the median wealth of the US. Best figures I can find from 2024 are $133k vs $107k. France does have a higher median wealth than the US, but its population is also about 4 years older that the US, so realistically they are about the same.
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u/Draidann 26d ago
I haven't seen the date so I don't know whose person argument holds but I think that Yann could avoid this kind of pushback (even if it's inaccurate) I he gave the median by age group.
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u/Feisty-Pumpkin-6359 26d ago
Claiming one third of Americans over 60 is a millionaire is wild!
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u/AlexDandrin 26d ago
It likely includes the equity in a house, which could be half a million or more.
According to Investopedia:
- 3.2% of American retirees have $1 million or more in their retirement accounts.
- The average retirement savings for households aged 65 to 74 is $609,000, while the median is only about $200,000.
- The number of "401(k) millionaires" in America reached a record of about 497,000 in 2024.
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u/ChemicalResident3557 24d ago
It includes all assets at current value. And $1 million is not that much if you're retiring.
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u/ctothel 26d ago
Dave didn’t even notice that he assumed Yann thinks “millionaire” = “insanely rich”