
The Average Canadian is Now Richer than the Average American - joeyespo
http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/07/17/the-average-canadian-is-now-richer-than-the-average-american/
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mnemonicsloth
So an article in TIME is three paragraphs now.

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sampsonjs
More like Time Pamphlet, am I right?

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rwmj
Isn't there a housing bubble going on in Canada right now?
<http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-18155405>

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eumenides1
Yes ....

House prices are rising, but condo prices are not. The cranes (in your video)
are putting up lots of space so the demand is being met. Houses (as in I have
a basement) prices are still rising.

Lots of foreign investment. People are buying house with CASH. 1 million
dollar crappy places with cash. We even have a tumblr about how crappy some of
the situation is <http://fmlistings.tumblr.com/>. Toronto is perceived as a
safe place to invest. I agree that we have better regulation of the finance
markets, but it's starting to get out of hand.

But ....

There are still cheaper places available. You just can't live in the city. You
live in the suburbs and commute. Pickering, Milton, Barrie, etc. It's like
living in Manhattan. You most likely can't afford it. So queens, brooklyn are
cheaper options.

Prices in Toronto (IMO) were low to start with. Vancouver prices were higher
than us, but there was no justifiable reason for it other than it was "nice".
Economically, Toronto is a better place for jobs. My thought is that we are
catching up to what it should have been and ...

The government is intervening. They are removing the easy credit without
raising interest rates, by making it harder to afford a mortgage. If the
market doesn't respond in kind, They will continue to make efforts to slow the
market. I have faith in the Bank of Canada. The governor has repeatedly put us
on notice that he will intervene if it is necessary and if we don't reign in
our personal debts.

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turar
With paper money, mostly. Canadian real estate prices are hitting new highs,
which is arguably unsustainable.

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omgsean
The government recently changed the rules to make it more difficult to get a
cheap mortgage, hopefully this will keep things from spiralling out of
control.

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csomar
_(‘Average net worth' measures the total combined value of a household’s
liquid and real estate assets, minus debt.)_

That's only one side of the story, maybe Americans have more leverage?

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serge2k
Unless you work as a software dev in which case you get 65k/year here.

Sigh.

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justinmk
What are the variance and median?

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glimcat
Here's a cool chart showing Gini coefficient versus GDP.

[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/78/Gini_coe...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/78/Gini_coefficient_beside_GDP_per_capita.svg)

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rwmj
Cool? I found it confusing. Not to mention there are clear rendering problems
with the fonts (not just in my browser, but in the original if you look at the
Wikipedia PNG equivalents). I think the diagram needs "Tufte attention".

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glimcat
The text is a bit mangled, but it's still better than doing CAPTCHAs. There's
a table on Wikipedia if you want to make your own chart.

It helps if you understand Gini coefficients. But in short, they attempt to
represent wealth distribution as a scalar from 0 to 1, where 0 is a uniform
homogeneous distribution.

So to read the chart, you can tell how big the pie is by how long the bar is,
and the non-uniformity in the distribution by how toppled the bar is.

