| ▲ | annjose 4 hours ago |
| Whenever I see a claim that "x% of adults do y", my brain goes: - "x% of what? what is the denominator?". Without that number, the claim is meaningless.
- surely it cannot be the entire population, so it has to be a survey.
- how many people participated in the survey? what was the distribution? Here is that info for this study. I found this in the PDF version of the study report [0] referred to at the end of the Northwestern page [1]. > Methodology
The Harris Poll conducted a total of 4,375 online interviews among the general U.S. adult (18+) population between January 5th and January 21st, 2026. Included in this overall total is a sample of 816 High-Net-Worth individuals (those with total household investable assets, excluding pensions, retirement plans and property, greater than $1,000,000). [0] https://filecache.mediaroom.com/mr5mr_nwmutual/179168/2026%2... [1] https://news.northwesternmutual.com/planning-and-progress-st... |
|
| ▲ | Animats 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| > "conducted a total of 4,375 online interviews" How? Mechanical Turk? Ads? This sort of survey is biased toward people who click on lots of stuff. |
|
| ▲ | fouc 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I love mental rule of thumbs / heuristics that we can install into our brain to avoid getting caught up in cognitive biases or other mistakes. An easy one that I would expect most HN readers probably do already is: When shopping, always round up to the nearest dollar before even mentally storing it or operating on it. The usual cognitive bias is that many people end up storing the listed price of $4.96 in a lossy manner, as $4.xx, and end up thinking of it as $4 when in reality they could be skipping straight to keeping it as $5 in their head. |
| |
| ▲ | boogieknite an hour ago | parent [-] | | it blows my mind when anyone ever reads $x.99 as $x out loud. i often cant keep myself from muttering "$x+1" and its taken decades of practice to keep myself from looking at them like they have 2 heads figured it out since i learned to read so it seems so childish to hear adults make it turns out ppl like me are the weird ones and most people just truncate at the period |
|
|
| ▲ | giancarlostoro 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > (those with total household investable assets, excluding pensions, retirement plans and property, greater than $1,000,000). Am I reading this wrong, is this about trust fund kids? |
| |
| ▲ | alwa 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | You are reading gp’s comment correctly as it was written, but it omits the next line in the source study: > Data for the general U.S. population (including the High Net Worth oversample) were weighted to
Census targets for education, age, gender, race/ethnicity, region and household income. They oversampled in major markets where they work and in high-net-worth populations (who they service), but their claims are for the overall US adult population. Oversampling like this is pretty routine in survey research. It improves the precision of any subgroup analyses you might want to do, and, to a first approximation, it doesn’t tend to bias the weighted overall-population claims in one direction or another. I think about it like Google Earth or something. I happen to have much-higher-res imagery of London than of the Cotswolds. That doesn’t mean my view, when zoomed out to “the whole United Kingdom,” is necessarily misleading. It does mean I can additionally make more detailed claims about Piccadilly Circus than about the sheep fields or whatever. | |
| ▲ | cliglot 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | How you define “rely”. I’ve certainly seen trust fund kids who’s success is anchored on “daddy gave me a sweet job at his company” and others who’d be dead or in prison if it wasn’t for the constant money poured into the legal system by their parents. | | |
| ▲ | michaelt 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | According to the more detailed report [1] the questions and answers were: Q2630. Do you currently consider yourself financially independent? Yes: 72%
No: 28% Q2634. How financially independent do you currently feel from your parents (meaning you could support yourself without them if needed)? Fully independent: 44%
Mostly independent: 17%
Somewhat dependent: 17%
Fully dependent: 8%
Not applicable: 14% Then they report 17+17+8=42 = "42% of adults rely on their parents for financial support" [1] https://news.northwesternmutual.com/download/2026+P%26P+Mark... | |
| ▲ | conductr 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | There’s a huge spectrum. I’m mid 40s and my wife grew up much wealthier than I did. We have done quite well, but I I’m a bit frugal, like to save, despise waste and excess, and therefore don’t like traveling like they do. I like traveling but all the fancy upgraded experiences at every turn is what I refuse to spend money on. But we don’t go without, we “rely” on my in laws to upgrade our travel (or that’s how my wife has structured the relationship with them, they pay for everything and we cover the drinks is basically how it works out). I’m not a huge fan of it but they don’t care and it keeps my wife off my back lol, so whatever. We travel with them a lot but even when we don’t I think my wife uses their card to pay for it. It’s between them is what I say, I don’t want to be a part of it as it feels like we’re taking advantage of them but apparently they’re fine with it. Is this fitting the definition of “rely” because it’s nonessential |
| |
| ▲ | fhdkweig 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > total of 4,375 online interviews > Included in this overall total is a sample of 816 High-Net-Worth Looks like about 1/5 are in the trust fund kid category. | |
| ▲ | vondur 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Sure seems like it if you are excluding property. |
|
|
| ▲ | dclowd9901 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > Whenever I see a claim that "x% of adults do y", my brain goes Would that everyone employed this level of skepticism before commenting on figures. |
|
| ▲ | root-parent 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| If you look into Italy its like 60% to 70%. |
| |
| ▲ | joe_mamba 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Europe in general maybe outside of some CEE, DACH, Nordics/Benelux is pretty fucked for the youth. Without help from parents or inherited housing you're fucked. You get American CoL with African wages. Joking of course, but you get the point. |
|
|
| ▲ | nathan_compton 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Typically surveys are adjusted for sampling biases before reporting. That appears to be the case here. So there is usually some attempt to account for the biases in the sampled population. The impulse to ask "what population was sampled?" is good but its not always a straight line from there to "these results directly reflect that sampling bias." In fact, from the page you posted: "Data for the general U.S. population (including the High Net Worth oversample) were weighted to Census targets for education, age, gender, race/ethnicity, region and household income. A full methodology is available." I would presume that the headline number attempts to account for sampling bias. |
| |
| ▲ | annjose 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I agree with you - there’s usually some adjustment for sampling bias, and this study says it is matching Census targets. But I had to go three levels down to see that info before I derive any meaning from the number. My concern is that headlines like “x% of adults do y” get repeated without anyone (sometimes even journalists writing the article) seeing the methodology or nuance behind them. Context matters. | |
| ▲ | dclowd9901 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Still, it lowers the resolution of the results if you have to throw out a significant portion of the interviews. | | |
|
|
| ▲ | thegrim33 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Related - any time a study is based on gathering the opinions of a random subset of the population, I also instantly dismiss it. The average person is a moron. I don't care about random people's subjective opinions, I only care about objective data. People polled in the 16th century would have said the sun orbits the earth; that doesn't make it true. |
