Income Distribution Charts

[SHRED]

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Puts things into perspective.

http://www.visualizingeconomics.com/2006/11/05/2005-us-income-distribution/

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[lonestarnot]

1. Now there is some perspective!

:(

[Gormy Cuss]

2. Yes, it does.

I'd love to see the first two graphs printed together on a tee.

Median and mean income figures alone don't convey how the distribution is shaped.

[shireen]

3. bookmarked. this is chilling. K&R. nt

[snappyturtle]

4. I see a very lop-sided bell curve! No wonder the masses are upset.

The CEOs and CFOs etc. that we bailed out yesterday should look over their shoulders as to the tsunami of fellow countrymen behind them. Thanks for posting...bookmarking.

edit: this was 2005! I can only imagine what the numbers are in real time.

[Donald Ian Rankin]

10. The skew isn't terribly important, I think - what matters are the mean and the standard deviation.

The lopsidedness (the technical term is "skew") doesn't tell you much about either how wealthy a nation is or how much inequality there is.

[hootinholler]

17. I'm no mathimagician, but...

WTF about this in anyway resembles a Bell Curve? This is like a logarithmic or exponential curve.

:shrug:

-Hoot

[snappyturtle]

22. That just the point! nt

[SmileyRose]

5. People need to understand when Obama talks about a small raise in taxes

he's talking only about the upper 2% of households and even then is only talking a couple of percentage points. This BS about how it will destroy the entire job market is idiotic. My boss owns a business that employs 70 people and is financially very healthy - though currently in trouble only because of the credit crunch. He said flat out Obama's tax plan won't make any difference to him at all either way.

[SHRED]

6. great point

[Cresent City Kid]

7. Right on

Clinton raised taxes on those making over $200,000 and the calamity that the right predicted never came to pass. Far from it.

[Donald Ian Rankin]

8. I'm afraid I'm not impressed by their data presentation.

The distribution of wealth in the US lends itself naturally to some really dramatic graphs, but these aren't they.

[SHRED]

11. I'm curious

Do you have links to others?

[Donald Ian Rankin]

13. Not without digging, I'm afraid

A brief dig turned up a couple of good graphics on related issues, but not one that does what that one tries to do.


http://journals.democraticunderground.com/Donald%20Ian%20Rankin/6

[malaise]

9. Thanks for this link n/t

[earth mom]

12. Now is it obvious that those fuckers didn't need the money?!

:banghead:

[RC]

14. Yes they do!

The have not bankrupted us yet. They need to bankrupt us to keep us down in our place so we don't have the resources to rise up and destroy them.

[lumberjack_jeff]

16. Torches and pitchforks aren't that expensive. n/t

[RC]

21. You have a good point.

[lumberjack_jeff]

15. This illustrates a pet peeve of mine; "middle class"

The term is intended to imply middle income, but in reality is used by people making well into six figures to consider themselves deserving of government assistance.

Modern politics makes clear that when they say "middle class" they mean families with incomes from about $60,000 (approximately the 70th percentile) to about $250,000.

Median household income is $46,000. That's middle income, and in my view, middle class. If we want to craft a package of assistance for middle class folks, it ought to include assistance for that family.

[SmileyRose]

19. oddly

Both sides of my family is blue collar or lower paid clerical (technically white collar with blue collar mindset) - I think the richest person in my whole extended family makes about 40 a year. I really don't know what "they" consider middle class but to me 30-60 per household is middle class and certainly over 100 per household is wealthy. Even my boss, who owns a good business that employs 70 people, a big house on the fancy side of town - he and the wife both employees of the business - and their joint income including EVERYTHING is around 220 - and they DO consider themselves upper class not middle class.

[NobleCynic]

24. My aunt and uncles work in PR and gross over 400K per year together

And I can't convince them that they're not middle class. When their income exceeds mine and 15 of my best friends combined, they think they're middle class. I think it's a way of avoiding feeling guilty.

[Karenina]

25. There are two concepts of class

One is strictly by the numbers. Here's my breakdown. YMMV

25K and under POVERTY

35-75 Working class

80-250 Middle class

300-1M Upper middle class

1-5M Upper class

5M and over Wealthy (But ONLY if lifestyle maintenace does NOT depend on a salary)

The other is conditioning, a mentality.

See: "The Prince and the Pauper" or "My Fair Lady" just for starters.

[Toucano]

18. Where's Ross Perot when you need him?

I would prefer an infomercial about this to those hocking another fitness device.

Thanks!

[SmileyRose]

20. SMILE

[jazzjunkysue]

23. In order to make the bottom 90% lose 4% of income, and the rest gain,

you need the government's help, and you need to know exactly what you're doing.

Sending the working class jobs overseas was our downfall. The laws rewarding that could be changed. This could turn around.

[roamer65]

26. I wonder was the income tax rate was on 25K of income in 1940.

The dollar is worth approximately worth 1/10 of what it was in 1940. We need to put tax rates back to the levels during Roosevelt's New Deal for anyone making more than 250K.

[Recursion]

27. Note the skew of the median and mean

That's actually a pretty good metric for somebody tinkering with the actual underlying economy.

There's a crucial theorem in probability called the "central limit theorem". At the risk of boring you all, it essentially says that in any unbiased system (say, a financial system), if you add up a whole bunch of independent interactions (say, a bunch of money transactions), the result is distributed in a specific way (the number should be pretty high, say, in the millions, but our economy is well past that number).

That distribution is pretty famous. You may have heard it called the "bell curve", or the "normal distribution", or the "Gaussian distribution"; it's all the same. You have a few outliers (a few very rich people, a few very poor people) and most people (70%) within one standard deviation from the mean, which in this is also the median.

From the central limit theorem, one way of analyzing the extent to which a system is biased is to note the median's skew from the mean. As it goes up, the system is biased high; as it goes down, the system is biased low. This isn't just probability that says this; it's been confirmed in game theory as well.

Trust an engineer on this: if you ever need any mathematical argument that the system is rigged and biased towards the rich, just point out how the millions of independent transactions have failed to achieve a Gaussian distribution, despite the fact that this does happen in sports, card games, chess, war, physics, chemistry, biology, etc...