> That's a myth. There's plenty of data on this. Most American never get anywhere close to the top 10% - not even remotely - regardless of age.
OK, let's take a look, because the GP was arguing about income mobility across different years of a person's life - intra-generational mobility -- not earnings compared to your parents -- inter-generational mobility. That distinction was the key point made. And the GP is basically correct:
From two studies about intragenerational bottom[1] and top[2] income mobility:
* 53.1 percent will have experienced at least one year within the top 10th percentile
* 36.4 percent will have encountered one year within the top 5th percentile
* 11.1 percent will have experienced one year within the top 1st percentile.
* 70% of Americans spend at least 1 year in the top quintile
* 61% of Americans spend at least 1 year in the bottom quintile.
* 42% of Americans experience at least one year in the bottom decile
Summarizing:
"Taken together, these findings indicate that across the American life course there is a large amount of income volatility. Rather than a rigid class structure, the top and bottom ends of the income distribution are fairly porous. This finding provides an interesting and important caveat to the overall story of rising levels of income inequality across the past 40 years." [2]
Note that a key issue when studying mobility is that you need to do it across a few business cycles. If your study is only during an economic expansion, then it's not going to be meaningful, as life changes tend to clustered around contractions and recoveries, and several such episodes are needed. Thus the studies I selected cover 44 year periods. Some of the studies are for 5-10 year periods, and that's really too small.
No, chmod600 was referring to income, as can be seen from his post:
"$190k/yr as a successful tradesman during boom time. The former will count as "poor" and the latter will count as "top 10%[..].
In other words, no, it's not comparing Americans of different classes. It's comparing Americans at different stages of life. Or just the ebb and flow of income over and individual's life"
You may want to talk about something else, of course, but my reply was to standardUser arguing that chmod600's data was wrong, when in fact he was absolutely right.
Chmod600 was trying to refute the headline, which talked about wealth. If he used income metrics to refute it then he is wrong. He was using the incorrect data set and applying it to the article, so the objection is correct.
OK, let's take a look, because the GP was arguing about income mobility across different years of a person's life - intra-generational mobility -- not earnings compared to your parents -- inter-generational mobility. That distinction was the key point made. And the GP is basically correct:
From two studies about intragenerational bottom[1] and top[2] income mobility:
* 53.1 percent will have experienced at least one year within the top 10th percentile
* 36.4 percent will have encountered one year within the top 5th percentile
* 11.1 percent will have experienced one year within the top 1st percentile.
* 70% of Americans spend at least 1 year in the top quintile
* 61% of Americans spend at least 1 year in the bottom quintile.
* 42% of Americans experience at least one year in the bottom decile
Summarizing:
"Taken together, these findings indicate that across the American life course there is a large amount of income volatility. Rather than a rigid class structure, the top and bottom ends of the income distribution are fairly porous. This finding provides an interesting and important caveat to the overall story of rising levels of income inequality across the past 40 years." [2]
Note that a key issue when studying mobility is that you need to do it across a few business cycles. If your study is only during an economic expansion, then it's not going to be meaningful, as life changes tend to clustered around contractions and recoveries, and several such episodes are needed. Thus the studies I selected cover 44 year periods. Some of the studies are for 5-10 year periods, and that's really too small.
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[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/271598246_The_Life_...
[2] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
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