Or, the income rank among "American workers" (which you referred to) and that among "American households" (which the person "correcting" you referred to) is different. Which is not merely plausible, but expected.
Household income is not the metric being used. It is income associated with a particular occupation that is used to class order those occupations.
I guess you're right about failing to conform to colloquial myths and falsehoods. I tend to want to align my observations with facts and research rather than pop culture misunderstandings and ignorance.
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.
What the linked article says...
"Eighty-four percent of Americans have higher family incomes than their parents did."
...the question is "incomes" just raw income or did they adjust it? Clearly people will have more dollar bills, but that dollar bill doesn't go as far.
I certainly know I'm not better off than my parents, I'm most definitely worse, but I still have a higher number on my paycheck.
That seems a spectacular claim that will require spectacular evidence to support it. I realize it's a very trendy statement, but it does not appear supported by the data[^1].
> Per capita income for Poles, Italians, Russian, and Germans is higher than median US per capita income.
US per capita income is higher than US median personal income (that’s what happens with concentrated-at-the-top instead of normal distributions.) But you probably mean “mean” rather than “median” since that’s what your source actually provides.
Confusing that the article has different numbers on the wealth gap than the source material:
“Working-class union households hold nearly four times as much median wealth ($201,240) as the typical working-class nonunion household ($52,221), suggesting that membership vastly increases wealth for working-class families.”
It doesn't look like it refute's the OP's point that the top 1% of people sorted by income are wage earners.
The abstract seems to be talking about "top income' (i.e. sort people by income and fetch from highest to lowest until you have 1% of all income in the US), which is a different measure.
That's not contradictory at all. The report says that the number of people making more than twice the median income has increased, not that those in the upper middle class are doing better.
This study is misleading, because it uses 'household' wealth, instead of individual wealth, and may be incorrectly interpreted as showing a decline in the middle class, when it is really showing the results of changes in family structure over the past 50 years. This graph shows how this choice affects the results: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-g3WZGpDibPM/Up3ZAPRtScI/AAAAAAAAJq...
> Americans already the second highest incomes in the world [1],
I would like to see this broken down by decile over time; I suspect that doing so would show a shift favoring higher income deciles and disfavoring lower income deciles. If Bill Gates eats at a restaurant, the median net worth of the restaurant's customers makes them billionaires. But that doesn't mean they are all that well off. The same is true for income and for the US population.
Indeed. And similarly, as the paper mentions, there are many places in the US where someone earning just under $100k would only be counted as middle class, even though they'd be well into the upper middle class. So the important question then is there a big bias in one direction or another? The paper concludes that the answer to this is no.
So why would they use such an ostensibly broad metric in the first place? The paper also goes into this. The reason is that on a micro level there are often extreme quality of living differences that are not accurately reflected by any data. For instance the CPI inflation rate of San Francisco, according to California, is only 11% higher than the US average. By any metric you'll be able to point to various little bubbles throughout the nation and indicate, accurately, that the macro level data does not hold true.
So you need to try to pick aggregate data that most likely balances out the biases so much as possible. Do you think this fails to do so?
Is this a critique of the article's definition of upper class (which they define as top 10%tile, and you define as non-working class). Or are you saying even given their calculation, their result is wrong?
This is measuring household income, not individual income. Real household income isn't increasing because wages are rising, it's increasing because more people in a household are working.
Well! Do more of the same! Obviously people are generally experiencing better lives, right? (No, actually they are not (US-focused).)
If the metrics are wrong or only partially focused, their meaning is less or non significant. There is ample recent evidence that only a narrow upper class is improving while the increasing lower class is dropping in terms of cost-of-living-adjusted income.
Household income is a stupid metric. In America, the top 20% of households contains TWICE as many PEOPLE as the bottom 20% of households. The top 20% of households contains FOUR times as many income earners as the bottom 20% of households. The top 20% of households contains THREE times as many children and HALF as many retirees as the bottom 20% of households.
So when someone says America has too many "poor" households. Consider that those poor households EXIST because they are WEALTHY enough to afford it!
Consider Italy. More households in the middle income share than America. Is that because Italy is an economic paradise? Or because of a strong, centralized bureaucracy capable of administering income distribution schemes? Maybe. But it could be the case that the old and young can not afford to establish their own households. So they continue to live with the working members of their family and enjoy the "benefit" of being a middle class household.
I don't mean to imply that America is perfect and that Italy is not. I only want to say that this chart is an awful way to represent data and is, in my opinion, intentionally misleading.
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