That's a very interesting study. I'm surprised the relationship is so linear through all the way through the income percentiles, aside from the very bottom few. I would have expected a relative plateau in the middle.
Looks like that despite the top <=10% seeing a disproportionate increase in their income, the overall average and median are still growing relatively proportionally, though not to the same degree as 5 years ago.
Adjusted household income has been essentially flat since the 70s. The percentage of those households with two earners has gone from 25% to 60% during that time. Productivity has grown nearly every year during that time.
This, combined with our rising income inequality, means that the economy is not okay for most people even if a few widely-watched numbers are high. It should not come as a surprise that such an economy would be more fragile than those high numbers would indicate.
Median is just the arbitrary mid point between the two extremes, that doesn't actually mean anything useful to the average person. If you picked someone at random from the subset of the US population that reports an income (presumably the working population) and asked them what their income is, the most likely answer is the mode value, or in 2014 about $22,000. That's reality. That's why that is important.
The median income ($53,000) is literally pointless except as yet another indicator of how unbalanced the economy is. If the economy was perfectly balanced the median and mean would be the same, but they're nowhere near that. The median was $53,000, while the mean was $75,000. An incredibly large chunk of the US is making significantly less than a handful of massive earners. And that's not even factoring in all the dirty tricks that the richest use to hide their wealth like offshoring bank accounts and shifting most of their assets into capital gains.
I think that's exactly what that shows. Real median income (2014 dollars) was 51,000 in 1986. Today, it's 53,000[0]. Wealth in the middle hasn't changed much, and all that GDP growth is being gobbled by the very top.
> 76% of Americans spend a year of their life in the top 20%,
That's not that surprising; median income for 45-54 age range is about 70th percentile overall, so do a little better than median in this age range and it's easy to hit top 20%; of courses this is still an income that is (especially on a non-sustained basis) not a sign of significant difference in economic relationships from the median—its working or lower middle class, in traditional terms, and not—contrary to AEIs spin, evidence for class mobility.
Do you make median income or less? (For a full-time worker, that's about 41,000/yr.)
I think most of HN is in the "baronet" class (say, 2-3x of median income) or higher, and doesn't necessarily have a good perspective on what most people (ie, those at or below median income) deal with.
Per capita income has flatlined for a decade (since 2008), after 60 years of steady growth. But that largely doesn't impact programmers, entrepreneurs, etc. Instead, it impacts the people on the bottom.
Just because the present system works for you doesn't mean it works for everyone.
Median income is not standard of living. The reason income inequality is trumpeted so much around here is because it is one the few remaining metrics that still work for the worn out everything is getting worse trope. Standard of living is the entire scope not your cherry picked datapoints.
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