Thanks for posting this! Good to have numbers to discuss!
I'm having trouble opening the spreadsheets on my Mac. How do the numbers compare for all races? Do numbers like this factor in things like health insurance or renting versus owning a house?
I'll observe that none of the statistics you offer covers the demographic of the article. I would be willing to wager that if you look at the same statistics split across income levels, you'll see a noticeable difference in rates.
I think the idea that the grandparent commenter was pointing out is that pointing to higher percentages of income going towards rent is an overly simplistic metric. If the percentage of income spent on rent goes from, say, 20 to 40%, but average incomes double then the total amount of post-rent income still went up by 50%.
Article has a bad way of representing how they use their data points but the data is nationwide income percentiles. The top 1% household income is > $630k
That's not a useful thing to add to the conversation without the context of how much income is going to those two different groups of income earners. Some might even say it is purposefully misleading.
The difference in health insurance coverage between whites and blacks is 4 percentage points. The difference in health insurance coverage between high and low income households is 10 percentage points.
The 99th percentile leaves out the income of the top 1 percent. And, in any event, none of these graphs are really representing the size of each slice of the pie for a group of people, they're just looking at the income at that level.
I guess we'll have to agree to disagree. I don't find the paper very informative, but I find the BI article to be an accurate representation of what the author is trying to say.
It’s hard to really grok what the means for this type of comparison. For census data, information is self-reported and often under reported income doesn’t include many common sources of money.
Additionally, median income driven down by the number of people living on social security, and many of those get benefits like housing subsidy that aren’t income.
Thanks. So, it's assets less debt. This is a huge flaw in the study. Even if everyone in the country had exactly the same income and savings rate, you'd still expect a triangle distribution of wealth because of differences in age (graded by years of saving followed by years of retirement on the downward slope). In reality, you have a huge number of people living with a high quality of life with almost no savings (house fully mortgaged, some small equity in their car maybe). Any measurement that counts these people the same as homeless is deeply flawed.
And then we're going to compare that bogus metric with what random people think it might ought to be after a few moments of thought. How many of the respondents do you think asked for a paper and calculator before giving their answer? This whole article is terrible rhetorical slight of hand.
The graph in your link is reproduced almost exactly in the link I shared (as chart 1). It doesn't take into account non wage income and a few other things.
It's also a problem because the median tells you nothing about who goes without. For that you need to know the distribution. Bottom 5% of housing cost vs bottom 5% household income is more informative.
It's a very apples to oranges comparison.
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