Comment by rm999 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rm999 | Hacker News Reader

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I'm confused, I just read the report in the article and everything you're saying seems to be wrong. Are you referring to a different report than this one? http://www.urban.org/research/publication/growing-size-and-i...

>The study appears to define "middle" as 90% of respondents

Where do they do this? I think they just defined the lower boundary as the federal poverty level of 30k and the upper bound as where "rich" starts. Seems totally reasonable to me.

> In the latter case, the study literally uses "people who identify as rich".... The obvious definition would be percentiles of income

The study did use a percentile, it did not define rich people as "people who identify as rich". It looked at the approximate percentile of people who self-identify as rich (1-2%) and then found a round number (350k) that was in the range of that percentile (1.8%). This seems perfectly reasonable to me. And arguing about 1% vs 1.5% vs 2% is pointless because as I always say, arbitrary-in arbitrary-out; neither is more or less "correct" than the other.

Apologies if we're referring to different reports.

We’re referring to the same report and thanks for being rigorous on this. I certainly wouldn’t want to oversimplify.

Using self-identified rich to derive an income baseline for rich still means “rich” is self-identified, no? It still puts us in the 1-2% range.

I suggest that a measurable definition of rich should be those who are clearly above the vast majority of (say) incomes. Being richer than 80% or 90% of the population makes one closer to the top than the middle, so that seems like a better definition of “rich”. Agree that it is necessarily arbitrary, but I think such a definition is pretty conservative.

Regarding the 90%, it’s from this line:

> about 9 out of 10 respondents identified as being in one of the three parts of the middle class

But re-reading, yes you’re right that the lower bound is not self-identified. But the author’s using the $30K number (from the poverty line) puts us at around the 5th percentile: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United...

…which effectively puts the “middle” classes at 90% of the population.

Again, thanks for the rigor and let me know if I have misread.

>Using self-identified rich to derive an income baseline for rich still means “rich” is self-identified, no?

I don't agree with this - I know a guy who makes 500k a year who considers himself "upper middle class", but this report would classify him (probably rightfully so) as rich. I think of the self-identified part as a principled way of defining something arbitrary. In my job I do a lot of analysis that needs to be boiled down to easy-to-understand metrics and definitions, and I personally feel this is the best approach when there isn't a good standard definition. A simple percentile wouldn't work here because the whole point of the study is looking at how income/class has changed over time.

>the author’s using the $30K number (from the poverty line) puts us at around the 5th percentile

Note that 30k is a normalized "family-of-three equivalent", which isn't the same as household income. It's actually a pretty neat way to remove size-of-family effects (which changed over the period of the analysis). Figure 2 shows about 20% of people would fall below middle class in 2014, and 24% in 1979.

>Again, thanks for the rigor

No worries and glad to, I love reading these kinds of studies!

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