What Jobs Do the Top 1% Have? | Hacker News Reader

What Jobs Do the Top 1% Have?

nytimes.com

180 pointsuptown124 comments

This was a particularly interesting article. You had to spend some time to look through it to find some good take-aways.

- Physicians and dentists are not only a large number of the 1%, the proportion of dentists and physicians who become part of the 1% is extremely high - about 20% combined.

- I was struck by the seemingly high number of secretaries on the list. Yes, I know the chart represents "1% households", but this made me smile, since I figured it means a lot of powerful men are marrying their secretaries.

- For the ridiculous amounts of money that athletes seem to earn (and I don't have a problem with them earning that much), they are a very small share of the 1%, and the chances of a professional athlete becoming a 1%er is low too, only 2% of them.

- And since this is a tech/programmer site, the relatively low numbers of computer science/software people in the 1% seems to indicate that our chosen profession "tops out" at a certain income level below that 1%.

Re: Secretaries - Or hiring their partner to be their secretary, although the partnership likely makes sense if they get along that well (co-founders in a way)

And since this is a tech/programmer site, the relatively low numbers of computer science/software people in the 1% seems to indicate that our chosen profession "tops out" at a certain income level below that 1%

This is an interesting point to take away. If you are smart and want to get rich, going into engineering is not your best bet. Same for scientists.

No wonder there are shortages, eh?

Most programmers who make it there would have to be entrepreneurial so I'm guessing they may get filed under a different "hat" so to speak such as management. Also, I'm guessing this is just based off yearly income so if someone cashed out with stock from an IPO but either sold it all at once years ago (and made a ton of money) or hasn't sold the stock yet I'm guessing it wouldn't be reflected on here. I think the paths that programmers take to reaching the 1% aren't well reflected in a chart like this so its hard to tell how many of these people "have been programmers" at some point.

Exactly. In 1999 was Bill Gates a "programmer" or a "manager" or (arguably) "investor"? I would say primarily a programmer who delegated, thus in a linguistic sense being a manager, but really still being in the first category for the purposes of this diagram.

Right, but at some point soon after he would most likely no longer have his job title be programmer thus removing him from that category on this list. Basically what I'm saying is the only people on this list who would fall under "programmer" and be in the 1% are those who are highly paid consultants, etc as even if one started their own company as a programmer (other than a services company where they just work as a consultant), at some point that title is going to most likely be changed to manager or investor and they would no longer fall under the programmer category even though programming is what got them to where they are.

Eh, it depends. Would you rather have an 80 percent chance to make 75k per year, or a 10 percent chance to make 1 million per year? That's what I thought.

Engineering and software development are fields where you can consistently make very respectable wages. Risk aversion is a factor, after all...

> Would you rather have an 80 percent chance to make 75k per year, or a 10 percent chance to make 1 million per year?

60k or 100k? Maybe my perspective will change with age but I'd bat for the million.

Haha, guess I didn't account for selection bias. I just asked a risk aversion question to a group of people who are considering startups (and thus very risk-tolerant). Go figure!

Have you heard of petroleum engineering? It doesn't get much press, but some of those guys make stupid amounts of money right out of college.

Uh..

I'm in Houston and I have to put some qualifications on that. Only CERTAIN petroleum engineers would make 1% kind of money. I would think the statistics would mirror software engineers roughly. Maybe a little better, maybe a little worse. Just nowhere even close to Dentists and Doctors.

Do you think you have to earn enough to be in the top 1% of all earners in the country in order to be 'rich'?

Honestly, this is the thing that annoys me the most about the Occupy Wall Street slogan of "the 99% vs the 1%"; income is a power distribution and there really isn't a threshold you can step over and become rich.

Not that it really matters, since what catches fire politically is only modestly correlated with what is actually true.

Your point of view is kind of understandable in isolation... except, the slogan is a based on the economic fact that the vast majority of the wealth and income of the US is held by a mere 1% of its population.

The implications of that are many but the first and direct is that the US is a plutocracy. That is, the movement is not about (not) "becoming rich" or achieving the 1% (which as you imply would ultimately be a contradiction) ... It is about the nature and sustainability of such a society.

> ... the US is a plutocracy.

Half of the electorate pays no federal income tax in the U.S.

Remember also that this is a table of household income, which means that you aren't even included unless you're married. It is seemingly fairly common for engineers to be "late bloomers" romantically and marry late, or not at all. By then, they're frequently in management anyway, and so they'd show up in the "manager" portion of the infographic.

I suspect that roughly 30% of the engineering population at Google is in the 1% (given what I know of salary scales and what fraction of engineers are at each eng level). That works out to maybe 4-5k engineers (assuming half the company is engineering), out of the 6,746 in "Computer & data processing services". You really think that Google accounts for 80% of the 1% in software developers? Where's Facebook and Twitter in there - them alone should push it over the count given?

No - what's happening is that most of those well-paid software engineers are single. Of the ones that aren't, many of them married college sweethearts who work as teachers or yoga instructors or urban planners or other professions that don't make a whole lot of money. One Google senior-SWE total comp will put you in the 1% as a single taxpayer, two of them will put you in the 1% as a household, but one of them plus a teacher's salary will not get you anywhere close to the 1%.

Remember also that this is a table of household income, which means that you aren't even included unless you're married.

I don't think the graph excludes single-person households. It's certainly easier to be in the 1% with two incomes, but it's not a prerequisite.

The census data is reported separately - the 1% threshold for singles is $160K, probably skewed lower because they tend to be younger. If the infographic is based off census data, it excludes single-person households.

So if you are a single person making $160K, you are the 1%. If, later, you get married to someone making $30K you become the 99%, even though the paired earnings haven't changed.

This whole 99/1% label thing is silly.

This is actually an interesting question: What fraction of the households in the top 1% are there because they have two salaries in the $150k-$200k range and what fraction are there because they have a single high earner? You're assuming that it's mostly the former, but it's not obvious to me why this should be the case, necessarily. It'd depend on salary distribution within various fields and across fields....

I haven't been able to find good data on individual income, sadly. At least in part because if one uses AGI then all you have to go with are tax returns and if a married couple files jointly the AGI will just be the joint number and that's that. But people also keep claiming this is "household" income, which doesn't quite match AGI in many cases (e.g. married-filing-separately situations, households which consist of taxpayers who are not married to each other, households with more than 2 taxpayers, etc).

I really wish the data-gathering methodology were actually spelled out somewhere. :(

Well, if there were actually shortages, then wages would increase until the "shortages" disappear.

This notion of "shortage" bugs me. There's two sides to a "shortage": supply and demand; but they meet at a point determined by price, where both are equal. There is always a "shortage": demand for engineers that isn't fulfilled by supply, because they can't afford to pay the engineers enough. But there is also always a "surplus": too many engineers to warrant high income levels in the 1%, etc.

A shortage would actually exist in a rigid market with inefficiencies, e.g. price fixing. To the degree that's not true, we don't have a shortage.

> "Well, if there were actually shortages, then wages would increase until the "shortages" disappear."

This is a common thought I see a lot on HN, but it's completely bollocks.

The elasticity of salary is not infinitely scalable, and is heavily based on the costs and profitability of the business. Say we took away all the taxi cab drivers in the world, demand would be immense and supply would be next to nil - in your fantasy world cab drivers would start making hojillions.

But of course, there is an upper bound to the value of a cab ride - cab fares would rise, but it won't not rise to astronomical levels simply because the cost will start exceeding the utility of the ride itself.

So yeah, in a shortage situation developer pay would rise - and rise they have, particularly in hotly-contested areas like the Bay, but this entitled attitude where "there's no shortage! I'm not making a million bucks a year yet!" is complete horseshit.

Cab rides have substitutes: your feet, mass transit, your own car (including the costs of parking), up to being carried around on a litter[1], which would be a very expensive. This limits the "hojillions" available to single cab drivers.

If there was 10x the supply of programmers, we could have 10x the number of jobs for them to do: they could be coming around to your house and offering to automate various bits and pieces of your life, they could be hanging around at traffic lights helping people stopped in cars optimize their phone usage, etc.

The profitability of the business is in part a function of its costs. That the business exists at all is based on an assumption of a certain level of costs, where at different costs other options may be more viable.

What I'm getting at is that there is a circularity in your objection. You assume things about the current state of supply and demand based on the current market mix of businesses, but the current market mix of businesses is the way it is in part because of the current state of supply and demand.

Yes, there is certainly a lack of elasticity in salary. The market isn't perfect. People aren't fungible. But the market is efficient enough to value e.g. doctors and lawyers quite highly. It simply doesn't value software engineers in the same way. That's just the way it is; I'm not saying it's right or wrong, and nor am I moaning about my wages (actually, I deliberately choose lower wages in return for more interesting work and flexibility in where I live).

What I am moaning about is people talking about an excess of supply or demand, like it's a plain fact.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Litter_%28vehicle%29

In your example, the demand for cabs would decline. People would find other modes of transportation or not travel at all.

You are right that an engineer's pay can only go so high. However, when the rate exceeds what you can afford, you simply bow out and do something different. Hire someone who does not have talent or refrain from doing the work.

Ferraris exceed what I am willing to pay for an automobile, but you won't hear me complaining that there is a shortage of Ferraris. Instead, I will buy a lesser car (an unskilled worker) and make do, or forego car ownership altogether.

A shortage implies that all the money in the world can still not allow you to fulfill your needs. If the fulfillment is out there, but you are not willing to pay the prices, that is not a shortage.

I depends. Increasing wages might mean people work less hours, because they don't need overtime to pay the bills. And you won't see a lot of experienced applicants appear overnight, unless you can tempt retirees or career switchers back.

If doctors who realise they can work 9-5, and have lots of holidays, and still have a great standard of living, why should they work longer hours? It does actually happen.

Of coures the mainstream economic explanation is that if this was predictable, students will have been driven into courses before the shortage occurred (it's called "rational behavior", or "the assumption that everyone is smarter than an economist").

Someone above questioned shortage, but nobody seem to question the Want more money part. And here you come up with " a great standard of living, " but really I think people with much less may have a greater life, even if they have no car and no washing machines.

More money is generally better (up to a saturation point of about $100k a year). But if you are time poor, and cash rich, the choice should be easy.

Obviously, some people just like work, and money. Marx was right - people can accumulate cash simply for the sake of accumulating cash (or the security it brings), not just for pure consumption.

Innovation has positive externalities (unless it is patented, others can get it for free (roughly)). So, you can still have a major shortage even if supply/demand are meeting in the usual way. (what do you think the reaction to sputnik was about?)

Well, in a market with perfect information, enough people and organizations would organize to donate money to fund the innovations :) (actually, I think this could be a better model for funding certain types of innovation, e.g. drugs for particular diseases, than patents). Of course, the market doesn't have perfect information, so there is not a 100% certainty on the return on these potential innovations. We must therefore discount them. But they are still valuable; and companies still have R&D departments that do blue-sky research, and we also have government funded R&D. Which you could argue Sputnik and reaction was about. I think these are also market behaviours.

So why do you think there is still a shortage, when there is in fact funding for innovation? Do you think the returns would be worth more investment, diverted from other current investments? If so, you should be able to convince enough other people to fund it. If not, does that not prove the weakness of your argument? ;)

(I'm arguing this with a hat on. That is, I'm taking a position that's actually somewhat more extreme than my real position, to see how it feels. I'm actually opposed to the market in many cases, but not because of quibbling over supply and demand, but rather because it is amoral - not immoral, amoral - as in it has no moral content. There is no intrinsic fairness in it. It just is, a machine driven by people's consumption, without consideration for whether their tastes are right or wrong.)

Anecdotal, but the majority of hackers I know aren't really motivated by money.

To them, it's about making enough money to fund their projects, or making something noteworthy enough to get hired by somebody else who can.

I'm glad you brought this up.

The only way to really excel as engineer or scientist is to move out of the role into a position that is people oriented, like manager. Even if you choose the entrepreneurial route, it is not the engineering that pays the bills, it is the interacting with other people. If you want your business to be successful, you will have to eventually delegate out the engineering so that you can focus on building the business.

With that, if you are only driven by financial gains (as opposed to the love of doing), why would anyone bother with the science/engineering step when you can put all of your focus on people-oriented jobs from the start?

>> the proportion of dentists and physicians who become part of the 1% is extremely high

As implied in another comment, this is cloudy because the New York Times has a hard time with the difference between "income" and "wealth".

If a doctor borrows $150K for their education, and borrows $850K to start a practice (for building, equipment, supplies, insurance, and working capital), they may have a very small (or negative) net worth with a million dollars of debt.

It takes quite a number of years at $400K of household income to pay off a million dollar debt. And during all those years, this example doctor would, according to this chart, be in the top 1%, even though their net worth might be miniscule.

Doctors that work for other doctors, though, are probably making pretty good money too.

"And since this is a tech/programmer site, the relatively low numbers of computer science/software people in the 1% seems to indicate that our chosen profession "tops out" at a certain income level below that 1%."

That could be misleading. A technical founder/co-founder of a very successful company would likely end up being categorized as a "manager". Bill Gates and Steve Jobs almost certainly would be classified as such and not as "cs/software" people.

I wonder where in the 1% those doctors and lawyers fall? You only need to make $350k to be considered "1%", but then it goes all the way up to Zuckerberg/Gates/Buffett levels. It's the 0.1% who are the millionaires and billionaires.

Regarding the physicians and lawyers, I think you would find this illuminating.

http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/investment_manage...

In light of that article it would be interesting to see a similar table for the top 0.5% and 0.1%. Bonus points for a slide-able %.

This is a bit misleading. They incorrectly haphazardly swap "income" and "wealth":

The subtitle says "Explore the occupations and industries of the nation’s wealthiest households." Yet the chart note is "The chart counts the number of individual workers living in households with an overall income in the top 1 percent nationwide."

This implies that a retired multimillionaire with a 300K passive income isn't in the wealthiest one percent, and a couple with a negative net worth (e.g. bought a $2 million dollar house that's now only worth a million; and no savings), with two $190K jobs is in the wealthiest one percent. Of course this is nonsense.

Plus, most of the entries are a mess of "spouse" jobs. e.g. They have 8k receptionists in the top 1% and 7k laborers. Dropping the lowest income household earners that weren't required in order to reach 1% would focus the data better.

Interestingly, this graph visualises the jobs of people in the wealthiest households. It does not mean that those jobs actually bring in the wealth.

I was surprised to see the relatively large box of elementary school teachers. Surely those jobs don't pay that well. It might be one of those cases where correlation is mistaken for causation: perhaps a lot of people who dream to be a teacher are able to realise it because they have a wealthy banker for a spouse or something.

Two married schoolteachers in a wealthy suburban school district near their peak earning years will gross nearly $200k for the household. (I'm related to multiple examples.)

The BLS collects copious stats on how much different occupations are paid. Reports of them being working poor are highly exaggerated.

My anecdotal evidence points to otherwise. On the other hand though, I believe 200k is close, but insufficient to place one into the 1%.

The the top 1% is $383K and up.

I've never heard teachers described as "working poor." Just middle income.

Two working people earning $200k together isn't what I would describe as particularly wealthy. That would put them squarely in what most people consider slightly upper-middle class. Consider that two engineers right out of college should be able to make that much.

Really depends on cost of living. I looked at a breakdown of this recently by locale. In the bay area or NY it doesn't get you anywhere close but in most other areas it puts you in or pretty close to the 1%.

Well, he said wealthy suburban.

>"Two working people earning $200k together isn't what I would describe as particularly wealthy"

You probably should, since the median household income is something like $50k or so, a quarter of what they make.

In what proportion are those: A. two person households, and B. two fulltime worker households?

My wife is a teacher, and I know a lot of other teachers in southern california. I don't know any that make anything close to $100k/year.

Here's the LA Unified pay scale.

http://www.teachinla.com/Research/documents/salarytables/tta...

"wealthy suburban school district" is important.

For example, http://acta.us/growls/2010/01/keeping_up_with_the_jones_in_m... lists numbers slightly over $100k for maximum salaries for teachers in two Maryland counties.

http://va.aft.org/fcft/index.cfm?action=downloadasset&as... is Fairfax County in Virginia; salaries are near $90k during peak earning years.

But even the pay scale you linked to has salaries near $90k at the top of the range....

In all of these pay scales it is only the absolute top of the scale that reaches 100k, and LA never reaches it.

Very few teachers reach this. By contrast programmers reach 100k rather quickly, yet they aren't as large in the original link. Let's remember what patio11 was replying to," I was surprised to see the relatively large box of elementary school teachers. Surely those jobs don't pay that well."

In fairness the comment about teachers in suburban districts was that two teacher salaries would be near 200k, not over 200k.

As far as the original comment about teachers, that's just basic statistics. There are lots of teachers. If you assume that people who earn >$400k or so marry people from other occupations more or less uniformly, you'd expect close to 1% of teachers to show up on this chart, which would be a big box. In practice, only 0.9% of teachers show up, but the real takeaway is that teachers are relatively well-educated and so not unlikely to actually be marrying people who end up with high salaries. There are plenty of occupations on that chart in which a lot less than 1% of the people in the occupation end up in the top 1% of households.

So as far as comparing box sizes, you have to balance better pay for programmers against the fact that there are a lot fewer of them than there are teachers...

"In fairness the comment about teachers in suburban districts was that two teacher salaries would be near 200k"

Precisely, and it's false. Two teachers, the vast majority of them, will not be near 200k. Look at my link, and it's obvious that if you randomly select 2 teachers, the vast majority of them will not be near $200k.

"If you assume that people who earn >$400k or so marry people from other occupations more or less uniformly, you'd expect close to 1% of teachers to show up on this chart"

Right, but you're making my point for me. My point is that teachers are not showing up because of their own salary.

> if you randomly select 2 teachers

Then you won't get 2 teachers "in their peak earning years". That part is important too.

There are two separate points here:

1) Teachers are not ending up in the top 1% because they make enough on their own. Very true.

2) Teachers in rich suburban school districts will end up near $100k in terms of salary in their peak earning years (which for teachers generally means near retirement). Still true.

No problem for both of those to be true, since $200k is nowhere near the 1% cutoff for household AGI.

We're splitting hairs over wording and possible implicit meanings, and I'm pretty sure we agree on the real issue, so yeah.

One last thing, not only do they have to be in their peak earning years, they also need to max out the points from additional education. I don't know how many teachers do that.

Yeah, I'm not entirely sure about the additional education thing either. Most teachers I know are spending a fair bit of time on that, but I'm not sure how that translates into the +15, +30, etc system of points...

$100k/year for teachers is somewhat rare.

However, $50k/year pensions for teachers is not all that rare and lots of retired police and fire folk do as well or better.

How much "net worth" does it take to throw off $50k/year guaranteed by taxpayers?

Thanks to http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3469401 , we know that a $50k/year pension is worth >$1.5M NPV.

So, those folks are near 1%ers. They just don't own the assets that will generate the money that they'll be spending. We do, or rather, we own the liability.

You'd have to be pretty killer to pull that off, however. I know for a fact that out of college Microsoft picks up engineers from MIT for 84k, and NASA gets new greats (not necessarily from MIT) for 76k. (disclaimer- I am not from MIT, but these ate both very reliable sources)

It's due to the sheer number: over 10M teachers. So there's simply a lot of them (in absolute numbers) that ended up marrying a 1%-er, even if its percentage-wise not out of the ordinary.

You can see that the color is very pale, and only slightly darker for college and universities.

I was also intrigued when I first saw the large amount of elementary school teachers in the 1%. Then I saw extra information called out on the sidebar: "School teachers don't earn enough to make the top 1 percent on their own, but many live in 1-percent households, primarily through marriage."

Ah, I did not even see that! At least they are aware that this visualisation has shortcomings :)

I have a friend who married into this exact circumstance who turned down med school at Duke to teach at Stuyvesant.

I don't like the way you put it. The spouse of a teacher might make more money, ok, but he or she is not a "banker".

I was invoking stereotypes, but perhaps those were a bit unfair. After all, according to the data linked, only 13.3% of "financial services sales occupations" and 10.7% of "financial specialists" in investment companies belong to the 1%. I should have picked on physicians :P

Also, to defend myself, according to this article the top half of the 1% are in fact people in the banking and financial services industry: http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/investment_manage...

For anyone interested, a similar list for the UK was published in the Guardian a couple of months ago. There are a few visualisations available, and the data's also there for download: http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2011/nov/25/highest-paid-job...

I tried looking for programmer, and this is what I found. I really hope this is just a poor job on the guardian's part!

22. IT strategy/planning professional £43,667 -8.5%

10th pct: £24,000. 80th pct✝: £63,693.

Also known as: Analyst-programmers; computer programmers; software engineers; systems analysts; systems designers. What they do: Provide advice on the effective utilisation of IT in order to enhance business functions. Well I never: A recent poll suggested IT consultants have unusually adventurous personalities.

Paul Krugman with the breakdown for the top .1%: http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/15/but-the-top-0-1-...

Interesting to note, the three largest boxes Physician, Lawyer and Teacher are all legally protected professions.

yes exactly. The reason for the escalating healthcare and education costs have to do with the guilds these professions enforce to prevent newcomers from undercutting their wages.

If the U.S. were to abolish the AMA and the teacher's union, the medical and education costs in this country would plummet, and the coming medicare debt could be halved.

What's your evidence for those statements?

I'm especially skeptical about teachers; I don't know anybody who avoided becoming a teacher because the certifications or the jobs were too hard to get, but I know a number of people who didn't do it (or did it and quit) because the pay and social standing was too low compared with the difficulty of the work.

Teachers just negotiate for job stability rather than wage. For some reason, teachers are extremely risk averse and would rather be paid crappy, forever, no matter how bad they are.

The teachers associations ensure no teachers can ever be fired no matter how incompetent. Teachers get summers off and big pensions and so they lobby for these and other lifestyle perks.

Which doesn't say anything about the point I'm questioning, which is your claim that teachers are part of some closed guild that drives up wages by forcing out newcomers.

They are part of a closed guild that drives up compensation. Their barriers to entry are just lower.

Note that the size of the boxes isn't really the relevant metric, but rather the color (which indicates the likelihood of someone in the profession being part of a household in the 1%). A darker color indicates a higher correlation between the profession and the income (ie, less likely that they simply married into wealth). Looking at the color, we see doctors, lawyers, and brokers, which is about what you'd expect.

If the data set was narrowed further to the top 0.1%, you would probably see the fee-based professions drop off and the high-end brokers dominate. There are only so many hours to bill or patients to serve in a day, while there is no limit to the size of a transaction from which a broker can skim a percentage.

Yep. This is the big American secret the working class can't seem to discover.

The elite have busted the unions, but professional associations are stronger than ever. Doctors do it to avoid free trade, they are protectionist, and surprise! They get paid for it.

The primary purpose of professional associations is to protect the wealth of the members, and this is done by lobbying for protectionism.

Doctors are really the last strong professional association, though.

Lawyers have a cabal, but it's pretty weak. There's no cap on new lawyers or people attending law school. If you are dumb and/or have bad grades you can always attend a 4th tier law school. In contrast, there aren't 4th tier med schools. Someone who gets their MD at University of North Dakota is still going to be making $150K, worst case scenario. Lawyers on the other hand have lower average wages than one might think. http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos053.htm#earnings It's just that a handful of certain lawyers, like trial lawyers, can make infinite money so others assume all types of lawyers are rich.

Doctors are the most powerful but the other associations still manage to raise wages through varying levels of protectionism.

> Lawyers have a cabal, but it's pretty weak... you can always attend a 4th tier law school.

Getting a school accredited by the A.B.A. is expensive [1], and if the schools necessarily cost a lot of money to run then the students largely come out with big debts to pay off. The article says essentially that the U.S. is oversupplied with "expensive" lawyers and has a strong unmet demand for "reasonably priced" legal services.

Moreover, there are a lot of people talking about how law graduates in the US are underprepared for their work - there's a recognition that some traditional curricula don't provide enough practical know-how to function in the real-world without serious on-the-job training. Law is essentially a vocational degree, and there is evidence that the standards governing the accreditation of law schools (and so lawyers) aren't aligned with the needs of the country.

I'll grant that the gatekeepers of the medical profession may have a stronger hold on things, but there are decent arguments for liberalisation of the legal market.

1: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/18/business/for-law-schools-a...

"The picture is clear; entry into the top 0.5% and, particularly, the top 0.1% is usually the result of some association with the financial industry and its creations."

This article makes an important distinction between the top 1% and the top .1% that the NYT piece glosses over:

http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/investment_manage...

Indeed, it's not that the conclusion of the article is wrong; the top 1% (whether measured by wealth or by income) are actually a pretty diverse group of people (in terms of occupations). However, the top 0.1% or even 0.01% are possibly a much more monolithic group, perhaps largely involved in the financial services and banking industries? This may be the more relevant group to discuss.

Your article is a bit deceptive - "some association with the financial industry" can mean an entrepreneur who made their money by building equity in a startup rather than earning a salary:

One of our clients, net worth in the $60M range, built a small company and was acquired with stock from a multi-national. Stock is often called a "paper" asset. Another client, CEO of a medium-cap tech company, retired with a net worth in the $70M range. The bulk of any CEO's wealth comes from stock, not income, and incomes are also very high... Another client with a net worth in the $10M range is the ex-wife of a managing director of a major investment bank, while another was able to amass $12M after taxes by her early thirties from stock options as a high level programmer in a successful IT company.

So by their criteria, Larry and Sergei, Steve Jobs, etc, all made their money "as a result of some association with the financial industry".

Interesting. I just did two years to get M.Sc. and started working full-time in IT myself. It is strange.. I always figured I'd eventually be making good money, and I didn't think much more of it. Now soon 30, some of my friends are making a lot more than I do. Only lately do I realize that when my uncle said I should specialize in something other than pure IT 10 years ago (himself having worked in IBM the past.. 10-20 years?), he was right..

This is mostly considering the money-aspect of it. I'll always program, but I don't feel it HAS to be my full-time job, it could be my hobby. Maybe I could have done smart things in the financial service, for instance? Or the oil sector.. I guess the only way to richness in IT is startups or a do other things than program. But it is really hard to do programming full-time at work and then focus on my own thing in my "free-time".

Ah well. Another life.

Who else was expecting to open up the diagram and find a bright red box in the top left with Finance written on it? How surprising it was to see that the 1% that everyone is complaining about are faceless managers, doctors and lawyers... Naturally, I'll need to see the .1% diagram, so that the hateful Financiers are in the position they deserve.

(I'm paraphrasing some of the other comments on this topic)

Exact same feeling here. Perhaps it should be 'Occupy Your Doctor's Office' rather than Wall Street.

Uh but while the graph may be "full of information", other posters have made good arguments that the information it gives isn't revealing (mixing wealth and incomes, aggregating occupations in confusing ways, etc). A simple graph of the occupations of those in the top of 1% of income and the top 1% of wealth (along with the overall source of that wealth) would be more revealing for the debates that have recently raged.

The Financiers are spread over several boxes, but taken together they are indeed right where we'd expect them (hated or not).

The visualization was confusing for me at first. It's important to realize that if <1% of a group is in the 1% there is a fair chance that they are not the ones bringing in the wealth. Instead they have married into wealth. The darkness of the squares is much more informative then the size of the squares.

In some ways I feel the graphic is misleading since I'm not horribly interested in what groups happen into the 1%, and much more interested in what groups create the 1%.

They should do this for the top .1% and show that 90% of them are in finance.

I'm actually keen on this as well. The U.S. population is currently about 300 million people. So 1% is 3 million people, which is an awfully large number.

I've read in several places that it's the 0.1% who have the true wealth and stature to control the legislature for their own benefit. So who's in the 0.1%?

I'd definitely like to know.

Of course this is not the same, statistically, but one thing I have done in the past is to find the most ridiculously expensive property in an area, look up the tax records online, and then google the owners. It takes a bit of work, but the picture that emerges is quite interesting.

For example, I live in the Seattle area, and I know where the mega-wealthy enclaves are here. Who owns the biggest mansions? Microsoft executives, members of the Nordstrom family, members of the construction family who built the Space Needle, people connected with Daniel's Broiler, some guy who invented a new kind of eyeglasses, a congressman's ex-wife, a woman who grew and sold her IT consulting firm, a guy who built a successful condo listing website, doctors, the founder of an investment firm, a commercial real estate developer... In short, it was mainly key players in big local businesses, entrepreneurs, and a small handful of physicians.

I imagine if one did this for NYC, the picture would look predictably different.

EDIT: I forgot, the site virtualglobetrotting.com makes this easier. Hamptons example: http://virtualglobetrotting.com/map/lloyd-blankfeins-house/n...

I'm not a UX guy, but I love this graph. Lots of data in an easy-to-explore format.

Having said that, I'm not sure if the colors were important enough to merit being included. Do I really care that some occupation gives people a better chance of being in the 1%? Probably not. I'd rather see how many total dollars we are talking about. For instance, do the 1% working securities law make a bunch more than the 1% who are construction managers? By how much?

I'll attempt a tl;dr, although you really should read the article. The 1% consists mostly of: managers, physicians, and lawyers, maybe with elementary and middle-school administrators thrown in as well.

I would caution to be careful of drawing too many conclusions, however. Every time we have these discussions it's the little details that always get you. It's very easy to feel like you are learning more than you actually are. Always be suspicious of aggregated data, especially when you are looking for insight. I blogged about this last month. (http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2011/12/management-by...)

Guys like lawyers and school principals fit into nice, little boxes. Entrepreneurs don't. I run into this every time I fill out a government form. For instance I know a guy locally who runs a couple of convenience stores, sells fuel on the side (by "on the side" I mean hundreds of thousands of gallons or more a month through home heating oil trucks, propane, etc.) , has a go-cart track, and is getting into e-commerce. What do you call him? A fuel speculator? Grocery manager? Entertainer? We talk about this all the time on HN, even though we don't know it. Take your average startup, say Stripe, are they a technology company? We would probably say so, but they also look a lot like a financial services company. How about the guy who's a lawyer and helps startups in a participatory manner for equity. Is he a VC? A lawyer manager? A partner? Yes, I know the IRS has legal definitions, but when looking at data like this the legal definitions don't really fit the discussion -- it just leaves us more questions than we started with.

The category of many of these business alone is problematic, much less trying to figure out job titles. Real innovation happens between the cracks. It doesn't fit into nice little boxes. The economy works because people are free to pick and choose little bits of all kinds of things to refashion them into something new that never existed before, so the parts that aren't being tracked here are the most important. Once you start looking at aggregates, averages, and deviations, you can make numbers say about anything you want.

Actually, I really looked the colors, it adds another dimension to the data: "given that you have X job, what is the chance that you would become filthy rich". I was actually frustrated with the graph until I noticed the meaning of the colors (viewing on a cell phone didn't help)

Yes, the colors indicate the correlation between the profession and the income. A darker color means that the profession is more likely to actually contribute to the income, while a lighter color means that those 1-percenters probably married into wealth or inherited passive income. In a graph showcasing the professions of the wealthy, the color is actually more significant than the relative sizes of the boxes.

Actually it's even more helpful than that: the lightest color indicates a less than one percent chance of entering the one percent, which means that that job does "worse than chance at achieving "one percent status".

Unrelated to the topic at hand, but if you want to make something in a treemap format, d3.js has a pretty fantastic treemap framework that you can customize pretty well.

http://mbostock.github.com/d3/ex/treemap.html

whether the colors mean anything or not, they add visual distinction to the chart and make it easier to read.

I actually wish they'd done the infographic with single taxpayers instead of households. The household numbers are confounded a lot by marriage - a hedge fund manager who marries a teacher is in the 1%, but that doesn't itself mean that teaching gets you into the 1%.

It'd skew younger as well - I suspect you'd see many more software developers, lawyers, and physicians, and fewer CEOs and managers.

I know a guy locally who runs a couple of convenience stores, sells fuel on the side..., has a go-cart track, and is getting into e-commerce. What do you call him?

All of those endeavors are probably incorporated, and he is undoubtedly an officer in the company or companies. So he's a probably a CEO. Not so terribly difficult to classify for this chart.

Yeah, the CEO of the 7-11 down the street is a friend of mine.

If he owns it and he"s incorporated, then sure.

Assuming this is only looking at 'income' and not capital gains / dividends, this is highly misleading because many wealthy live off the former, though it's a bit difficult to find numbers. Also if everyone is listing their occupations, it's only natural that many choose generic ones rather than "I live off inherited family money dividends" or equivalent

Teachers can make lots of money, via tutoring. I know teachers, besides their regular jobs, who have been charging $80 to $100 a hour for tutoring, for 10 to 20 hours a week. Also their regular jobs only take 9 months so they got time for other jobs. They can easily pull in 150K to 180K a year.

The data in this graph is flawed.

I only see one major box categorized as "engineer", and it says that 1/4 of all engineers are architecture or surveying. Try 1/20, perhaps. 1/4 is way too large. The only engineering majors that large are EECS and Mechanical, I bet.

I think the problem with drawing the line at the 99% vs 1% is that it let's the bottom 90% of the 1% side with the top 10% of the 1%. (Refering to this previously mentioned link: http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/investment_manage...)

"We are the 99.9%" isn't as catchy but strategically it would make sense.

Whats the deal with managers ranking above CEO s.

Absolutely speaking managers rank higher, but that's a trivial figure considering there are significantly more managers out there than CEOs.

Relatively CEOs are better off than managers.

Companies have many managers, but one CEO.

The visualization is a bit confusing, but it makes sense that the manager box is larger than the CEO box since as others have pointed out there are more managers than CEOs, however notice that the CEO box is noticeably darker than the manager box, indicating that CEOs are more likely to be in the 1% than managers.

It's not a terrific visualization. It's a bit difficult to compare box sizes and colors.

CEOs are also managers :)

Cashiers... :|

On what planet could a cashier make that much money? I need to research this!

so basically, about 1% of everyone is in the 1%.. surprise

The 1% don't have "Jobs" even the high paid banker with a 2 million bonus isn't realy one of the 1%

Well, according to the other NYT article on the front page the annual household income required to be in the top 1% is $383,000. Many people in the top 1% probably don't consider themselves to be all that wealthy...

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/01/15/business/one-...

Annual household income => $383K is a bit surprising? Or do I just have a wrong picture of rich people. I thought it would be much more.

I thought this as well, but you may be comparing against a Forbes richest people list. The majority of the people I talk to (even devs) think $100,000 is a very large sum of money. Also, just by having a decent salary in the US/Canada, income-wise you're easily the top 1% of the world: http://www.globalrichlist.com/

Just to clarify, that URL is about annual income whereas the list of Forbes billionaires is about net worth.

   annual income != net worth (aka wealth)

I was thinking more the guy I met at first Tuesday a few years ago I thought he looks familiar. He was sporting the red VC badge I looked down one word "Rosthchild".

And it was a Napoleonic era portrait of Nathan Rothschild who helped finance the UK Finance the Napoleonic wars that I was recalling

Many people in the top .1% probably don't consider themselves to be all that wealthy either. We tend to compare ourselves to those that surround us, not the majority of the population. Afterall, living in manhattan and vacation homes are expensive.

We are talking about one out of every 100 people. Most of them have regular, relatable jobs. The $2m bonus territory is probably the top 0.1% or 0.05%.

Hmm... I'm thinking top 1% people do not have a job anymore, other people are working for them.

Or at least this is what I would do if I would be in top 1% :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com