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.
The BLS collects copious stats on how much different occupations are paid. Reports of them being working poor are highly exaggerated.
You probably should, since the median household income is something like $50k or so, a quarter of what they make.
Here's the LA Unified pay scale.
http://www.teachinla.com/Research/documents/salarytables/tta...
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....
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."
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...
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.
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.
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.
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?
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 can see that the color is very pale, and only slightly darker for college and universities.