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Comment by fyi80 | Hacker News Reader

Another horrible repeating of the "income inequality" trope, and then showing graphs of median income that don't get near the top l% of US earners, while citing a stat that the top 1% of earners are gaining.

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Do you honestly expect whole census tracts to have median incomes at the level of the top percentile?

A factor of ten difference between census tracts in the same city is worth examining.

Isn't that what you'd expect? There's a factor of ten difference these days between the poverty line and a fairly typical white-collar income (call it $120K.) Is it really surprising, or telling, that at the tract-level you'd find a factor of ten difference in a major city? Is there a major city where you don't see that?

You usually see a gradient where the tract-to-tract variance is less pronounced. A city will almost always contain tracts where there is a 10x difference between the highest and lowest numbers, but it is not as frequent that those tracts will be located right next to each other. There are several other cities which are like this, Delhi and to some extent Philadelphia both come to mind and I think it is notable there as well.

And, for whatever it's worth, I also think the variance even when the tracts are not next to each other is equally worthy of examination. Just because it is common does not mean it isn't something we shouldn't talk about. In many ways, when the neighborhoods are next to each other it is a good thing for visibility.

New York has this... I don't think it's atypical. Tracts are so small that it only takes a single development to raise or depress median income grossly. Take a look at the middle of Manhattan: there are tracts with $10K next to tracts with $120K, but they might have as few as 20 households in tract, which means that a single building with 11 low-income tenants would pull the median down to the poverty line.

http://www.wnyc.org/blogs/wnyc-news-blog/2011/dec/08/census-...

$120K is typical? Even if you only isolate the executive/management positions from SF, which is one of the most inflated markets in the world, the median is still only about $100k. Obviously, the average of all white-collar jobs will be far lower. In more representative parts of the country, I'd imagine that it's below $50k (which is only two to four times the poverty level, not ten.)

Honestly, where do people get the idea that the average American makes $120k. That salary is astronomical.

http://www.bls.gov/ncs/ocs/sp/ncbl1627.pdf

I specifically called it out as "white-collar" income, not overall median income.

It's household income, not per capita. The median household income for SF is $73. I don't think it's out of bounds to assume that for a white collar worker (call it a 75th percentile income) that number is well over $120.

(The median household income for a number of cities in this area exceeds $110K. They're not all execs. http://citylab.news21.com/data/types/19/)

About 30% of the US gets a bachelor's degree, which seems like a reasonable proxy for the number of people working in white collar office jobs. So a median white collar worker is probably about 80th percentile income. For the overall US, that works out to $105K to $110K. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_...

Found some data on the US Census website:

  Table H-1.  Income Limits for Each Fifth and Top 5 Percent of 
  All Households:  1967 to 2011						
  												  	
  Year		Lowest	Second	Third	Fourth	Top 5 percent			
  2011		20,262 	38,520 	62,434 	101,582 186,000 			
  1967 (adj)	19,931 	38,866 	55,164 	78,663 	126,232 			
  1967		 3,000 	 5,850 	 8,303 	11,840 	 19,000 				
  ---------------------------------------------------------------------
  
  Table H-2.  Share of Aggregate Income Received by Each Fifth and 
  Top 5 Percent of Households, All Races:  1967 to 2011			
  												  	
  Year	Lowest	Second	Third	Fourth	Highest	Top 5 percent
  2011	3.2 	 8.4 	14.3 	23.0 	51.1 	22.3 
  1967	4.0 	10.8 	17.3 	24.2 	43.6 	17.2 
  ---------------------------------------------------------------------
  
  Table H-3.  Mean Household Income Received by Each Fifth and 
  Top 5 Percent, All Races:  1967 to 2011						
  
  Year	   Lowest  Second  Third   Fourth  Highest  Top 5 percent
  2011	   11,239  29,204  49,842  80,080  178,020  311,444 
  1967 (adj) 10,630  29,452  47,018  65,787  118,393  186,758 
  1967	    1,600   4,433   7,077   9,902   17,820   28,110 
  ---------------------------------------------------------------------
  
  Table H-6.  Regions--All Races by Median and Mean Income: 1975 to 2011
  
  	Median income	  Mean income	
  	Current $ 2011 $  Current $  2011 $
  2011	50,054 	  50,054  69,677     69,677
  1975 	11,800 	  44,851  13,779     52,373
  ---------------------------------------------------------------------

This data indicates to me that the bottom 3/5ths of income earners earn about what they did 45 years ago if adjusted for inflation, while the top income earners have increased. The fact that the top 20% have increased their earnings drastically does not necessarily mean to me that there's a problem.

It simply means if you can break out of the slump and make your way into the top 20% of income earners that you will be more rewarded than you were 45 years ago.

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