Ask HN: Is Your Income above Your Country's Median Income? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is Your Income above Your Country's Median Income?

29 pointstokenadult44 comments

I've seen a lot of submissions and comments to Hacker News recently about income inequality, which is perhaps not a core topic here but a topic a lot of people care about. It occurred to me that I might better understand where other participants are coming from on the income inequality issue if I can get a reality check on whether you are above or below your country's median level of income. My wild guess is that most Hacker News participants have incomes above the median levels in their countries, but please let me know so I understand this issue better.

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Its an interesting question but the sample set (people who read HN) will skew hugely toward technologists. The starting income for engineers[1] is higher than the median income. I would expect a significant fraction of the readers here to be engineers and thus have higher than median incomes.

For me though the 'income inequality' question adds little insight into meaningful problems. Consider what it would be like if you wrote equally valid copy about 'house price inequality.' You might right, "Why is it that a four bedroom 2000 square foot ranch style house is worth $170,000 in Minnesota but worth $1,500,000 in California?" You could write about how badly the $170,000 house felt about themselves that for providing the same number of bedrooms, the same quality of shelter, and the all the same appliances as the house in California but for some clearly bogus reasons people "judged" that house to be worth less. Alas the unfairness of it all.

Fortunately we're not trying to sway the vote of that $170,000 house or its shopping habits, or you would get that sort of writing.

When you look at it in that context when there isn't a person whose "value" is being equated to their "salary" (which is the central issue in this narrative in my opinion) you can see there are so many different things going on that it makes no sense to think that houses in different places would, by virtue of their similar feature, somehow demand the same sales price.

[1] http://www.mtu.edu/engineering/outreach/welcome/salary/ not a wonderful reference but the census.gov site was letting me down.

According to [1] in the UK the median pretax income for an individual in 2012–13 is £21,300; the 75th percentile £33,300; the 90th percentile £50,500; the 95th percentile £68,500; and the 99th percentile £156,000.

My income is closer to the 90th percentile than the 75th or 95th.

According to [2] compared to international income distributions (rather than just my country) my income places me in the richest 0.5% of the world's population.

Needless to say, I try to stay appreciative; my position is heavily dependent on luck. I also donate around £10,000 a year to charity; seems like the least I can do really.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_in_the_United_Kingdom

[2] http://www.givingwhatwecan.org/get-involved/how-rich-am-i

Yes, by a fair bit. Unwilling to quantify exactly how much without anonymization.

Have to echo zafka's sentiment: I'm incredibly lucky to be in my position, and try to remind myself often that it can vanish just as quickly as it came. I'm fortunate because of luck and preparation (more former than latter), and it ruffles my feathers when people on HN try to toss around the "self made man" thing.

UK based. Yes. I believe I am significantly. I am the co-owner of a small company that writes specialist pharmaceutical related software. For the last 3 years my partners and I have pulled down around £110k per year (pre tax). In the last year work hours have gone down for us, but profit has gone up. We are just building "cash at bank" now, while maintaining the same income. We don't really have exit. Just enjoying the "good times" while they last.

The key thing is I am only as happy, if not less so than I was when we started up. There's no excitement now, an important factor for me day to day. Also, it sounds played out, but I have more financial stress now. I have a big mortgage on a big house and employees to worry about. It really can be more money more problems.

"a big mortgage on a big house" Why?

Because he didn't have enough cash for a small mortgage?

Basically yes. I was buying a house in a small (but expensive) village that I had lived in for my whole life. I was getting married. We needed a house. All my friends and family live there. Its my home. Its easy commuting distance to my office, central London, Heathrow airport and has clean air, good schools, good amenities, good community and a canal to walk and cycle down every day I want to. I wasn't buying a house as an investment. I was buying a house as somewhere to live until I possibly die.

By the time you take solicitors fees, stamp duty, etc in to account I may as well buy it for the long term. My house is already estimated to be worth 50k more than I paid for it less than 9 months ago. Why? I've fixed lots of easy problems with it, slightly modernised and I got a good deal as they were desperate for a sale, I had no chain and they needed the money (previous deal collapsed and they were on a bridging loan). I don't view it as an investment. I simply bought the house I wanted to live in, in the area I wanted to live in at a very competitive price.

This interactive infographic from the BBC gives you a global overview of average wages in different countries. You can type in your monthly salary to see how near or far you are to the average wage in your country.

It obviously comes with lots of caveats and tells you nothing about the quality of life in a particular country. It's still quite eye-opening though.

Where are you on the global pay scale? (March 2012) http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-17543356

This is bruto pay. It is massively wrong, almost deceitful.

I think they're presenting average pre-tax income. Singapore tax is between 0% and 20%, and there's 7% VAT. In Germany you're going to be paying between 42 and 45% income tax, and 19% VAT. That means in Singapore you can spend 74.4% of your income on what you want, in Germany 39%. And singapore is much less regulated than Germany, and much better connected trade-wise, which means goods are a lot cheaper there to begin with (not real estate though).

So, for the same bruto pay you'd have double the money in Singapore compared to Germany, meaning those Singaporeans can easily buy 4 or 5 ipads for that average wage, whereas an average Earning german would be doing very well to get 2.5 for their "higher" pay. Hell, the average Singaporean is probably better off than the average Luxembourgian.

Keep in mind that the "average" wage in singapore might be high, but the mean wage is a LOT lower. Same, of course, is true in Luxembourg, but I don't think it's that skewed in Germany.

London based. I started off below median London income and I must say it was not pleasant. Now three years later after changing my life around I earn well above median and together with my partner our combined household income is in the top 20% of London. Having been on the other side of the spectrum I feel these inequality discussion strongly. I worked just as hard and had barely enough to get through. We need to tax wealth and not labour. Even the OECD has recommended that in it's recent reports.

Taxing wealth is simply a deferred tax on labor.

That's not true. First, there are ways of accumulating wealth that do not involve labor. Second, wealth taxes would apply to the same resources over multiple periods, which is a significantly different dynamic.

Thanks to all of you for your thoughtful comments. Several of you drew the important distinction between individual income and household income, which often pools the incomes of more than one income-earner. As is surely apparent from my submission and comment history on HN, I am not a person with a technical education or technical occupation. My person income since I had children (when I reduced labor force participation in the interest of homeschooling the kids) has been below the United States median personal income. My wife likes her work and does it well, and much of the time we have had children we have been near the United States median household income, and recently above it, in nontechnical occupations. I like HN because it includes a lot of discussion about lifestyle and education tradeoffs that I wish I would have engaged in when I was the age of most participants here. I'm happy with my life, and think I am staggeringly wealthy--not least because I have this Internet technology that lets us communicate with one another all over the world. My oldest son is launched into adulthood as a hacker and has an income sufficiently high to save money in his high-expense city, and my other children look set also to have more expedient career choices than I made.

I've been freelancing for a while and I've taken offers ranging from 10 USD/hour to 45 USD/hour. Minus insurance, minus VAT and other taxes, minus expenses such as electricity/heating, Internet, ~20USD/month on AWS bills, and gear (which right now is just my laptop, tablet and extra monitor).

I make between minimum wage and the average programmer's salary on my home country (which is a little above the average for senior developers but almost nothing for junior ones), without using my native language at all, and my average week is usually more than 40 hours.

I have to be available on sundays and pretty much every holiday, but at least I don't have any reason to hate mondays and I don't have to commute either :-)

Also, I get to travel a lot because I can work from almost anywhere in the world (I've lived in 2 different countries last year and visited many others), although it brings me down a little having most of my human interaction reduced to emails and online posts (Plus, when my girlfriend is not around, I have to talk to my cat to keep my vocal cords in shape. Seriously, it's quite difficult to just start talking when you remain silent for most of the day :-))

Whichever responses you get, they are unlikely to be terribly informative due to heavy response bias.

Besides, even if you arrived at some reasonable aggregate, you would then have to surmount the pitfalls of ecological inference to be able to draw any meaningful conclusions: it could very well be that users whose preferences influence the most the content of top-voted submissions are far from representative.

That is not to say though your guess is ex ante incorrect: programmers almost invariably earn above the median income in every country, especially in the US (and especially in the startup scene); and this is an English-based US site that distinctly up-votes programming and startup content --"niche" topics of very narrow interest to all but a particular sliver of population, and so highly informative in the "Bayesian surprise" sense.

I am right at the median household income for the U.S. Consider though that I'm measuring my individual income against the median household income, which puts me at above average for individual income. I'm also young (26), and finishing up grad school, so I expect my individual income to rise significantly over the next 5-10 years.

There are lots to consider when trying to gauge your income to the median. Median for your city or state could be very different than your country's median income. You also have to take individual, family, and household income into consideration. There are many other factors, too. Age, occupation/industry, and educational background are all heavily correlated to income.

Thank you for suggesting I look at this. I had a vague idea, but I didn't have a good solid number until I looked it up.

It makes me incredibly thankful for the sacrifices my parents made in hardship and poverty in order to provide me and my sister with an education.

My current income is well over 14 times what the median income for my age-group was 4 years go. No, I'm not filthy rich, I just live in a country whose population is largely on the poor side. If you're curious, it's South Africa:

https://www.statssa.gov.za/Publications/P02112/P021122010.pd...

Yes, by a very large margin. I also try to maintain an attitude of gratitude at all times. I realize that my position in life is largely a matter of luck. I was born in the right place with the right genes.

Switzerland, and no, I've read that a supermarket cashier or a secretary makes about the same as I do, without the long hours, but I am very frugal so I most likely save a lot more than they would (one month of salary buys me several months of runway for when I'll get serious and drop everything else) and I like what I do of course.

EDIT: I just typed 'median income switzerland' in google and damn, I am even worse off than I thought...

I'm around 1.5 times my countries average wage.

For reference here are some info sources.

Countries by average wage: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_wa...

Median household income: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_household_income

I suggest creating a survey that would allow you to collect this information without binding it to specific identities.

As it is, yes, I am above my country's mean and median (Canada), but I'm not sure I want to tell you what the scaling factor is in a public forum. (FWIW, I'm above the median and mean for the number one countries in each respective list posted by jamilv - but again, I ain't sayin' by how much.)

No; I'm probably about 15k below the national median and 25k below the state median. This is entirely my own fault. Life is OK, though.

I am a grad student and my wife is a PostDoc, this puts us right at the median income in the US. I think we live well, but we also don't spend much: my wife hates stores.

On this income we are able to afford to live in a nice suburb outside Boston. I am really worried about having a kid towards the end of the year though. Daycare in this area costs about $20k per year.

According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_in_the_United_Kingdom, with the 22% inflation, for my age range, yes, I earn more.

In the UK, we're actually below the median since my wife isn't working at the moment.

OTOH, we own our house outright and don't have any crazy expensive habits or any debts, so I still currently save over 50% of my net income.

How, who, what?! You earn under 21K and own your own house and still save 10k pa?

I find myself guilty at my profligate unbudgeted ways but even so, I can't see how that's doable!

Tell me more

This really underscores the value of capital wealth. Once you own your own home, actual living expenses are quite small.

Personally I budget and save for big expenses like insurances, new car and holiday's. When you are forward planning like this you end up saving a lot of your income for those once a year items.

The person you are replying to probably isn't investing all of that 10k, but he's putting it into a saving account on a regular basis knowing that in month 7 he'll be paying out 500. The interest and habit of saving probably means that a big chunk is going on long term savings.

Hi, sorry I didn't notice your reply before.

It's not as tough as it sounds once there's no rent or mortgage. You can count your mortgage as savings for budgeting purposes though.

I work from home, so no travel expenses. My bills and council tax come to about 300 a month. About 300 a month for food. 300 a month spending money. That's 900 total and save the rest.

Note that I'm below the median for two people, which is a little higher than the median for one, but it's still in the same ballpark.

Yes, I'm pretty sure I was at 3x median income when I worked at what became a larger startup. Now I'm back to making barely enough to cover my ridiculous rent while getting a new company off the ground.

This sounds like a very San Francisco story to me!

Yes, more than double. I am very fortunate, which I have to remind myself on a daily basis due to my consumption of mass-media and its incessant message of consumer culture.

Here in India, I started out with programming at an age of 12, today 2 years after graduation, I am 11 times higher than the national median income.

Yes (in the UK), we're just slightly above it as a household, but I'm more ahead of it as an individual.

Wow, I'm actually below the median...and I thought that I lived well.

> thought

Then you probably do, no?

6 to 8 times. Up to 10 if I work hard. I'm working as a contractor.

Yes, about 2.4x median household income (just me, not my partner).

No. I am currently $4000 behind the median (Canada, Small startup)

From Chile, and way above the mean, something like 4x or 5x.

Well above, even if restricting the group to college grads.

Yes, 3 or 4 times. I am from Argentina.

www.globalrichlist.com will give you some insights to where you fall globally.

Substantially above.

Yes, 3.5 times.

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