That can't be right though... 1000 people isn't nearly enough to drag the average income down 5k BELOW the median income in a nation of over 300 million. It should still be higher due to the long tail on the high side of incomes.
Where x is the remaining average.
X≈66.3k, and that's excluding the ENTIRE 1% which is over a MILLION people at least, depending on how you count it. America is big.
To explain the first panel alone, by removing the top ten earners from the data set, you'd move the median to.the lower end by 5 "slots". I'm confident that there are more than 100 people in the USA who make between $65k and $75k (I know at least 25).
If they mean the average/mean, that still doesn't add up. Assuming that the US population is about 350 million and that 350,000,000 - 10 ~= 350 million.
NGL, formatting the equations and walking then out step by step is a pain, esp on mobile, but the answer I came to is by multiplying the difference in mean values (~$10,000) by the US Population (350 million), which yields $300,000,000,000 or about 10 billion per person once evenly distributed.
Elon Musk (2nd richest man in the world at time of writing) has a net worth of less than $5 billion rn, but the numbers here imply that the top earners in the US made at least 60x that amount.
TL;DR: I'mma need some sources on this.
Edit: on my app (Voyager/Wefwef) I can't save draft comments to go look at the meme while commenting, so definitely have some things off from.what the meme was saying, but they're close enough I'm leaving as it.
This is also why the publiclly discussed focus is on household income, which is mostly two incomes. Prior to the 80s single income housholds were the majority.
Median is the middle point of the population and has its place when the range doesn't skew too much. I think a good representation of income is by percentages, as in "90% of people make $x,000 or below". This chart had dated (2010) data but its a better representation than I've found elsewhere
For what it's worth, AI models are saying just excluding the top 10 wealthiest Americans actually drops it from 68,700 to around 40,000 based on data from 2020.
Take this with a giant shovel of salt... But it does kind of corroborate the numbers presented.
For the second frame of this to be true, assuming 157 million working Americans, each of the top 10 earners would be making over $150 billion a year on average. This amount is close to the net worth of the world's richest people, and couldn't possibly be their annual income.
What? The world's richest people are not in the 1,5 billion dollars range. They are in the 200-100 billion dollars. And it would be surprising if they didn't earn 150 million just from owning this amount of wealth each year.
The rich are consolidating the market and republicans are too busy incorrectly blaming Joe Biden who is trying to support labor by implementing safety measures and holding businesses accountable.
I see lots of people are pointing out that these numbers don't make sense. Here are some of my thoughts.
I'm not an economist so I'm probably making some very basic mistakes but...
GDP per capita is $76.3k [Google]
Average household size 2.6. [Google]
So GDP per household is $198.4k [Calculator]
That is the mean productivity per household.
But the median income per household is $75k [Google]
So what happens to the $123.4k of productivity (198.4k-75k) per household that isn't paid to workers? It's in the outliers and is asset appreciation isn't it?
Yeah I had to replace my phone's screen and the digitizer has never been the same. I've corrected it to something sensible, I'm not sure what my original word choice was though.
Dont know if i dont get the sarcasm. But why are you using the household size? Why is everybody in the household working fulltime? I would think the >2 household are the kids :D
I used median household income to account for the fact that not every person in a household is earning. I wasn't confident that median individual earnings would include people that aren't earning.
It might work a bit better if incomes were bucketed into 5k brackets before taking the mode. From there, I guess you can take the mean or median of all the incomes that comprise the bucket?
Thats not the source of any of the stats in the meme though? There's no way the average income outside of the top 1000 is that low. Heck, that's not even a large proportion of "the 1%"
This, ladies, gentlemen, & all other variadic param[] of polymorphic gender identifier: average is just about useless when your income distribution is skewed to hell.
The following elaboration of 'skewed to hell' brought to you by our grammatical sponsor(s) who felt a single sentence would be asking a bit much:
skewed to hell:
much like a contemporary Big Box Home Improvement™ 2x4†,
even after you have laboriously picked through the entire 2 pallets of this week's pathetic delivery of stock,
each one weighing as much as an Olympic bar (~45 pounds for the metric challenged),
overladen with pumped-up moisture content,
with employees giving you the stink-eye because their boss is the assistant viceroy to the vice-supervisor II who reports 'directly' to the district junior manager of "end-cap yo' ass from on high I crave the retail facing',
trying in vain to select the most choice and optimal specimens,
still ending up not being able to see anything but sap, knots, and disappointment as you look down the length,
as you strain to assess its deviation from a long-lost baseline against the fluorescent lights,
activating your ADHD superpowers,
contemplating economic and environmental policy failures of multiple decades,
questioning your life choices,
ultimately defending a clumsy attack on your sensibilities by the special human who parked blocking the store entrance and hotdog stand because it can't be arsed to use a parking spot and would not be qualified to park in the 'pro contractor' area anyway as judged by peers
Regardless, the income distribution is about as normal, perky, and bell-shaped as a Petunia in Death Valley.
† Note: 2x4 is given in nominal measurements, not actual dimensions - do your research
ADHD superpowers? My ADHD superpower is staying up (against my will) for 2 days straight half-alive before an important event, but not being able to stay awake past 3 pm when I need to be somewhere at 5 pm. And any amount of sleep/napping below 7 hours somehow making me more tired than I was before
Well, not anything... It's pretty recognized that in most cases, median provides a more realistic and representative measure than average for this very reason (outliers).
median provides a more realistic and representative measure than average for this very reason (outliers).
Must be a hell of a lot of people earning SO much less than the median wage if the average wage excluding only 1000 out of ~335m is already significantly lower..
I lament statements like this because I work with statistics and you can't just make them say anything. I hate that people use this to dismiss real facts.
You always have to look at the distribution, which is hard to do well. Simple statistics and averages hide so much detail, it's often ineptitude more than outright deceit.