MetaFilter posts tagged with income

Two Americas Separated by a Common Capital City

l33tpolicywonk — Sat, 06 Sep 2008 11:49:43 -0800

Two Washingtons: Washington, DC is defined by its income inequality. In the US capital, the top fifth are 27.1 times as wealthy as the bottom fifth. In Dupont Circle, expect to pay $1.2 million for a single family home. Across the Anacostia, expect to find crime, pollution and nothing better than dead-end opportunities. Neighborhoods on the same subway line (pdf) can be separated by nine years in health disparities. As gentrification squeezes the black population out of a historically black city, diverse businesses decline and the city loses its unique character. Now, former Bush speechwriter David Frum says its even what makes DC residents so Democratic.

US Census Bureau's DataWeb

Gyan — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 07:03:28 -0800

TheDataWeb - a network of online data libraries on topics including census data, economic data, health data, income and unemployment data, population data, labor data, cancer data, crime and transportation data, family dynamics, vital statistics data

Treasury: Income Mobility Substantial. Pew: But Not Enough.

shivohum — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 20:22:53 -0800

A new U.S. Treasury Report (press release) reports that tax returns from 1996 to 2005 show that income mobility in the U.S. is "considerable," with rising earnings, and top earners who often stumble. The WSJ crows. Pew releases its own research (reports, press release) on income inequality today with a multi-decade outlook, but summarizes the findings as that American families' income mobility is still highly dependent on their parents' position. Forbes and a The New Republic blog try to reconcile the reports. Meanwhile, blacks appear to be downwardly mobile.

Mind the Gap

hoverboards don't work on water — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 04:51:34 -0800

Mind the Gap: an essay by Paul Graham on wealth, riches, poverty, and why income inequality might not be so bad.

"When people care enough about something to do it well, those who do it best tend to be far better than everyone else. There's a huge gap between Leonardo and second-rate contemporaries like Borgognone. You see the same gap between Raymond Chandler and the average writer of detective novels. A top-ranked professional chess player could play ten thousand games against an ordinary club player without losing once. Like chess or painting or writing novels, making money is a very specialized skill. But for some reason we treat this skill differently. No one complains when a few people surpass all the rest at playing chess or writing novels, but when a few people make more money than the rest, we get editorials saying this is wrong. Why? The pattern of variation seems no different than for any other skill. What causes people to react so strongly when the skill is making money? I think there are three reasons we treat making money as different: the misleading model of wealth we learn as children; the disreputable way in which, till recently, most fortunes were accumulated; and the worry that great variations in income are somehow bad for society. As far as I can tell, the first is mistaken, the second outdated, and the third empirically false. Could it be that, in a modern democracy, variation in income is actually a sign of health?"

County Migration

tellurian — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 22:58:32 -0800

This map displays county-to-county migration data for 2000-2005 from the U.S. Internal Revenue Service. In, out, staying put, median household income. [via]

Mind the gap. Wait, nevermind.

peeedro — Fri, 30 Mar 2007 19:34:38 -0800

Income inequality continues to rise. Or maybe not.

Professors Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty and the Cato Institute's Alan Reynolds debate on how to measure[PDF] income inequality. Despite the ongoing debate, President Bush has decided, "The fact is that income inequality is real; it's been rising for more than 25 years."

But I Want a New Yacht

fenriq — Sat, 16 Dec 2006 17:03:05 -0800

Scraping By on $150K a Year
My heart bleeds for people who earn a six figure income but are still dirt poor. In a skewed distribution model with the median income ($43,000 in 2002) being in Salina, Kansas and moving a mile east or west for each $1000 above or below that median, the Bush's would be four states away in Columbus, Ohio and the average CEO would be in....Kabul, Afghanistan. The top 400 incomes would be three quarters of the way to the moon. From a 2003 article at Alternet so they're probably beyond the moon now and on their way to Mars. From 1979 to 1997, the average annual income of the top 1% (after taxes) increased by 157% (or $414,000) while the poorest 20% went down by $100.

Freedom to Fascism

augustweed — Fri, 13 Oct 2006 22:05:03 -0800

Aaron Russo releases America: Freedom to Fascism on the net!

How the other half lives...

Irontom — Tue, 16 Nov 2004 08:10:08 -0800

How the ~~other half~~ top quintile lives... Coldwell Banker has released the first Coldwell Banker(R) Luxury Index, a "study conducted in August 2004 of U.S. luxury homeowners -- those owning homes valued at $1 million or more -- concerning their attitudes, preferences and purchasing behavior related to luxury goods and services." You might be interested to discover that 61% of those surveyed stated recent increases in interest rates would have no impact on their luxury item purchases.

By Their Bootstraps

y2karl — Tue, 29 Jun 2004 08:54:40 -0800

Consider the scorecard. During Clinton's two terms, the median income for American families increased by a solid 15% after inflation, according to Census Bureau figures. But it rose even faster for African Americans (33%) and Hispanics (24%) than it did for whites (14%). The growth was so widely shared that from 1993 through 1999, families in the bottom fifth of the income distribution saw their incomes increase faster than those in the top 5%. By comparison, under President Reagan in the 1980s, those in the top 5% increased their income more than five times faster than the bottom 20%. Likewise, the poverty rate under Clinton fell 25%, the biggest eight-year decline since the 1960s. It fell even faster for particularly vulnerable groups like blacks, Hispanics and children. Again the contrast with Reagan is striking. During Reagan's two terms, the number of Americans in poverty fell by just 77,000. During Clinton's two terms, the number of Americans in poverty plummeted by 8.1 million. The number of children in poverty fell by 50,000 under Reagan. Under Clinton the number was 4.1 million. That's a ratio of 80 to 1. Clinton's Biggest Gains Not on Conservative Critics' Radar

The working poor

jbou — Sun, 30 Nov 2003 13:27:18 -0800

the working poor A new book by Beth Shulman called The Betrayal of Work” argues that hard work is just not cutting it in America anymore. According to Shulman, even in the go-go ’90s one out of every four American workers made less than $8.70 an hour, an income equal to the government’s poverty level for a family of four. Many, if not most, of these workers have no health care, sick pay or retirement provisions. more inside.....

Arts degrees 'reduce earnings'

MintSauce — Thu, 06 Mar 2003 02:39:48 -0800

Arts degrees 'reduce earnings' A degree in an arts subject reduces average earnings to below those of someone who leaves school with just A-levels. Graduates in these subjects - including history and English - could expect to make between 2% and 10% less than those who quit education at 18

"Feeling warm about literature doesn't pay the rent."

Slouching towards Sierra Leone?

troutfishing — Wed, 15 Jan 2003 10:42:08 -0800

US income distribution moves towards 3rd world profile? - US Census Bureau data on growing family income inequality, 1947 to 2001. Also see: The "L Curve" (for a graphic depiction of current US wealth distribution). "The most egalitarian countries have a Gini index in the 20s. European countries like Germany, Austria, Belgium, Hungary, Poland, Norway, and Sweden all fall in that range, according to World Bank figures. Canada and Australia are just over 30. The United States is around 40...Once inequality reaches 50 percent, disparities become glaringly obvious, to the point where they undermine a society's sense of unity and common purpose....Sierra Leone takes the prize. At 63 percent, it offers the world's most extreme example of inequality." By multiple measures, income inequality in the US is rapidly increasing, and a substantial percentage of middle class Americans may be gradually sliding into poverty..

nofundy — Tue, 16 Jul 2002 12:45:06 -0800

Cheney in Numbers. It's hard to spin hard cold numbers. Here's a few: *Cheney's 2000 income from Halliburton: $36,086,635 Increase in government contracts while Cheney led Halliburton: 91% *Minimum size of "accounting irregularity" that occurred while Cheney was CEO: $100,000,000 (One hundred MILLION dollars) *Number of the seven official US "State Sponsors of Terror" that Halliburton contracted with: 2 out of 7 *Pages of Energy Plan documents Cheney refused to give congressional investigators: 13,500 *Amount energy companies gave the Bush/Cheney presidential campaign: $1,800,000 I also loved this quote: "Cheney and Bush want privacy for their conversations, but not for anyone else's." --Tony Mauro in USA Today, Feb. 27, 2002

Ty Webb — Wed, 24 Apr 2002 12:52:30 -0800

"The Myth of Ownership." Financial Columnist Stephen Moore's review of a new book which claims that it is a "compelling fantasy that we earn our income and the government takes some of it away from us."

jellybuzz — Thu, 28 Feb 2002 09:25:53 -0800

It's easy to think of lawyers as greedy, overpaid blood-sucking pigs. But do we have any clue what lawyers earn? Yes we do, thanks to American Lawyer Media's (via law.com) annual roundup of lawyer compensation. Not all of which is surprising. For example, partners at the top corporate firms like Wachtell Lipton, or Cravath, Swaine & Moore or Davis Polk each averaged millions in 2001 ($3,285,000, $2,245,000 and $1,740,000, respectively). Even piddly little first year associates at those firms got $125,000 to start. (We're talking 24-year-old law school grads with precisely zero professional experience and know-how. Zero.) But most newbie lawyers don't win those jobs. Also difficult to land are entry-level positions at district attorneys' offices, but they're not nearly as lucrative. A junior Manhattan D.A. earned $45,000 last year (up from $42,000 in 2000). But locking up criminals beats toiling for civil rights at a not-for-profit like the New York Civil Liberties Union, which paid entry-level lawyers only $35,000 last year. Over all, best off are lawyers who work for big companies. Top counsel at IBM last year earned a measly $506,000 in cash (salary & bonus), but throw in stocks & options and his compensation totaled $7,795,613. Compared to that, you have to worry about the Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court whose family in 2001 had to struggle along on $192,600.

username — Thu, 21 Feb 2002 06:02:17 -0800

90% of white males suffered downward income mobility over last 20 years Why hasn't this detailed, well-done study by reputable entities gotten any play from the major media? The study linked above proves that things have gone downhill for the vast majority of people here in the USA. Now what I would like to see are the results of a similar study done for northwestern Europeans.

sigsegv — Tue, 02 Oct 2001 00:32:28 -0800

Polls say blacks tend to favor checks.
"African-Americans ... are more likely than other racial groups to favor profiling and stringent airport security checks for Arabs and Arab-Americans in the wake of this month's terrorist attacks, two separate polls indicate."

"The findings by the Gallup Organization and Zogby International were met with varying degrees of disappointment and disbelief by black activists and intellectuals, who struggled with explanations."

Could it be that income and education are more related to racialist attitudes than race itself?