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I'm no expert, but I just searched "income distribution in san francisco" and found [1]. The chart labelled "Distribution of median household income in 2013 (nu
by jkaptur 11y ago
I'm no expert, but I just searched "income distribution in san francisco" and found [1]. The chart labelled "Distribution of median household income in 2013 (number of people)" indicates a multimodal distribution of income. The smallest bar on the chart is the 50k-60k bucket - a traditional "middle class".
Of course, there's plenty to quibble about. I've never heard of city-data.com. Maybe this distribution looks more normal if you don't bucket everyone >200k together.
But I'm curious where you were headed with your comment. Is there a more important distribution that I just didn't find?
[1] http://www.city-data.com/income/income-San-Francisco-California.html http://www.city-data.com/income/income-San-Francisco-Califor...
- jessriedel 11y agoThe bar plot available at your link isn't helpful. It's not just the $200k+ group: the width of the income buckets jumps around from bucket to bucket ($60k-$75k, then $75k-$100k), so of course it has weird structure! My point is that whenever people start mentally divvying up the population discretely (introverts vs. extroverts, rich vs. poor, etc.), this is almost always a mistake; it's a projection of their mental map onto reality, when in fact the variable under discussion is almost always smoothly distributed.
- Maarten88 11y agoI thought it was very helpful: in my mind a healthy society would have some sort of bayesian distribution in income, where most of the people would fall into the middle, few would be rich and few would be poor . These charts look nothing like that.
- jessriedel 11y agoThat's not the topic we're discussing.