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The whole point of much of this analysis (and the videos shown) is that household income can be very misleading. But most if not all of the analyses I report on

The whole point of much of this analysis (and the videos shown) is that household income can be very misleading. But most if not all of the analyses I report on are for individuals over time. So changes in the number of earners are actually more of a problem for most of the gloomy studies that look at households by quintile. Incredibly, the proportion of households with two earners is LOWER in 2014 than in 1980 because of the large increase in households with one or no earners. Marriage is not nearly as common as it used to be. The data are here in Table H-12: https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/income-poverty/historical-income-households.html https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/income-p... I also would add as I did in the essay, that I am not claiming that everything is OK in the economy. I am trying to respond to the relentless claim that the rich got all the gains of the last few decades. It's simply not true. That doesn't mean everything is fine. But just figuring out what actually happened is surprisingly complicated. The people who claim that the economy is only helping the rich should be more nuanced.

roymurdock 8y ago
Thanks for coming on here to weigh in personally. I always appreciate research that adds nuance to a discussion. Do you have any plans to explore wealth concentration in future essays?
tanderson92 8y ago
I think it is generally well-understood that individuals more senior in their career have generally higher incomes. So, when it is stated that "the rich" are obtaining wealth gains, it is explicitly looking at structural changes rather than simply an earnings cycle for individuals continuing to be true. Your first sentence is "Adjusted for inflation, the US economy has more than doubled in real terms since 1975" -- but it was the case even in 1975 that there was absolute income mobility as one progressed in their career. So, your argument purports to disprove the relative mobility or inequality arguments of Saez/Piketty but in fact cannot. That is why there is so much pushback on this piece of yours: because it appears to be attacking a strawman unrelated to real inequality in the system.
thrmsforbfast 8y ago
> Incredibly, the proportion of households with two earners is LOWER in 2014 than in 1980 because of the large increase in households with one or no earners. Marriage is not nearly as common as it used to be. The data are here in Table H-12 That's interesting data. However, one income supporting one person is very different from one income supporting 4+ people. Is there any reason why we shouldn't just use division (# earners/household size) here?
vannevar 8y ago
As you're no doubt aware, these kinds of analyses can be tricky when dealing with fat-tailed distributions, such as income. Using the median can hide exactly the kinds of large disparities that Piketty, et al, are talking about. Likewise, saying that 93% of the poor exceeded their parents' income while only 70% of the wealthy did so leaves out the most important number, which is the aggregate amount by which each group benefited. I don't believe anyone has made the claim that the poor have gotten nothing; only that they have gotten a grossly disproportionate share of growth. Nothing in your article refutes that premise. Indeed, you seem to go out of your way to avoid actually addressing it directly.

roymurdock 8y ago

Thanks for coming on here to weigh in personally. I always appreciate research that adds nuance to a discussion. Do you have any plans to explore wealth concentration in future essays?

tanderson92 8y ago

I think it is generally well-understood that individuals more senior in their career have generally higher incomes. So, when it is stated that "the rich" are obtaining wealth gains, it is explicitly looking at structural changes rather than simply an earnings cycle for individuals continuing to be true. Your first sentence is "Adjusted for inflation, the US economy has more than doubled in real terms since 1975" -- but it was the case even in 1975 that there was absolute income mobility as one progressed in their career. So, your argument purports to disprove the relative mobility or inequality arguments of Saez/Piketty but in fact cannot. That is why there is so much pushback on this piece of yours: because it appears to be attacking a strawman unrelated to real inequality in the system.

thrmsforbfast 8y ago

> Incredibly, the proportion of households with two earners is LOWER in 2014 than in 1980 because of the large increase in households with one or no earners. Marriage is not nearly as common as it used to be. The data are here in Table H-12 That's interesting data. However, one income supporting one person is very different from one income supporting 4+ people. Is there any reason why we shouldn't just use division (# earners/household size) here?

vannevar 8y ago

As you're no doubt aware, these kinds of analyses can be tricky when dealing with fat-tailed distributions, such as income. Using the median can hide exactly the kinds of large disparities that Piketty, et al, are talking about. Likewise, saying that 93% of the poor exceeded their parents' income while only 70% of the wealthy did so leaves out the most important number, which is the aggregate amount by which each group benefited. I don't believe anyone has made the claim that the poor have gotten nothing; only that they have gotten a grossly disproportionate share of growth. Nothing in your article refutes that premise. Indeed, you seem to go out of your way to avoid actually addressing it directly.