What you're saying is true but is irrelevant to my point. With the original post the claim was that 1/20 in Boston make more than 374k because the top 5% of peo

What you're saying is true but is irrelevant to my point. With the original post the claim was that 1/20 in Boston make more than 374k because the top 5% of people between 35 and 64 make more than 374k. Again this is not true and is not how percentiles work. What's so difficult to understand? If you have 98 people in Boston who are 18 who make $1 and 1 who is 40 who makes $374K and another who is 36 who makes $10K what does this mean? It means 50% of people in Boston between 35 and 64 make more than 10K, but not that half of the people in Boston in general make that much, as the original post suggested. The original poster was claiming he or she was not doing well because of the data NYT presented, but percentiles cannot be extrapolated from one group to another. As you've said it's only useful for a specific cohort in which it's measured. In my hypothetical example the person making 10k would be in the top 2% despite being in the lower 50% for income in their cohort.