5 ms·
"39% of Americans will spend a year in the top 5 % of the income distribution, 56 % will find themselves in the top 10%, and 73% percent will spend a year in th
by rvcdbn 6y ago
"39% of Americans will spend a year in the top 5 % of the income distribution, 56 % will find themselves in the top 10%, and 73% percent will spend a year in the top 20 %."
from https://medium.com/incerto/inequality-and-skin-in-the-game-d8f00bc0cb46 https://medium.com/incerto/inequality-and-skin-in-the-game-d...:
- sidlls 6y agoWhat are these numbers actually taken from? I'm betting the vast majority of this is counting the sale of a home or a one-time windfall (e.g. small inheritance, gambling winnings) as income for "a year", but I'm not going to buy the book just to see.
- shuckles 6y agoRuss Roberts has a fairly thorough treatment of composition effects impacting income statistics: https://medium.com/@russroberts/do-the-rich-capture-all-the-gains-from-economic-growth-c96d93101f9c https://medium.com/@russroberts/do-the-rich-capture-all-the-...
- refurb 6y agoThanks for the link. These stats just backup what I've always heard - the top 10%, 1%, whatever, is not static. Neither is the bottom 10%. Many people usually start their careers at the bottom (i.e. college student working part time) and then eventually make it into the middle class and plenty make it further than that. Of course, some never make it out of poverty.
- quadrangle 6y agoI've heard otherwise that this mobility (which nobody denies exists) is about the lowest it has ever been and growing more static. I'm sure some searches about social mobility stats would bring up lots of stuff.
- refurb 6y agoIf you do a google search on mobility, you'll find papers that say a whole lot of different things - some that say it's gotten worse, some that say it's gotten better. The biggest problem is data. It's not that great.