> In other words, increasing your income by more than $50k, only decreases "paycheck to paycheck"-ness by 12 percentage points. That seems to support the thesis

> In other words, increasing your income by more than $50k, only decreases "paycheck to paycheck"-ness by 12 percentage points. That seems to support the thesis that it's due to human nature rather than income distribution. You're relating statistics which may be unrelated. It's at least not shown they are related, and I have reasons to believe they are less related than as presented. People that make over 100k but live paycheck to paycheck might primarily be made up of people who live in area with extremely high costs of living. People that make less than $50k might be primarily living in low to medium cost of living areas where thy can survive on that but don't have much chance to save. Without normalizing based on cost of living, you aren't really making a comparison that is useful. By using hard values, such as $50k or $100k, but ignoring that the largest affect on what amount of that is disposable (and thus valid to be applied to savings) is a highly variable cost of living, you ignore variables so large as to make any assumption useless. You might as well normalize and average values for income and savings the United States and China and make assumptions based on that across both populations together. It's essentially the same thing you're doing here, with a more obvious set of differences. The conclusions you make from it will have flaws in similar ways.