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I hate to be the person to quibble about the semantics of words but when one says the word modest one doesn't usually imagine a situation that is more than 70%

I hate to be the person to quibble about the semantics of words but when one says the word modest one doesn't usually imagine a situation that is more than 70% of all others. I agree, it's a reasonable expectation that two people working should have a lifestyle that something like 100k/year would support. That being reasonable doesn't change the fact that it's still more than what 70% of other situations get, regardless of how those situations came about. If you want to compare that on an individual level then it's still not modest. The median Individual income is only 36k/year. Even on an individual level they're still doing better than 70% of the population on that level. Yes, it's possible to be comfortable and live a nice life no in NYC or SF. But let's not delude ourselves into thinking that just because it's reasonable to expect that level of income for a household, that it's modest, or even the norm.

bzbarsky 5y ago
Imagine a world in which everyone has exactly the same income and the same expenses, saves up the same amount of money for retirement, and lives exactly the same amount of time. In that world, someone just about to retire would in one sense be somewhere in the top 1-2% of wealth holders and in another sense be exactly average (and median, and mode), as regards their consumption patterns. The point being, lifecycle effects matter a _lot_. In the US, ~17% of the population is 65+ (not all of them retired, of course, but many retired and living partially off their savings) and ~6% of the population are college students. Let's assume that "individual income" does not include children (though it might, depending on how it's measured. It certainly includes various people who only work part-time, but let's ignore that. If we assume that college students and retirees are all below-median (not entirely true, but no worse than the other assumptions we just made), 70th percentile of individual income is something like 60th percentile of "income of non-students and non-retirees". > That being reasonable doesn't change the fact that it's still more than what 70% of other situations get The point is, if you look at actual consumption (as in, how people actually live), not everyone's consumption comes entirely from income. So it's extremely misleading to look at incomes and say anything about what people "get".

bzbarsky 5y ago

Imagine a world in which everyone has exactly the same income and the same expenses, saves up the same amount of money for retirement, and lives exactly the same amount of time. In that world, someone just about to retire would in one sense be somewhere in the top 1-2% of wealth holders and in another sense be exactly average (and median, and mode), as regards their consumption patterns. The point being, lifecycle effects matter a _lot_. In the US, ~17% of the population is 65+ (not all of them retired, of course, but many retired and living partially off their savings) and ~6% of the population are college students. Let's assume that "individual income" does not include children (though it might, depending on how it's measured. It certainly includes various people who only work part-time, but let's ignore that. If we assume that college students and retirees are all below-median (not entirely true, but no worse than the other assumptions we just made), 70th percentile of individual income is something like 60th percentile of "income of non-students and non-retirees". > That being reasonable doesn't change the fact that it's still more than what 70% of other situations get The point is, if you look at actual consumption (as in, how people actually live), not everyone's consumption comes entirely from income. So it's extremely misleading to look at incomes and say anything about what people "get".