6 ms·
Where is the One Percent?
- fennecfoxen 15y agoOf course, you can break into the global top 1% with a mere $34,000 a year.
- TruthElixirX 15y agoI believe it is 54k a year now, but I may have been looking it up incorrectly.
- rprospero 15y agoAccording to the Wiki, 40% of the US population made over $54k in 2003. That's 125 million people or 1.8% of the world's population. Since there are obviously people outside the US also making over $54k per year, we can assume that at least 2% of the world population is making over 54k.
- forensic 15y agoOnly if you adjust for living expenses.
- nirvana 15y agoSeems they're concentrated in Washington DC primarily, with New York, San Francisco, Boston and Seattle taking the rear. The North Slope of alaska, however, shows an error here. The cost of living in Barrow is really very high... much higher than, say, Adams County, Washington. So, I suspect someone making the median income in Adams County is probably doing better than someone making the median in Barrow, in terms of take home pay.... Though, interestingly, those oil workers will be taxed on their income, not accounting for their expenses, and thus are marginally poorer as a result. Also, according to the standards of this map, I'm the %1. This is good to know, because previously, I'd felt a little sheepish when I made that claim.
- seldo 15y agoIt seems like having the center of political power inhabited by the 1% explains why the concerns of the 99% are so easily dismissed by national politicans.
- strait 15y agoKeep it up, Hari.
- seldo 15y agoHeh. So few people get the reference...
- InclinedPlane 15y agoI think you might have cause and effect backwards.
- guelo 15y agoWhat are the standards for this map? It seems it is the 1% richest counties by median (household?) income. So I don't think you can qualify yourself as 1% based on this, all you could say is you live in a rich county.
- _delirium 15y agoYeah, this is measuring something quite different: the areas where the average person is the wealthiest, rather than where the much-wealthier-than-average people live (though there is probably a correlation). The cutoff for being in the top 1% of household incomes is $380k or so. It would be interesting to see the distribution of where such people live. This map isn't useless, but I think the title is highly misleading.
- Retric 15y agoLooks like median household income, what's most interesting is when you look at the bottom 0-10% bracket they are mostly in red states except for West Virginia.
- mguarascio 15y agoCampbell County, Wyoming. Just as I suspected! This is great, thanks. What technology did you use for the map and parsing the census data? UPDATE: Looks like this js library was used http://mbostock.github.com/d3/ex/choropleth.html http://mbostock.github.com/d3/ex/choropleth.html
- CGamesPlay 15y agoEl Paso County, TX (the leftmost one) has a median income of 36,78? A few others in Texas are similarly quite off.
- TruthElixirX 15y agoHave you ever been to El Paso? Its miserable.
- m_myers 15y agoJudging by the percentage given, I'm pretty sure the trailing 0 was stripped and it's really $36,780.
- Rusky 15y agoIs this adjusted for living expenses at all? New York may have high salaries but they also have high cost of living.
- mguarascio 15y agoAgreed - that would be interesting to see cost of living weighed in. Speaking from experience, Suffolk/Nassau counties in NY may have higher salaries - but the cost of living is rough (e.g. property taxes).
- jerf 15y agoPersonally I'm not a huge fan of so-called "cost of living" adjustments. I've lived in a range of "cost of living" areas, and areas with a higher CoL are generally nicer, by which I mean, everything in the area is just generally nicer. Stores don't have missing tiles, produce is fresher, crime is lower, the lights on the stores outside don't have missing bulbs for long, the roads are smoother, the houses are nicer, and the local culture is richer, in most senses of the term. If we're talking about things like global levels of true wealth, you probably shouldn't adjust for CoL. Areas with high CoL are areas with a higher ambient wealth, and for questions of who is better off, trying to normalize on CoL lines someone in semi-rural China vs. a Manhattenite is normalizing away a critical truth.
- lsc 15y agoI find this especially true in labor markets. I've moved from the central valley to the silicon valley and back several times during my life, and yeah, silicon valley has higher wages (and higher rents) - but you know what? it also has higher expectations. I noticed that whenever I went to silicon valley, I was, well, mediocre. I had to put some effort in just to stay in the middle of the pack, and I've had some jobs where it took my all just to keep my head above water. In the central valley? almost everywhere I worked, I was like a little god, even without all that much effort. Sure, the average worker gets paid more here in silicon valley; but if you hire the average silicon valley sysadmin/programmer, you are getting a whole lot more than the average central valley sysadmin/programmer.
- veyron 15y agoIs median income the right measure to use here? This leads to weird anomalies like how is Bergen County is 1% but New York County (Manhattan) is 4%?
- jeffdavis 15y agoAgreed, I thought the same thing. It seems kind of strange to use median income to find the "1%". I guess it all depends on the point this is trying to make, which I'm a little unclear on. It seems perhaps useful (it's data, after all), but if the intent was to tie it to the "occupy" movement, then I missed that connection.
- bgentry 15y agoCost of living. Cost of living. Cost of living. $85,000 in San Francisco will not get you much. The same amount in Kansas will have you living like a king.
- baddox 15y agoNot get you much? Perhaps that's true if you're supporting a family of four with only your income, but if you're single, 85k is pretty darn decent. Granted. I don't know if you can find an apartment in SF right now regardless of how much money you've got.
- ubi 15y agoTook me 2 months to find a place in sf, rent < 1600/mo Per bed.
- baddox 15y agoWas that within the last 4 months? I moved out this July and pretty much had to find a place within 3 or 4 days. In 2 days, I found a room (granted, far away from downtown and in a house full of random people) for $900 a month. I was a bit disappointed with my place, but in the following month or two I saw the housing market go crazy again, and to this day I hear it's difficult to find a place even if you can afford the offerings, simply because there's huge lines at every open house.
- guelo 15y agoYea but living in San Francisco will get you lots of culture, restaurants, etc. that you won't get in Kansas. Living in SF is just a luxury that some people are willing to pay for, you could live in Oakland and pay half the rent.
- bgentry 15y agoI'm not knocking on SF, I live there and I love it. I'm just pointing out that this "top 1%" article is useless since it does not account for cost of living. The difference in CoL is so drastic between NYC/SF and Kansas that the study might look drastically different if it looked at net income after living expenses.
- stephanerangaya 15y agoHere's what CNN says http://money.cnn.com/2011/10/20/news/economy/occupy_wall_street_income/index.htm http://money.cnn.com/2011/10/20/news/economy/occupy_wall_str...
- hkmurakami 15y agoWhat I'm really curious in these days is how this map would look if we had a map of the World instead of the map of the United States. Where would the 1% be then? How many of us would be in the 1%?
- rprospero 15y agoMore of us, but not as many as you'd think. The top 1% of the wold is ~70 million people. This is 22% of the US population. The top 22% in the US earn about $85k per year. So, if you're making over $85k, you're in the global 1%. Except, this is rather America centric. If we expand out to the entire G8 (pop. ~880 million), we find that you need to be in the top 8% of G8 salaries to be in the global 1%. This corresponds to about $150k, taking the zeroth order approximation that the G8 distributions are the same as the US one. Note: Population data pulled from Mathematica and US Household income data pulled from wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_...). Note that the income data is dated, so corrections are welcome.
- learc83 15y agoWow check out all the counties in metro Atlanta. We always joked that paulding county was full of rednecks, but it's in the top 5%.
- igorgue 15y agoI think Occupy refers to the claim that "the top 1 percent owns more financial wealth than bottom 95 percent combined" popularized by Michael Moore in his latest film.
- jakeonthemove 15y agoWhoa, so any small business owner who is more or less successful is considered the 1%? The situation is worse than I thought... Seriously, I think the 1% should include only those earning over 500K a year (there's about... oh 1% of them in the world :-))...
- lsc 15y agodepends a lot on if you count capital gains. My understanding is that if you include those, (which really, you'd have to; most really wealthy people earn most of their money through capital gains rather than salary) you have to be well north of a million a year to be in the top 1%.
- garethsprice 15y agoHere's a great interactive tool from IBM, based on 2010 data: http://www-958.ibm.com/software/data/cognos/manyeyes/visualizations/income-percentiles-for-2010-by-typ http://www-958.ibm.com/software/data/cognos/manyeyes/visuali... 99% = $515k taxable household income, which I believe includes capital gains. It's a hard L-shaped graph though, the difference between 30 and 40% is under $10k, but the real jumps don't come until the mid 90% range.
- SomeCallMeTim 15y agoNo. You need $380,000 in income, i.e., PROFIT, from a small business to be considered part of the 1%. A "successful" small business owner could take in $2-3M in receipts and still only clear $150k a year after expenses. Or less. Some businesses don't have much of a margin. And most don't have more than a few hundred k a year of receipts. That's what I find crazy about all of the "you'll hurt small business!" anti-tax rhetoric. If it's only targeting more than $380k in PROFIT (for a sole proprietorship, or that much per owner for a partnership/jointly owned business), then raising the MARGINAL tax to 50% or higher would only encourage the business owner(s) to spend the money on expanding their business instead of buying a second yacht.
- lsc 15y ago
- lunchbox 15y agoDouble Click to zoom in; Shift + Double Click to zoom out.
- InclinedPlane 15y agoOr use the scroll-wheel.
- tansey 15y agoThe idea that Caroline County, VA (my home town) is the 9% is fairly ridiculous. It's a very poor county, with most people working in the food industry or at King's Dominion nearby. I suppose DC commuters may be skewing the stats, but that certainly wasn't reflected in my high school.
- jinushaun 15y agoNot surprised about Virginia, which is where I live. 3 of the top 5 richest counties in the US are in Virginia. If you count Maryland, then 4 of the top 5 are in the DC metro area.