3 ms·

I wonder what the graph would look like if it was parents' income as an absolute value vs as a percentile.

by technomancy 11y ago

erikb 11y ago
You're right, it might also be about representation! Have completely forgotten about that one.
leereeves 11y ago
It would look like a cliff, as most of the population would be packed on the left.
- 6502nerdface 11y ago
  Yeah you'd have to use log or sqrt of income.
- kens 11y ago
  Out of curiosity I drew the US wealth distribution on a linear axis a while ago, and it's really insanely packed to the left. As in everyone but a couple thousand people are in a single pixel column on the left with less than $100 million. Half the population are within a wavelength of light's distance of 0 on a linear wealth scale. The point is that wealth is nothing like a normal distribution - the very rich are so rich that even millions of dollars is nothing in comparison. http://www.righto.com/2013/03/wealth-distribution-in-united-states.html http://www.righto.com/2013/03/wealth-distribution-in-united-...
  - tripzilch 11y ago
    A few years ago, I made this histogram for a friend (I'm not American myself), who was interested in the modal income for the US, instead of the median income. The modal income is when you pick a US citizen at random, the expected value for their income, which can be seen as the location of the peak in this histogram: http://i.imgur.com/euPugla.png http://i.imgur.com/euPugla.png Note that the data is from 2008, and only counts employed citizens. I compiled the data from an official US government data/demographics/census website (I forget which one, sorry). I noticed I could query the average income for all counties split over many "occupation groups". This gave me relatively fine-grained buckets (it doesn't really matter what they were, just that they were small-ish), weighted by the number of people in it, allowing me to plot the histogram. The really proper way to build this histogram would be to bucket an actual list of income for each individual US citizen. But that list is not available, for obvious reasons.

I wonder what the graph would look like if it was parents' income as an absolute value vs as a percentile.

erikb 11y ago

You're right, it might also be about representation! Have completely forgotten about that one.

leereeves 11y ago

It would look like a cliff, as most of the population would be packed on the left.

6502nerdface 11y ago
Yeah you'd have to use log or sqrt of income.
kens 11y ago
Out of curiosity I drew the US wealth distribution on a linear axis a while ago, and it's really insanely packed to the left. As in everyone but a couple thousand people are in a single pixel column on the left with less than $100 million. Half the population are within a wavelength of light's distance of 0 on a linear wealth scale. The point is that wealth is nothing like a normal distribution - the very rich are so rich that even millions of dollars is nothing in comparison. http://www.righto.com/2013/03/wealth-distribution-in-united-states.html http://www.righto.com/2013/03/wealth-distribution-in-united-...
- tripzilch 11y ago
  A few years ago, I made this histogram for a friend (I'm not American myself), who was interested in the modal income for the US, instead of the median income. The modal income is when you pick a US citizen at random, the expected value for their income, which can be seen as the location of the peak in this histogram: http://i.imgur.com/euPugla.png http://i.imgur.com/euPugla.png Note that the data is from 2008, and only counts employed citizens. I compiled the data from an official US government data/demographics/census website (I forget which one, sorry). I noticed I could query the average income for all counties split over many "occupation groups". This gave me relatively fine-grained buckets (it doesn't really matter what they were, just that they were small-ish), weighted by the number of people in it, allowing me to plot the histogram. The really proper way to build this histogram would be to bucket an actual list of income for each individual US citizen. But that list is not available, for obvious reasons.