from Hacker News

How much Americans make in wages

by LiweiZ on 1/11/19, 2:43 AM with 205 comments

• by jurassic on 1/11/19, 3:28 AM

  I feel this a lot in my own family. I’m in tech at a fairly privileged BigCo. Siblings work retail gigs for a small fraction of what I bring home. I’ve had raises and bonuses equal to what one of my siblings makes in a year.

• by ausbah on 1/11/19, 3:00 AM

  >There is one important caveat to keep in mind when thinking about our dataset. The SSA numbers include any wage earners whatsoever, even part-time workers like students and teenagers.

  not leading with this feels like poor reporting

• by skilled on 1/11/19, 3:58 AM

  I honestly wonder are people that delusional that they overlook the ridiculous debt that the country is in? Don't get me wrong, I am not from America myself but I have a lot of friends from there, and I generally don't hear anything good about the 'American dream'.

  If you take a hard step back, like way back. And take a moment to look at the "situation" with an outside perspective, don't you think it's a little ridiculous that the debt keeps growing, and somehow the numbers get adjusted, and more loans are given.

  And it makes me wonder, if this is not being actively resolved now, then when? In a 1,000 years? I have a hard time believing that society is going to survive that long with all the idiocracy that's going on.

• by largehotcoffee on 1/11/19, 3:59 AM

  >48% of wage earners had net compensation less than or equal to the median wage

  Isn't that how math works?

• by ryanmarsh on 1/11/19, 5:48 AM

  This is chart junk. The issue raised in the opening paragraph is a change in wages. Therefore it should be represented as a time-series chart (line, bar, etc...). This is a static view. The different categories are nestled together in a way that obscures their relationship to their neighbors. The income groups are not categorical groups they're subranges. They should be next to each other in a progression. This graphic is confusing and unhelpful.

  This probably could have been done well with a steam graph. Maybe a slope graph. I'd have to see the data and it depends on what they're really trying to show.

• by pxeboot on 1/11/19, 2:54 AM

  Dual ~30k incomes is still very much middle class in most of the US.

• by 11thEarlOfMar on 1/11/19, 3:51 AM

  Would be interested to know the composition of retirees subsisting on social security checks. Also, I believe this is individual income, rather than household. Wondering how much different the picture would be on a household income basis.

• by bobthepanda on 1/11/19, 2:58 AM

  Perhaps nitpicky, but it bothers me that their data representation is a psuedo-pie chart that isn’t even centered.

• by zswinton on 1/15/19, 12:30 PM

  I used to work om many of those undertable gigs in order to get something to eat in the evening. Later I figured out more about taxable gigs and 1099-MISC here: https://1099-misc-form.pdffiller.com/ (actually a copypaste from the IRS website) and was puzzled about how some young people actually supposed to live a decent life and pay that amount of their wages to a government as well

• by jungletime on 1/11/19, 3:29 AM

  Anyone know the software package used to create this graph? Was it photoshop :)

• by notacoward on 1/11/19, 2:34 PM

  What a weird way to visualize this data. A simple histogram or CDF plot would have shown the patterns quite well. This way it's hard to follow the bands and blobs, which seem to be based on completely arbitrary cutoffs. It doesn't even seem to follow its own strange logic, jumping suddenly from just under $100K (1% per blob) to over $100K (8%) in a different part of the diagram. Why would anyone do this?

• by fromthestart on 1/11/19, 5:17 AM

  >There is one important caveat to keep in mind when thinking about our dataset. The SSA numbers include any wage earners whatsoever, even part-time workers like students and teenagers. This drags down the aggregate wage numbers for full-time working adults, which reach $61,372 for households last year.

  So...what do the statistics look like if we remove part time teenagers and students? I suspect much less attention grabbing than the headline.

• by g9yuayon on 1/11/19, 9:26 PM

  Yet many parents still think that nerds are boring. Many students still bully those who focus on academic excellence. Teachers still think that students should learn easy peasy stuff because, well, "everyone is fking unique", or let's leave no child behind.

  The end result? The people in the middle ground, aka most children, will be left behind.

• by jdlyga on 1/11/19, 2:59 AM

  30k is very low. If your company offers 6 holidays per year, that equals out to $14.71 per hour. That's below minimum wage in New York City right now.

• by peterwwillis on 1/11/19, 6:11 AM

  Well let's pile some more random data onto this tire fire and jump to some conclusions. (edit: comparing 2015 to 2017)

  How much do Americans earn?

  2015 data [1]: median household income was $52K. If you're white. If you're black, the median is $34K. So, only like, 1/3 less. Or if you're asian, the median is $72K.

  2017 data [2]: median household income apparently jumps to $62k. If you're white it's $65k, black it's $40k, asian $81k.

  Then the Social Security data (from 2013) shows the median net compensation for individuals is $28K. And according to tax data, the bottom 50% of taxpayers make less than $34K.

  Since the poverty level for a family of 4 (in 2017) is $25k, that means a majority of families of 4 (which, again have to pay 4x for more food, clothing, transportation, education, and miscellaneous) have a bit more than subsistence level money.

  2017 data [3]: Census claims the poverty level for a household of 1 is $12k. What? Who the fuck is living in America on $12k a year?

  Adding up all the people making less than $15k comes to ~28% of Americans, or 92 million people, just above to below poverty level (SSA data for 2017 [5]). But Census poverty data [6] says only 12% are in poverty. There's a huge gap between the SSA's numbers of people and their net compensation, compared to the Census's formulation of how many people are in poverty. How is there a gap of 52 million people in calculating the poverty rate? Can someone point out what's going on?

  GDP is also higher than median household income, which doesn't take inflation into account.

  [1] http://www.mybudget360.com/how-much-do-americans-earn-in-201... [2] https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/demo/tables/p60/263... [3] https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/cps/tables/time-ser... [4] https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2018/demo/p60-26... [5] https://www.ssa.gov/cgi-bin/netcomp.cgi?year=2017 [6] https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2018/demo/p60-26...

  edit: in the Census report (https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publicatio...) they mention that you have to adjust all pre-2014 numbers by increasing them by 3.14 percent, due to changes in reporting....

• by justaguyhere on 1/11/19, 11:44 AM

  Anyone else having a hard time with the infograph? Why not just use the usual rectangular shape instead of circle?

• by chrisbrandow on 1/11/19, 3:18 AM

  Would be awesome to see the same chart but broken down by what percentage of income each category represents

• by lorax on 1/11/19, 3:05 AM

  > 48% of wager earners had net compensation less than or equal to the median wage

  I'm surprised. I expected that 50% of wage earners would make less or equal to the median wage. If for no other reason than the definition of median.

• by dzonga on 1/11/19, 3:35 AM

  but hey capitalism, is the greatest invention since we discovered we could wipe our behinds. Problem, with America is there's a lot of embarrassed 'to-be' millionaires. Once everyone accept it's okay to be average and life a average lifestyle safe-guarded by the a social net, a lot of people will be lifted from poverty.

• by alkibiades on 1/11/19, 3:01 AM

  stopped reading at "net". misleading title

• by adamnemecek on 1/11/19, 3:12 AM

  The crisis never ended, it just changed shape.

• by mc32 on 1/11/19, 3:34 AM

  Yet many talking heads insist that cheap (under the table) labor from undocumented workers has negligible effect on earnings of poorly educated Americans (rural or inner city). They still think abandoning TPP was bad, that playing tough with China is bad.

  Dems used to protect the working class till the 80s, they used to be anti-globalists (till Clinton) then they got the fever for corporate money and sold them down the river and only half heartedly pay lip service to them. The only one left caring is Bernie, but he’s too far left for traditional labor.

• by mirimir on 1/11/19, 3:31 AM

  It is a sad situation. But the article doesn't support the title. Because I only see one time point. And "vanishing" requires comparison.

  A few decades ago, at what was arguably the peak of the US middle class, relatively few adult married women worked outside the home. But of course, they did work. It's just that they didn't get paid.

  Or rather, they got paid through sharing their husbands' income. What's happened since is that both partners often work, but aggregate inflation-adjusted income (aka household income) has stagnated. Maybe even declined.

  Anyway, the point is that, a few decades ago, maybe 30%-40% of workers earned nothing. So to get meaningful results, you need to look at aggregate household income over time. Including both partners, and children. And you also need to net out childcare expenses.

  Also, I note that TFA relies on W2 data. So what about consultants, whose income is reported on 1099s? But maybe they're a minor factor, and can be ignored.

  And finally, it's my impression that executive incomes are typically capped at a $million or so. With the rest paid as stock options and such.

• by rayiner on 1/11/19, 5:44 AM

  If $30,000 per year is "substandard" then the rest of the developed world must be positively impoverished: https://mises.org/wire/when-it-comes-household-income-sweden.... There's a very legitimate criticism to be made about the plight of the poor in the U.S. But the U.S. middle class has it better than almost everyone else in the world. They make a lot more money than in Europe, and pay far less taxes. (Indeed, the poor in the U.S. are so bad off precisely because the middle class pays far less taxes compared to their European counterparts. The difference between Trump's tax code and Sweden's is not corporate tax rates, but individual tax rates, particularly for people outside the top 1%.)

  In reality, $30,000 is a pretty decent income for a young single person in Atlanta, where a 1BR apartment near a subway stop can be had well under $1,000. It's tough for someone trying to support a family of four, but by and large those people don't make $30,000. The median income for people 35+ is $50,000. And the median household income of a married couple with kids is $85,000.

  There is also the fact that, even if there were zero income inequality (everybody got paid the same), the median income would be about $50,000 (13 trillion in personal income divided by about 250 million working-age people).