Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How much Americans make in wages

howmuch.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 219 posts

Re: How much Americans make in wages

#141

Post by ThePadawan »

lotyrin wrote: post #102
largehotcoffee wrote: post #67

>48% of wage earners had net compensation less than or equal to the median wage Isn't that how math works?

Definitely a weird thing to highlight as a "surprise" but also not quite right, since it should be exactly half... and also that portion of the pie should be a semicircle (around 180 degrees even if it's 48%)... but it's significantly smaller than that somehow?

It does point out that wage is still and predominantly the biggest factor in net compensation.

This is assuming that bonuses, commissions etc. count as compensation, but not wages.

Re: How much Americans make in wages

#142

Post by Larrikin »

dpark wrote: post #47
ausbah wrote: post #5

>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

They also use the term “earn” but the numbers they are throwing around are entirely after-tax. That’s not even poor reporting. That’s intentionally misleading. No one thinks that money paid to the government in the form for tax is unearned by the individual.

The money that it says I make in my contract has basically been a meaningless number to me most of my life other than a hard number I don't need to calculate when comparing jobs. It is only now that I have a "true" job after graduate where I make enough money to be able to set aside some money before tax.

Re: How much Americans make in wages

#143

Post by notacoward »

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?

Re: How much Americans make in wages

#144

Post by helen___keller »

jurassic wrote: post #52
kough wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity, do you subsidize your siblings? I'm going to be in the same situation and I'm not sure what I'm going to end up doing but I think I'm going to end up doing it.

Yeah, moderately. This year I gave about $7k to each sibling which is life-changing for them and not really a hardship for me other than slightly delaying my home-ownership goal. For one sibling, I'm the safety net when crises happen that they can't afford. E.g. can't come up with their car insurance deductible, water heater broke, etc. They don't ask but I always offer when it's clear that a small outlay would spare…

>It's very hard to enjoy money when people you love are going through hardships that would be solved by an infusion of cash. Obviously it's important not to give more than you can afford but you would be surprised by the number of people in tech who are sending money home in one way or another.

I've seen this time and time again, especially with PoC, who (statistically speaking) have much lower net worth as family units and thus are more susceptible to financial ruin when going through times of hardship

Re: How much Americans make in wages

#145

Post by bzbarsky »

anoncoward111 wrote: post #76
mac01021 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that 70 million probably contains a lot of people not in the workforce. So it's not "apples to apples".

Then assume 50-60% are working and include the addition multi-million person metropoles I left out like BOS PHI PHX etc

Assuming that 50-60% of the population of cities is working is probably too high. As a simple example, the third table at https://www.health.ny.gov/statistics/vital_statistics/2016/t... data for New York City for 2016. Total population is 8,537,673. Population under 18 is 1,798,888. Population over 64 is 1,155,075. That's 35% of the population right there.

Some of them might be working, of course. For the kids, this is not likely to be more than 10% (which would be _all_ the 16 and 17 year olds, pretty much). For the seniors, let's guess 33% (pretty much everyone under 70). That leaves 28% of the population in the kid-or-senior age range and not-working and 7% in the kid-or-senior age range and working.

To get to 50% overall working with those assumptions, you need 43% of the population to be prime age and working. The prime age population is 65% of the total. So you need 43/65 = 66% of the 18-65 age population working. But in 2017 (yes, I know, a year later; I haven't found the 2016 equivalent) https://www.osc.state.ny.us/reports/economic/labor-force-tre... claims a labor force participation rate of just about 60% for NYC (see page numbered 14 in the document, page 17 of the PDF). And that's the rate for 25-64, which should be higher than the 18-64 rate, because as the document notes "people between the ages of 16 and 24 are more likely to be in high school or college".

Page 15 of the document (page 18 of the PDF) does show labor force participation rates for 16-24 and 65+ in New York State and our "33%" above for seniors was likely a significant overestimate based on that, though it's hard to tell: NYC labor force participation may not match the overall state very well, obviously.

Anyway, under the (imo optimistic) assumptions above, something like 45% of the overall population of NYC is in the labor force. Or in other words if you ignore the 18% of the population that is children under 15, it's about 55%. So your estimate was pretty close if you ignore the existence of kids...

Or put another way, if the prime-age labor force participation rate is 60%, there's no way that 60% of the overall population is working. Just not possible.

Re: How much Americans make in wages

#146

Post by maxxxxx »

briandear wrote: post #77
walrus01 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The authors write that "the incomes of the top 1% collectively made up 11% of national income in 1980, but now constitute above 20% of national income, while the 20% of US national income that was attributable to the bottom 50% in 1980 has fallen to just 12% today. Further, "while average pre-tax income for the bottom 50% has stagnated at around $16,000 since 1980, the top 1% has experienced 300% growth in their inc…

However the top 20% pay over 80% of the taxes.

They could lower their tax rate by taking a smaller share of the profits.

Re: How much Americans make in wages

#147

Post by Retra »

jacobolus wrote: post #91
tfigment wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are a good person. Money is really good to keep separate though at least for many people I think. I've done similar things like loaned my older brother enough to get through nursing school as he was stocking at Target at 33 and I thought this was a better path. I was better off then but not well off and this cause some strains. When he was doing better it was hard to get him to pay back anything even at 0% intere…

General advice: treat any “loans” to family or close friends like gifts. Once you hand the money over, imagine it is gone forever. Then if the loan is paid back, you will be happily surprised. But if it’s not you won’t be bitter about it, and it won’t ruin your relationship. Corollary: don’t lend your family members an amount of money that would cause you hardship if it’s not paid back. (Obviously extreme circumstanc…

This is great advice, I feel. I loaned my sister some money for school, and she made an honest effort to repay me, but started falling back on it after a while. So I just said "consider the rest of the loan a birthday present" and asked her to not pay anymore on it.

Because at the end of the day, I'm not going to let money destroy a relationship, and I gave her that money to relieve her stresses, not to contribute to them. So from now on, if I give money to my family, I let them pay it back according to their conscience and ability. People who need money really don't need more things to worry about.

Re: How much Americans make in wages

#148

Post by ForHackernews »

pjtr wrote: post #123
fernmyth wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not nitpicky at all. It's a pointless, obfuscating blob of unhelpful colors violating basic principles of data visualization: - Sequential income brackets are not adjacent. The wage of each blob can only be understood by reading every number - Irregular shapes make it impossible to gauge size by eye - White text on green and pink backgrounds does not score well on WCAG. At least they had the decency to make the text…

I even think it's intentionally obfuscated. The obfuscation misleadingly suggests the arbitrarily chosen thresholds 30k and 50k are somehow meaningful. This encourages group-association-based / class-divide-based outrage-sharing, reinforcing the infighting between lower middle class and upper middle class.

Lumping together $50k-$50M as though that's a meaningful interval is especially misleading.

Re: How much Americans make in wages

#149

Post by jamisteven »

jurassic wrote: post #52
kough wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity, do you subsidize your siblings? I'm going to be in the same situation and I'm not sure what I'm going to end up doing but I think I'm going to end up doing it.

Yeah, moderately. This year I gave about $7k to each sibling which is life-changing for them and not really a hardship for me other than slightly delaying my home-ownership goal. For one sibling, I'm the safety net when crises happen that they can't afford. E.g. can't come up with their car insurance deductible, water heater broke, etc. They don't ask but I always offer when it's clear that a small outlay would spare…

"It's very hard to enjoy money when people you love are going through hardships that would be solved by an infusion of cash." True yes, but thats not sustainable and will continue to happen. You arent doing them any actual favors by enabling them to continue on with this same financially irresponsible behavior, you are simply doing it for your own guilt. "You give a poor man a fish and you feed him for a day. You teach him to fish and you give him an occupation that will feed him for a lifetime"

Re: How much Americans make in wages

#150

Post by wintermutesGhst »

sameerds wrote: post #130
jurassic wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, moderately. This year I gave about $7k to each sibling which is life-changing for them and not really a hardship for me other than slightly delaying my home-ownership goal. For one sibling, I'm the safety net when crises happen that they can't afford. E.g. can't come up with their car insurance deductible, water heater broke, etc. They don't ask but I always offer when it's clear that a small outlay would spare…

In my language (Marathi), we have a phrase for this which can be translated as "from the bowl into the plate". The intention is to expand the meaning of "me" to include people that matter. Then you no longer think of the money that you give out as a loan or a gift; you're merely spending it on your extended self. I was afforded the "luxury" of doing a PhD instead of getting a job out of college because my older broth…

This idea really resonates with me, and is a notion I've been working through without really having words that express it.

Could you share the untranslated phrase if I wanted to read more about it?

Post reply on HN