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I was doing my normal review of news web sites this morning when I came across this headline at the Washington Post:
The median U.S. wage in 2010 was just $26,363
At first I was shocked by this but then, not so much. David Dayen had this post at FDL News back in September
There were a couple other pieces of big news from the release of Census data. First, real median household income declined in 2010 by 2.3%. The average household now makes $49,445 a year.
My bold. If you think about it, with the rise of multi-person earners in households, the two figures are not at all incompatible. Nevertheless, it is still a concern It reinforces the message being sent by the folks at the various #Occupy efforts around the country.
This post from NASDAQ.com points out some of the aspects of this:
Though the average wage of a single earner stood at $39,959.30 per year, that number was skewed by those at the very top of the survey – the 93,725 earners who took home more than $1 million annually. That top sliver – a fraction of a fraction of the top 1 percent – collectively took home $224.6 billion , or about $2.4 million per top earner.
…snip…
When one end or the other of a set becomes skewed, averages become extremely misleading. The $40,000-per-year figure seems reasonable until you realize that just over 66 percent of all workers come in under that number. As the SSA states, “by definition, 50 percent of wage earners had net compensation less than or equal to the median wage.”
In more prosperous times, it might have been safe to assume that the average 4-person household contained two wage earners, but with U-6 unemployment at a seasonally adjusted rate of 16.5 percent in September, that’s far from certain. It looks like half of all American families are a single layoff away from living in poverty.
n the meantime, the major banks earnings are boosted by an accounting quirk called the debt value adjustment, which means that their earnings rise if their creditors perceive their debt as riskier, and thus less valuable, TheStreet reports.
When two facts like these are set against each other, is it any wonder that the occupations in Zuccotti Park, Dewey Square and Grant Park continue to gather momentum?
According to this wiki, the 2011 poverty line for a single person is $10,890 while for a family of four it is $22,350. In this post from last December, I did a “what-if” based on one person working a full-time, minimum wage job. Obviously, there are millions of people not even close to working a full time, minimum wage job.
This Google Docs Spreadsheet breaks out the income/population spread in $5K increments. This article from The Atlantic offers some perspective on the various group sizes.
Yeah, I’m part of the 99%. Why aren’t you?
And because I can:
Cross posted from Just A Small Town Country Boy by Richard Taylor
23 Comments
Great read DK, thanks . . . . decoding the garbage that passes for details and information spewn by the MSM in behalf of their corporate overlords is one of the things YOU, and FDL/MyFDL do SO phookin well.
I love this town for that.
Rcc’d of phookin course.
Think I’ll go ‘Eat A Peach’ . . . take a dreamy nap on the couch with it spinning in the background . . . ;-)
Wait a minute, there. One is median and the other is average. Different things. When one averages in the billionaires, the average income of everyone goes up. But if you find the median of the whole population, then that’s different – you are looking at the income of the middle person in the lineup. And that’s pretty darn low for a nation as rich(?) as we supposedly are.
You are correct but that’s kind of my point. Median is the exact mid-point of wage earners versus the “Average Household income” which pretty much implies that many households have to have two wage earners to reach that average, given the Median for the individual.
I am also attempting to show the difference (as noted in the NASDAQ article) between the Median wage and average wage being so skewed due to the uber rich.
But yes, we are no where near as “rich” as a nation as the PTB paint us.
right. never mind.
i should have read it over a couple of times to understand before getting all know-it-all!
Not to worry. The difference between the average (mean) and the median is one of the few concepts I quickly grasped in my first statistics classes.
Way too frequently, folks just rely on the average and let it go when the median also tells us a lot. As it did today.
And that, my friends, is certainly one mean statistic. It is actually worse when one considers that many of us are actually earning less than I am getting on for disability. Worse, even yet, is the fact I can barely make it. I’ve been forced to take a room mate, since I enjoy recreational activities-such as eating occasionally.
But a bit of jingoism will alleviate the pain. USA, USA, USA! We’re number one (facts be damned)!
Good post better music. What ever comes and goes we lived through the best music time ever produced , those WERE the days.
It’s all good though. We have refrigerators and color televisions.
Actually, dakine, the mode is my favorite measure of central tendency. LOLOL
We call ‘em “ice boxes and tubes.”
who is going to do anything about this? No one. And those who know how bad it is can’t do a thing.
It’s mot spelled “toobz”?!?
D’OH!
Thanks for the chart and the tune, dakine. Best Allman Brothers song ever. Willie Nelson did a great cover of it as well.
Thanks, dakine…I love following your always insightful posts! Also, I read an article today that indicated people’s actual credit card debt was one-third higher than their perceived debt. Scary.
It was on HuffPo. I’m using my phone to comment, or would find and provide a linky. My apologies.
I’ll stick with my first comment, and rcc’d.
Maggie, yer irrascapble . . . . or something spelt like that.
*G*
I think even us “safely middle-class” people consider ourselves a single layoff away from living in poverty. I doubt I could get a job paying anywhere near what I’m making now if I were laid off. The qualifications of people applying for the few open positions I know of, are really stunning. Frankly, many of them are more qualified than I am. It’s scary.
We Is Still From The Beginning.
There it is.
Is there somewhere we can learn how many of the median wage earners are the sole family income?
To quote the incomparable George Carlin: “Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize that half of them are stupider than that.”
And they can vote!
We are doomed.
Population and income: the American public needs to learn the concept of “bimodal distribution”.
But shouldn’t we be comparing the median household income to the median individual income? Never compare medians to averages, as they’re not the same thing. I’m assuming the median household income is less than the average household income, but would still show two-income households.
And let’s remember, this chart only describes INCOME, not WEALTH. Distribution of total wealth is even more unbalanced, and getting worse.
Your point about households going from one income to two incomes is one of the things Elizabeth Warren speaks about.