Political Calculations uses economic data and simple models to look at income, prices, and everyday curiosities such as soup prices and Minecraft luck.
HN links it in income and wealth threads. One commenter argues household-based data can mislead by hiding changes in family structure.
Not true.
In 2014, the 99th percentile of personal income was was $240k, and the 99th percentile of household income was $330k.
http://i.imgur.com/cCmRisG.png
source http://politicalcalculations.blogspot.com/2014/09/what-is-your-income-percentile-ranking.html
$250k is a realistic number for the upper tier of software engineers to make in Silicon Valley. If you work for one of the big companies, your stock options will get you pretty close to that. If you're a manager, bonuses and incentive pay will also bridge the gap. If you're an independent consultant and you're not making at least this much, you're really missing the boat.
Are you a senior software engineer, or middle management or higher? Is you partner also? Then it's _highly_ likely that your household is a 1% household
More importantly, the IRS considers any group of people who live together to be a household. I know of many people here in SF who have two, three, four roommates, each making six figures in tech. Essentially all of those households are 1% households.
As an aside, I've pointed this out to several people I know. Without fail, they always have reasons why they don't count. "Oh cost of living is too high". "Oh, I have to pay back student loans, my disposable income isn't this". "Oh, sure I make this much but look at my taxes".
In reality, describing "the 1%" is not a useful description. For one, many of the 1% are people living middle class lives in high cost-of-living areas. On the one hand, it is…
I'm not the one arguing about definitions. You chose to take us down that path, adding a bunch of ad hominem while simultaneously misusing the terminology you were trying to be patronizing with. I 100% agree that it's completely inconsequential so long as we both understand what the other is saying, but I'm also trying to, within reason, respond to each thing you're stating.
One major thing I'd emphasize here is that you're acting like the consequences of non-inflationary systems are speculative. The entire point of this discussion is we have a wealth of data to draw from, from both systems. With a non-inflationary system we have a system that was, more or less, stable over nearly 200 years through numerous catastrophic events. With the modern inflationary system we have something that already not only seems unsustainable, but is causing major societal issues after just 50 years of relative super-utopia. I say super-utopia because not only have we avoided anything on the scale of e.g. WW2, but it kicked off alongside the once-in-a-civilization super-economic boom of mass digitization that is now plateauing.
So on the data issue - the way you determine an inflection point on a noisy graph is just to look at the midpoints of the noise and graph them. Look at the slope of the midpoints from start to mid 70s, and then from the mid 70s to present. The brief spike at the dotcom bubble is just noise that gets smoothed out. For a comparable graph, with less noise, here [1] is a…
This study is misleading, because it uses 'household' wealth, instead of individual wealth (...)
Perhaps, but there is no hard data at the individual level because, as it happens, basically every comprehensive dataset on income or wealth relies on tax or census data, which are aggregated at the household level by design. So any empirical claim about individual-level data should be taken ex ante with a big grain of salt and evaluated carefully; especially in a heavily politicized field like economics where data is scarce and motivated reasoning reigns.
Take, for instance, the graph you cite [1], which cites Kitov and Kitov (2013) [2] along with the US census bureau as a source. The problem is, what that paper provides is not an empirical dataset but a microfounded model for predicting individual income --with all the problematic epistemological/overfitting caveats that they come with. Presenting that graph as an empirical fact and not as a debatable modeling exercise is quite misleading.
Besides, as others have pointed out, all the links you provide discuss income, not wealth (and no, their arguments/reasoning about income do not readily/trivially translate to wealth, as you commented below). If you are interested, check out the work of Cheryl Doss [3], who has conducted actual empirical work about the differences between household and individual equality in Ecuador, Ghana and India.
(PD: Oh wow even their claims about changing family structure in that blog [4] is…
"SF Developers are by most definitions filthy rich."
So you're implying that it's unfair for a highly skilled SF developer making 2-3x the median wage across all professions (having dedicated years to decades of their life to attain that level of skill) to make that money in the first place?
Besides the $100-150K such a developer makes is less than half what the bottom of the 1% makes in 2014: $390K, source: http://money.cnn.com/2014/04/04/pf/taxes/top-1-taxes/. You're talking something closer to the top 3-5% here, source: http://politicalcalculations.blogspot.com/2014/09/what-is-your-income-percentile-ranking.html#.VHkMO4XfE6J
And even then, most of the people I know who make that kind of money worked their butts off and sacrificed a lot to get to that income level. To be fair, I know some idle trustafarians too, but they are a tiny minority of the group it seems like you're demonizing for their hard work.
My unsolicited advice to people who can't afford to live in SF is DON'T LIVE IN SF! For what it's worth, I don't and for exactly that reason. That and my definition of filthy rich is a lot stricter: the top 0.1% and their $1M+ a year income.
> The period of perhaps greatest economic growth in the West, the 1950s and 60s, was the period of greatest government regulation and direct involvement in economies.
What calculation leads you to conclude there was more regulation in the 1950s and 1960s than today? My impression is that "deregulation" in practice largely amounted to at best a decline in the rate of increase in federal regulations, not an overall decrease in total regulation. Today there are vastly more federal rules and regulations and also substantially more government employees as a percentage of total employment than there was in the 1970s.
Um, here's a plot of one proxy for new regulations - the size of the federal register in pages:
http://politicalcalculations.blogspot.com/2012/07/the-regulation-of-american-people.html
There were several high-profile cases of actual deregulation (eg, regulations related to trucking and airline fares), but it amounted to pushing back the tide - the nature of government programs is to grow and most have continued to do so, occasional changes in fashionable rhetoric notwithstanding.
We've confirmed the code is working on several other browsers, both desktop and mobile versions, so the issue right now looks specific to Safari and potentially mobile Safari. The last time we confirmed the tool works in Safari was 2018, so that would narrow the potential issue down to changes in Safari since then.
I suspect the code's vintage may be an issue. It was originally developed in 2006 to very specifically be backward compatible with older versions of JavaScript, where I can see Apple perhaps phasing out supporting some of the coding aspects that have become obsolete.
We do have another tool that uses the same data and many of the same formulas, but with a more modern implementation of code (http://politicalcalculations.blogspot.com/2009/06/investing-through-time.html). If you run into the same issue, that would suggest other changes in Safari are at work.