Income

[andrewducker]

The article on income and statistics here not only points out that I'm doing quite well for myself (being above both the median and the mean incomes), but points out how silly the 'average' really is - as it doesn't actually tell you very much that's useful/interesting.

makes it pretty clear that 2/3 of people earn below an average wage - because the richest people push the average up significantly.

I'm sure that I had something which told you what percentage of people in full time employment in the UK earned less than you - but I can't seem to find it now...

Comments

[del-c.livejournal.com]

Good to see the BBC getting a clue. I bashed them for this back in January, for this article.

[rhythmaning.livejournal.com]

Strange - since someone else mentioned the salary data had been released, I had a look at the data on the UK National Statistics website. There, they state that the median earnings for full time employees were £457 (under £24,000 pa).

That is a lot more than the median of £377 shown in the BBC article. Perhaps the BBC were using both part time and full time employees? Just shows what you can do with statistics! Looking again at the BBC's chart, I am not sure that there description of the bars is correct, either - "each band representing 10% of the population": so I would have expected to see only ten bands. My guess is that they mean 1% bands.

The points you and the BBC make are absolutely right, though. Average is meaningless; median, mode and mean are useful.

And it is rather chastening - I am pretty far to the right, too; but only with regard to the chart!

[drplokta]

The BBC are pretty clearly including people who aren't employed at all, since there's no other way to explain the big spike at an income of £0.

[rhythmaning.livejournal.com]

Oh, well spotted! I really must wear my glasses...

[a-pawson.livejournal.com]

I'm curious about exactly who is included in that particular graph. Just over 500,000 people have zero income, and I would have expected it to be a far higher number than that if it included all adults.

[cheekbones3.livejournal.com]

Adults of a working age I would assume, which takes out quite a few million pensioners. There's also contention around whether you'd include full-time students etc etc.

[bohemiancoast.livejournal.com]

Amazingly few people have 0 income (though there are a few; 500k sounds about right in fact, mostly pensioners who are living entirely on capital, and students who are living entirely on their parents' income. Rather a lot have 0 earnings; they account for most of the bottom 20% of the working age distribution. I have no time for these graphs unless they make clear whether this is pre-or post-tax income, and whether it is income before or after housing costs. Poverty analysis is normally post-deductions (tax and NI) and post-housing costs; what's more it's normally considering households rather than individuals. For mean and median earnings and income, who knows.

This is quite a complex area of analysis.

Similarly, there was a useless article about debt in the paper today, saying that average London debt is about £45k per person, and linking this to the credit crunch. You had to look very very hard to establish that it *included mortgages*.

[a-pawson.livejournal.com]

I was thinking about housewives (and nowadays I suppose househusbands). Even in today's double income society, they still make up a sizable percentage of the adult population.

[bohemiancoast.livejournal.com]

Many housewives have Child Benefit though. There are no longer very many one-income-by-choice couples without children; a very big societal shift over the last 30 years.

[miss-s-b.livejournal.com]

I'm well over to the left, as usual.

[chuma.livejournal.com]

To be honest, a very basic understanding of maths and statistics would tell you that the averages are meaningless.

[channelpenguin.livejournal.com]

It's all misleading in another way, even with the revised chart. I'd be off the far right of the chart - but I am still not at all what could described as 'rich'. I know folks that pull in twice (or more) what I do - and they are not rich either. We all still have to work, and it's not generally to fund lavish lifetyles! The upper tail on that graph is fricking HUGE....

There's got to be some way of showing the gap between the poor/average/doin'prettyalright and the truly wealthy. It's huge gaps that make people unhappy/angry/depressed/discontent.

I wonder about all those people in Tower Hamlets staring across at Canary Wharf...

[bohemiancoast.livejournal.com]

But one of the other features of the income distribution is that the rich don't believe they're rich, even to quite a long way along the tail. I have a running joke about this with one of my friends; he says 'you're rich, you know', I say, well, we're comfortable. Nobody ever admits to being better off than 'comfortable'.

If you're off the right hand side of this graph, especially if you have no dependants, you're definitely well on the way to rich; the person earning twice what you do, with no dependants, is really impressively rich by the standards of a UK household-on-average-income, by the standards of the world, by the standards of history.

It was contemplating all of this that led me to conclude that we really ought to be saving some money. Because we might not always be in such a relatively fortunate position.

[andrewducker]

You are most definitely rich. You are vastly better off than the average person, who is on £400-ish a week, own your own property outright, and are close to being able to leave your work and sail around the world on a boat you own. this most definitely puts you in the top couple of percent in the country, income-wise.

[zz]

leave your work and sail around the world on a boat you own

want.