Wednesday, September 11, 2019

Personal Income for American Men and Women

Interesting charts from Kevin Drum. While personal income for men has been about the same since 1970, that for women has gone up a lot. This trend is continuing; over the past four years, women's incomes have grown 3.3% per year, men's 2.3%. This is mainly because women continue to get more education, while the education level of men has stagnated.

This reminds me of a snippet of conversation I overheard on the Metro, from a man in his fifties:
He said, "I need a job." I said, "you already have a job," and then he said, "I need a man's job."

1 comment:

G. Verloren said...

Awful, manipulative, dishonest chart design - the chart for men doesn't start at $0 and go up to $30, it instead starts at $20 and goes up to $50.

The endpoint of the graph for women looks really high in comparison to the endpoint of the graph for men - until you note that the actual numbers. Women top out at just above $25 in 2018, which is roughly equal to where the men started out sixty five years ago in 1954.

It's also manipulative in the focus on percent change. Percentages are larger when you start with smaller numbers. Give $5 to a person who has $100 already, and that's a 5% increase. But give the exact same $5 to a person who has $200 already, and that's only a 2.5% increase. Both parties saw equal gains, but someone judging purely off percentages gained would think the poorer party somehow gained more.

Stop linking to dishonest charts, John. It's a bad habit of yours that needs to stop. You need to do a better job of vetting your sources, because they're making a fool out of you.