>Alright, well income vs wage accounts for a good part of it and
>the 'wage' vs. 'income' didn't go unnoticed originally.
>
>However I still thought the wages seemed low. $52,000 a year in
>1999 was among the top 10%tile of U.S. Wage earners?
It's the 90th percentile hourly wage, converted to an annual at 2000 hours/year. So it's the border between the 9th and 10th deciles. Since it includes lots of part-time workers, the yearly numbers would be lower, especially for women, who are more likely than men to work part time for less than a full year.
> $39,000 was
>in the top 20%? My thinking was that there are a lot of
>people in white-collar jobs (doctors, lawyers, executives, IT)
>that would be more than 10% of the workforce that earn over 52k.
The universe is all wage & salary workers aged 18-64. Since it relies on the Current Population Survey, all earnings in excess of a certain amount - I think it's $299,999 - are treated as $299,999. That doesn't make that much of a difference for an analysis like this.
Most people, it seems, have little idea of what other people earn. Rich people think everyone's pretty much like them, and nonrich people think everyone else is doing better than they are.
Doug