2005 US Income Distribution part 3

I went back to my 2005 US Income Distribution graph but this time I looked at the income of everyone above $250,000. Although one can find lists of high income earners it is very difficult to find a graph plotting their earnings as compared to everyone else. The scale of the graph is so extreme that most of the population ends up looking like a dot at the bottom of the graph.

Below I have created 3 graphs that try to show the relationship between the bottom 99.99% and the top 0.01%.

{Click on each graph to take a closer look}

The original Census data can be found at Table HINC-06. Income Distribution to $250,000 or More for Households

The bottom 99.99% I estimated from data found at Emmanuel Saez’s web site

The CEO and Celebrity income estimates came from Forbes magazine

And finally the income for the top hedge fund managers was first published at Alpha magazine but I found it via the New York Times

See Also: Part 1 and Part 2
[tags]US Income Distribution, High Income, Census Income, Income Inequality [/tags]

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Tagged as: CEO and Executives, Distribution of Income, Forbes, Histogram, Income - High, Income - Individual, IRS, Pitketty & Saez, Population, United States, US Census

Higgins

Excellent work! Do you know if is there a formula that we can use to estimate the number of households at any given income? Could you run a regression on your data set?
Catherine

Unfortunately no I don’t have that kind of data
rainer

Hi, thanks for this useful rendering of data. Two things… you might consider including a y axis with unit markers in your “bottom 98%” chart, would make it easier to match a particular y value with its corresponding x value. As it is one has to count the houses for each column and that’s a little tedious. But the overall visual impact is great.

Secondly, in the “top 2%” chart, the unit is undefined on the y axis. How many people or households does one of those little figures represent? Perhaps I have missed something but this chart seems not to provide the necessary households to income level ratio info that is necessary for completing the L shaped curve begun in your “bottom 98%” chart. I would so appreciate it if you could please clarify.
Michael

One question: Where do I sign up to be a hedge fund manager?
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Taxpayer700B

What I want to see, on a linear/linear scale, is the distribution of aggregate national income across evenly-spaced income brackets. My suspicion is that it will show a substantial proportion of the aggregate US income falls above the $250K income level. Impossible to find that data on the internet. Probably those who fall into that category would be happier that the general public isn’t aware, and have the influence to suppress that information.
http://pulse.yahoo.com/_EDPH7EOG5DEYIWTJK2HTHBHN5I Carl Von Snarl

What suppresses that information is the same thing that suppresses your income: A failure to understand mathematics. Just look at the histogram of income distribution; if X people earn Y income, you can figure it out. Duh.