Wednesday, September 19, 2007

Maybe the census bureau should add some income levels?

I was comparing myself against other 35-39-year-old white men who work year-round at the Census Bureau site. So, there are about 6,730,000 of us, 6,725,000 of whom had income -- 5000 worked for free, which was mighty white of them. 311,000 made between $20K and $22.5K -- that's the biggest bin below $30Kpa -- and 435,000 made between $40K and $42.5K, which is the largest bin.

1,016,000 35-39-year-old men made over $100K. That's bigger than any of the bins. I don't have a conspiracy theory for this -- it's not like it's in anyone's interest to obfuscate incremental structural changes in income distribution -- but it seems like bad data management to have 15 % of your data in the 'everybody else' bin. I know I've got a high-earning race and age, and one would expect that year-round workers earn more, but even for 'all sexes, all ages' 2.6 % of the data is in $100K+.

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