[map via Business Insider]
This article is about a minority population--the 1%. This über powerful group controls the majority of major resources. The question has often become, for people who ponder the rules for membership to this selective society, of what it takes to be considered as one of the 1%. Our friends at Business Insider have broken it down for us by state.
The numbers are in, and sourced from the Minnesota Population Center's IPUMS dataset.
In our fair state, a person would need to earn $387,000 a year to qualify as the 1%. In Philly, there are certainly going to be extreme results on either side of this figure. If you're north of this number, congratulations. If you're not, well, then maybe there are different ways to look at the equation.
Of course, this figure is going to be flawed, because there are more complex ways in which income can stream in for the ultra wealthy than can be measured through data such as these. So there are other baselines to understand what wealth looks like today.
One baseline to roughly get a handle on income is by looking at the median, or middle number of representative income. In PA, it's $51,230, according to the Census Bureau 2012 ACS estimates.
The top .1% is the other baseline, which has grown since the 1980s. This group, on a national level, has amassed about $20 million in wealth. A presentation on this topic by economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman is worth perusing.
Questions inevitably arise when reviewing these statistics: where do you stand; how do you feel about these results; is true wealth attainable, and does that level of achievement become more or less accessible, depending on where you live; And, how do you make more money to get into the 1% from where you sit now?
·Here's How Much You Need to Make to Be in the Top 1% in Your State [Business Insider]
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