From: Dave Long (dl@silcom.com)
Date: Thu Oct 12 2000 - 13:53:46 PDT
> Sure, as long as the big fatty part of the bell curve gets big and moves
> to da retro. "Wide Right," call it Scott Norwood economics. The area
> under the curve isn't a constant over time. I would much prefer a big
> distribution centered around $74,000 with the sigmas getting shafted than
> a real nice, tight spike where everybody sits around $12,000. Too bad you
> can't create any artificial plateaus.
What bell curve? Neither wealth nor income are normally distributed,
at least according to the figures available at the census bureau.
I suspect lambdas may be better than sigmas for talking about them,
but maybe taking log($) would suffice.
Household net worth (ca. 1993) had a mode at $1-$4999, and fell off
with a long tail to the right. (12% < 0, 0 < %14 < 5k, 500k < 4%)
Personal income (ca. 1999) for the 70% of those over 25 who had
earnings actually rises a bit from $0-$2499 (5%) to a mode at
$20000-$22499 (6%), and falls off from there. It's about 1% per
$2500 increment around $70k, and a quarter of a percent per over
the area from 85-100.
So, from the standpoint of income, $22k is better than $12k, but if
we were talking about wealth, $5k is worse. Either way, the skew
means there isn't much centering going on.
-Dave
1999 Income, M+F, 25+, $k
none ####################
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1993 Net Worth, Household, $k
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