Six-Chart Sunday (#22) – Income Disparities

6 Infographics from the week + 1 video (inspiring business leader Ursula Burns)

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Despite new data this week showing Trump closing the money gap, Biden closing the polling gap, federal spending growing the deficit gap & the Great Debate likely to garner a massive audience, we instead take a lot at income gaps across society & the world.  In sum, go to college but don’t major in religion.  

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1. Bay Staters Earn the Most While the Last Frontier Taxes Least: Massachusetts workers enjoy the highest average salaries [$80,330 avg vs $62,027 nationally], while residents of Alaska enjoy the lowest tax burden. So to maximize your income, work for a Boston company (remotely), live in Anchorage.

2. Asian Americans Out-Earn Other Ethnic Groups: “In the U.S., median household income rose from $51,570 in 1967 to $74,580 in 2022. In terms of broad ethnic groups, Black Americans have consistently had the lowest median income in the given years, while Asian Americans have the highest; median income in Asian American households has typically been around double that of Black Americans.” (U.S. Census data per Statista)

3. Gender Gap Persists, Though It’s Shrinking: The earnings gap between American women & men narrowed to the smallest on record in 2023, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported.  Median weekly earnings for women were 83.8% of the typical amount that men were paid.  The gender pay gap varied widely by race & ethnicity. Black women earned close to 94% of Black men’s pay, while the equivalent figure for White women & men was 84.1%, and for Asian women & men 78.3%. (Bloomberg)

4. College Grads Earn More than Those With Less Education:  The wage gap between recent college and high school grads has been widening for decades, and grew even more last year.  (Federal Reserve Bank of New York data, Axios visual).

5. Engineers Earn Twice as Much as Liberal Arts Majors Within 5 Years of Graduation: Sure, but we history majors will get the last laugh when we tell future generations who unleashed SkyNet & the AI-pocalyse (looking at you, computer engineers).

6. Americans Enjoy Higher Median Income Than Citizens of Any Other Nation: For fellow history majors: We’re #1!  For you econ nerds who need to justify earning 75% more than us: “The following table represents data from OECD's ‘median disposable income per person’ metric; disposable income deducts from gross income the value of taxes on income and wealth paid and of contributions paid by households to public social security schemes. The figures are equivalised by dividing income by the square root of household size. As OECD displays median disposable incomes in each country's respective currency, the values were converted here using PPP conversion factors for private consumption from the same source, accounting for each country's cost of living in the year that the disposable median income was recorded. Data are in U.S. dollars at current prices and current purchasing power parity for private consumption for the reference year.”) Equivalised?! Nerds.

   

   

   VIDEO

Ursula Burns is a thoughtful & inspiring business & national leader. She’s the first black woman to lead a Fortune 500 company & the first woman to follow another woman as a Fortune 500 CEO, per Wikipedia. I was lucky enough to interact with her when she ran Xerox, and she kindly made time to discuss life & leadership in 2021, shortly before she released her great autobiography:

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