How the other 1% lives

Actual first graph of a Reuters story featured in today’s edition of The Paper of Record:

NEW YORK — When Josh McFarland graduated from Stanford he owed $40,000 in student loans and couldn’t fathom a way he’d ever pay it off and have a future for himself – not unusual for the typical young adult these days. Then he went to work for Google.

It gets a lot worse from there.

This kind of thing brings to mind a passage from Homage to Catalonia:

Some of the English visitors who flitted briefly through Spain, from hotel to hotel, seem not to have noticed that there was anything wrong with the general atmosphere. The Duchess of Atholl writes, I notice (Sunday Express, 17 October 1937):

I was in Valencia, Madrid, and Barcelona . . . perfect order prevailed in
all three towns without any display of force. All the hotels in which I stayed
were not only ‘normal’ and ‘decent’, but extremely comfortable, in spite of
the shortage of butter and coffee.

It is a peculiarity of English travellers that they do not really believe in the existence of anything outside the smart hotels. I hope they found some butter for the Duchess of Atholl.

. . . the story also cites some extremely improbable statistics, such as that “12 million Gen-Yers make more than $100,000 per year.” The story defines Generation Y as people born after 1980 (this is the most liberal definition of the category.). There are about 40 million Americans in that category who are 21 or older. So according to the story nearly 30% of these people have annual incomes of $100,000 or more. Given that in 2010 only 6.6% of American adults had incomes of $100,000 or more the the 30% figure for people in their 20s and early 30s must be wildly exaggerated.

Update: The source of the wrongheaded statistic appears to be this: the cited survey claims 59 million Americans (including children) live in households with incomes of $100,000 plus, and that 20% of “affluent consumers” are in the Gen Y cohort (this appears to mean that 20% of the adults who live in households with $100,000+ incomes are of this age). The story’s author then did some very bad math to generate the claim that “12 million Gen Y-ers make more than $100,000.” (A couple of commenters make the excellent point that, given the stats the story quotes about Gen Y-ers living or moving back in with their parents, a good portion of these “affluent” young adults’ supposed affluence is a product of their parents’ household income being attributed to their children!).