Interestingly, this graph visualises the jobs of people in the wealthiest households. It does not mean that those jobs actually bring in the wealth.
I was surprised to see the relatively large box of elementary school teachers. Surely those jobs don't pay that well. It might be one of those cases where correlation is mistaken for causation: perhaps a lot of people who dream to be a teacher are able to realise it because they have a wealthy banker for a spouse or something.
Two married schoolteachers in a wealthy suburban school district near their peak earning years will gross nearly $200k for the household. (I'm related to multiple examples.)
The BLS collects copious stats on how much different occupations are paid. Reports of them being working poor are highly exaggerated.
Two working people earning $200k together isn't what I would describe as particularly wealthy. That would put them squarely in what most people consider slightly upper-middle class. Consider that two engineers right out of college should be able to make that much.
Really depends on cost of living. I looked at a breakdown of this recently by locale. In the bay area or NY it doesn't get you anywhere close but in most other areas it puts you in or pretty close to the 1%.
In all of these pay scales it is only the absolute top of the scale that reaches 100k, and LA never reaches it.
Very few teachers reach this. By contrast programmers reach 100k rather quickly, yet they aren't as large in the original link. Let's remember what patio11 was replying to," I was surprised to see the relatively large box of elementary school teachers. Surely those jobs don't pay that well."
In fairness the comment about teachers in suburban districts was that two teacher salaries would be near 200k, not over 200k.
As far as the original comment about teachers, that's just basic statistics. There are lots of teachers. If you assume that people who earn >$400k or so marry people from other occupations more or less uniformly, you'd expect close to 1% of teachers to show up on this chart, which would be a big box. In practice, only 0.9% of teachers show up, but the real takeaway is that teachers are relatively well-educated and so not unlikely to actually be marrying people who end up with high salaries. There are plenty of occupations on that chart in which a lot less than 1% of the people in the occupation end up in the top 1% of households.
So as far as comparing box sizes, you have to balance better pay for programmers against the fact that there are a lot fewer of them than there are teachers...
"In fairness the comment about teachers in suburban districts was that two teacher salaries would be near 200k"
Precisely, and it's false. Two teachers, the vast majority of them, will not be near 200k. Look at my link, and it's obvious that if you randomly select 2 teachers, the vast majority of them will not be near $200k.
"If you assume that people who earn >$400k or so marry people from other occupations more or less uniformly, you'd expect close to 1% of teachers to show up on this chart"
Right, but you're making my point for me. My point is that teachers are not showing up because of their own salary.
Then you won't get 2 teachers "in their peak earning years". That part is important too.
There are two separate points here:
1) Teachers are not ending up in the top 1% because they make enough on their own. Very true.
2) Teachers in rich suburban school districts will end up near $100k in terms of salary in their peak earning years (which for teachers generally means near retirement). Still true.
No problem for both of those to be true, since $200k is nowhere near the 1% cutoff for household AGI.
We're splitting hairs over wording and possible implicit meanings, and I'm pretty sure we agree on the real issue, so yeah.
One last thing, not only do they have to be in their peak earning years, they also need to max out the points from additional education. I don't know how many teachers do that.
Yeah, I'm not entirely sure about the additional education thing either. Most teachers I know are spending a fair bit of time on that, but I'm not sure how that translates into the +15, +30, etc system of points...
So, those folks are near 1%ers. They just don't own the assets that will generate the money that they'll be spending. We do, or rather, we own the liability.
You'd have to be pretty killer to pull that off, however. I know for a fact that out of college Microsoft picks up engineers from MIT for 84k, and NASA gets new greats (not necessarily from MIT) for 76k. (disclaimer- I am not from MIT, but these ate both very reliable sources)
It's due to the sheer number: over 10M teachers. So there's simply a lot of them (in absolute numbers) that ended up marrying a 1%-er, even if its percentage-wise not out of the ordinary.
You can see that the color is very pale, and only slightly darker for college and universities.
I was also intrigued when I first saw the large amount of elementary school teachers in the 1%. Then I saw extra information called out on the sidebar:
"School teachers don't earn enough to make the top 1 percent on their own, but many live in 1-percent households, primarily through marriage."
I was invoking stereotypes, but perhaps those were a bit unfair. After all, according to the data linked, only 13.3% of "financial services sales occupations" and 10.7% of "financial specialists" in investment companies belong to the 1%. I should have picked on physicians :P
I was surprised to see the relatively large box of elementary school teachers. Surely those jobs don't pay that well. It might be one of those cases where correlation is mistaken for causation: perhaps a lot of people who dream to be a teacher are able to realise it because they have a wealthy banker for a spouse or something.