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kmt1972 · 04-26-2013, 05:58 AM

See

Political Calculations: Find Your Age-Based Income Percentile Rank

It shows age based incomes percentiles. It is interesting to see that for the 90 income percentile, income peaks at around age 51. For the 80 income percentile income peaks at around 56. Same for 70 and 60 percentiles. For 50 percentiles and below income seems to plateau around age 41-50 before falling. This does show the obvious trends of ER for high income populations and later retirement for white collar population that has relatively lower income as the work into the late 50s and early 60s. For the bottom 50 percent the nature of work are more likely to be labor intenstive so income then tend to stagnate after the age of 40.

samclem · 04-26-2013, 08:41 AM

Thanks, an interesting chart. One unfortunate result of the portrayal is that it invites users to "trace the line" of, say, a "30 percentile worker" through his lifetime, and I don't think that's an especially accurate portrayal of economic life in the US. People rise and fall through the "percentiles" according to their talents, effort, luck, etc. I know that my high school friends who went to work instead going to college as I did were way ahead of me on the income scale for at least 4-5 years, but stats would indicate they we swapped places at some point. But some of those people started successful businesses and will always be ahead of me. So, all of us were "hopping lines" up and down throughout this period, and I think that happens quite a lot throughout the lives of many people.

So, good chart, but we need something else if we want to understand income "mobility" in the US and the complexities of how the incomes of real people varies with age.