
Ask HN: Is Your Income above Your Country's Median Income? - tokenadult
I&#x27;ve seen a lot of submissions and comments to Hacker News recently about income inequality, which is perhaps not a core topic here but a topic a lot of people care about. It occurred to me that I might better understand where other participants are coming from on the income inequality issue if I can get a reality check on whether you are above or below your country&#x27;s median level of income. My wild guess is that most Hacker News participants have incomes above the median levels in their countries, but please let me know so I understand this issue better.
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ChuckMcM
Its an interesting question but the sample set (people who read HN) will skew
hugely toward technologists. The starting income for engineers[1] is higher
than the median income. I would expect a significant fraction of the readers
here to be engineers and thus have higher than median incomes.

For me though the 'income inequality' question adds little insight into
meaningful problems. Consider what it would be like if you wrote equally valid
copy about 'house price inequality.' You might right, "Why is it that a four
bedroom 2000 square foot ranch style house is worth $170,000 in Minnesota but
worth $1,500,000 in California?" You could write about how badly the $170,000
house felt about themselves that for providing the same number of bedrooms,
the same quality of shelter, and the all the same appliances as the house in
California but for some clearly bogus reasons people "judged" that house to be
worth less. Alas the unfairness of it all.

Fortunately we're not trying to sway the vote of that $170,000 house or its
shopping habits, or you would get that sort of writing.

When you look at it in that context when there isn't a person whose "value" is
being equated to their "salary" (which is the central issue in this narrative
in my opinion) you can see there are so many different things going on that it
makes no sense to think that houses in different places would, by virtue of
their similar feature, somehow demand the same sales price.

[1]
[http://www.mtu.edu/engineering/outreach/welcome/salary/](http://www.mtu.edu/engineering/outreach/welcome/salary/)
not a wonderful reference but the census.gov site was letting me down.

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throwaway_gb
According to [1] in the UK the median pretax income for an individual in
2012–13 is £21,300; the 75th percentile £33,300; the 90th percentile £50,500;
the 95th percentile £68,500; and the 99th percentile £156,000.

My income is closer to the 90th percentile than the 75th or 95th.

According to [2] compared to international income distributions (rather than
just my country) my income places me in the richest 0.5% of the world's
population.

Needless to say, I try to stay appreciative; my position is heavily dependent
on luck. I also donate around £10,000 a year to charity; seems like the least
I can do really.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_in_the_United_Kingdom](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_in_the_United_Kingdom)

[2] [http://www.givingwhatwecan.org/get-involved/how-rich-
am-i](http://www.givingwhatwecan.org/get-involved/how-rich-am-i)

------
potatolicious
Yes, by a fair bit. Unwilling to quantify exactly how much without
anonymization.

Have to echo zafka's sentiment: I'm incredibly lucky to be in my position, and
try to remind myself often that it can vanish just as quickly as it came. I'm
fortunate because of luck and preparation (more former than latter), and it
ruffles my feathers when people on HN try to toss around the "self made man"
thing.

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christoph
UK based. Yes. I believe I am significantly. I am the co-owner of a small
company that writes specialist pharmaceutical related software. For the last 3
years my partners and I have pulled down around £110k per year (pre tax). In
the last year work hours have gone down for us, but profit has gone up. We are
just building "cash at bank" now, while maintaining the same income. We don't
really have exit. Just enjoying the "good times" while they last.

The key thing is I am only as happy, if not less so than I was when we started
up. There's no excitement now, an important factor for me day to day. Also, it
sounds played out, but I have more financial stress now. I have a big mortgage
on a big house and employees to worry about. It really can be more money more
problems.

~~~
_random_
"a big mortgage on a big house" Why?

~~~
cs02rm0
Because he didn't have enough cash for a small mortgage?

~~~
christoph
Basically yes. I was buying a house in a small (but expensive) village that I
had lived in for my whole life. I was getting married. We needed a house. All
my friends and family live there. Its my home. Its easy commuting distance to
my office, central London, Heathrow airport and has clean air, good schools,
good amenities, good community and a canal to walk and cycle down every day I
want to. I wasn't buying a house as an investment. I was buying a house as
somewhere to live until I possibly die.

By the time you take solicitors fees, stamp duty, etc in to account I may as
well buy it for the long term. My house is already estimated to be worth 50k
more than I paid for it less than 9 months ago. Why? I've fixed lots of easy
problems with it, slightly modernised and I got a good deal as they were
desperate for a sale, I had no chain and they needed the money (previous deal
collapsed and they were on a bridging loan). I don't view it as an investment.
I simply bought the house I wanted to live in, in the area I wanted to live in
at a very competitive price.

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chestnut-tree
This interactive infographic from the BBC gives you a global overview of
average wages in different countries. You can type in your monthly salary to
see how near or far you are to the average wage in your country.

It obviously comes with lots of caveats and tells you nothing about the
quality of life in a particular country. It's still quite eye-opening though.

Where are you on the global pay scale? (March 2012)
[http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-17543356](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-17543356)

~~~
waps
This is bruto pay. It is massively wrong, almost deceitful.

I think they're presenting average pre-tax income. Singapore tax is between 0%
and 20%, and there's 7% VAT. In Germany you're going to be paying between 42
and 45% income tax, and 19% VAT. That means in Singapore you can spend 74.4%
of your income on what you want, in Germany 39%. And singapore is much less
regulated than Germany, and much better connected trade-wise, which means
goods are a lot cheaper there to begin with (not real estate though).

So, for the same bruto pay you'd have double the money in Singapore compared
to Germany, meaning those Singaporeans can easily buy 4 or 5 ipads for that
average wage, whereas an average Earning german would be doing very well to
get 2.5 for their "higher" pay. Hell, the average Singaporean is probably
better off than the average Luxembourgian.

Keep in mind that the "average" wage in singapore might be high, but the mean
wage is a LOT lower. Same, of course, is true in Luxembourg, but I don't think
it's that skewed in Germany.

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greenpinguin
London based. I started off below median London income and I must say it was
not pleasant. Now three years later after changing my life around I earn well
above median and together with my partner our combined household income is in
the top 20% of London. Having been on the other side of the spectrum I feel
these inequality discussion strongly. I worked just as hard and had barely
enough to get through. We need to tax wealth and not labour. Even the OECD has
recommended that in it's recent reports.

~~~
thrill
Taxing wealth is simply a deferred tax on labor.

~~~
dllthomas
That's not true. First, there are ways of accumulating wealth that do not
involve labor. Second, wealth taxes would apply to the same resources over
multiple periods, which is a significantly different dynamic.

------
tokenadult
Thanks to all of you for your thoughtful comments. Several of you drew the
important distinction between individual income and household income, which
often pools the incomes of more than one income-earner. As is surely apparent
from my submission and comment history on HN, I am not a person with a
technical education or technical occupation. My person income since I had
children (when I reduced labor force participation in the interest of
homeschooling the kids) has been below the United States median personal
income. My wife likes her work and does it well, and much of the time we have
had children we have been near the United States median household income, and
recently above it, in nontechnical occupations. I like HN because it includes
a lot of discussion about lifestyle and education tradeoffs that I wish I
would have engaged in when I was the age of most participants here. I'm happy
with my life, and think I am staggeringly wealthy--not least because I have
this Internet technology that lets us communicate with one another all over
the world. My oldest son is launched into adulthood as a hacker and has an
income sufficiently high to save money in his high-expense city, and my other
children look set also to have more expedient career choices than I made.

------
gaelow
I've been freelancing for a while and I've taken offers ranging from 10
USD/hour to 45 USD/hour. Minus insurance, minus VAT and other taxes, minus
expenses such as electricity/heating, Internet, ~20USD/month on AWS bills, and
gear (which right now is just my laptop, tablet and extra monitor).

I make between minimum wage and the average programmer's salary on my home
country (which is a little above the average for senior developers but almost
nothing for junior ones), without using my native language at all, and my
average week is usually more than 40 hours.

I have to be available on sundays and pretty much every holiday, but at least
I don't have any reason to hate mondays and I don't have to commute either :-)

Also, I get to travel a lot because I can work from almost anywhere in the
world (I've lived in 2 different countries last year and visited many others),
although it brings me down a little having most of my human interaction
reduced to emails and online posts (Plus, when my girlfriend is not around, I
have to talk to my cat to keep my vocal cords in shape. Seriously, it's quite
difficult to just start talking when you remain silent for most of the day
:-))

------
gone35
Whichever responses you get, they are unlikely to be terribly informative due
to heavy response bias.

Besides, even if you arrived at some reasonable aggregate, you would then have
to surmount the pitfalls of ecological inference to be able to draw any
meaningful conclusions: it could very well be that users whose preferences
influence the most the content of top-voted submissions are far from
representative.

That is not to say though your guess is _ex ante_ incorrect: programmers
almost invariably earn above the median income in every country, especially in
the US (and especially in the startup scene); and this is an English-based US
site that distinctly up-votes programming and startup content --"niche" topics
of very narrow interest to all but a particular sliver of population, and so
highly informative in the "Bayesian surprise" sense.

------
dkokelley
I am right at the median household income for the U.S. Consider though that
I'm measuring my individual income against the median household income, which
puts me at above average for individual income. I'm also young (26), and
finishing up grad school, so I expect my individual income to rise
significantly over the next 5-10 years.

There are lots to consider when trying to gauge your income to the median.
Median for your city or state could be very different than your country's
median income. You also have to take individual, family, and household income
into consideration. There are many other factors, too. Age,
occupation/industry, and educational background are all heavily correlated to
income.

------
zo1
Thank you for suggesting I look at this. I had a vague idea, but I didn't have
a good solid number until I looked it up.

It makes me incredibly thankful for the sacrifices my parents made in hardship
and poverty in order to provide me and my sister with an education.

My current income is well over 14 times what the median income for my age-
group was 4 years go. No, I'm not filthy rich, I just live in a country whose
population is largely on the poor side. If you're curious, it's South Africa:

[https://www.statssa.gov.za/Publications/P02112/P021122010.pd...](https://www.statssa.gov.za/Publications/P02112/P021122010.pdf)

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zafka
Yes, by a very large margin. I also try to maintain an attitude of gratitude
at all times. I realize that my position in life is largely a matter of luck.
I was born in the right place with the right genes.

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hobo_mark
Switzerland, and no, I've read that a supermarket cashier or a secretary makes
about the same as I do, without the long hours, but I am very frugal so I most
likely save a lot more than they would (one month of salary buys me several
months of runway for when I'll get serious and drop everything else) and I
like what I do of course.

EDIT: I just typed 'median income switzerland' in google and damn, I am even
worse off than I thought...

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jamilv
I'm around 1.5 times my countries average wage.

For reference here are some info sources.

Countries by average wage:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_wa...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_wage)

Median household income:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_household_income](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_household_income)

------
PeterWhittaker
I suggest creating a survey that would allow you to collect this information
without binding it to specific identities.

As it is, yes, I am above my country's mean and median (Canada), but I'm not
sure I want to tell you what the scaling factor is in a public forum. (FWIW,
I'm above the median and mean for the number one countries in each respective
list posted by jamilv - but again, I ain't sayin' by how much.)

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thaumaturgy
No; I'm probably about 15k below the national median and 25k below the state
median. This is entirely my own fault. Life is OK, though.

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chrisBob
I am a grad student and my wife is a PostDoc, this puts us right at the median
income in the US. I think we live well, but we also don't spend much: my wife
hates stores.

On this income we are able to afford to live in a nice suburb outside Boston.
I am really worried about having a kid towards the end of the year though.
Daycare in this area costs about $20k per year.

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jbrooksuk
According to
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_in_the_United_Kingdom](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_in_the_United_Kingdom),
with the 22% inflation, for my age range, yes, I earn more.

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phaemon
In the UK, we're actually below the median since my wife isn't working at the
moment.

OTOH, we own our house outright and don't have any crazy expensive habits or
any debts, so I still currently save over 50% of my net income.

~~~
lifeisstillgood
How, who, what?! You earn under 21K and own your own house and still save 10k
pa?

I find myself guilty at my profligate unbudgeted ways but even so, I can't see
how that's doable!

Tell me more

~~~
phaemon
Hi, sorry I didn't notice your reply before.

It's not as tough as it sounds once there's no rent or mortgage. You can count
your mortgage as savings for budgeting purposes though.

I work from home, so no travel expenses. My bills and council tax come to
about 300 a month. About 300 a month for food. 300 a month spending money.
That's 900 total and save the rest.

Note that I'm below the median for _two_ people, which is a little higher than
the median for one, but it's still in the same ballpark.

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SeoxyS
Yes, I'm pretty sure I was at 3x median income when I worked at what became a
larger startup. Now I'm back to making barely enough to cover my ridiculous
rent while getting a new company off the ground.

~~~
themoonbus
This sounds like a very San Francisco story to me!

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wavefunction
Yes, more than double. I am very fortunate, which I have to remind myself on a
daily basis due to my consumption of mass-media and its incessant message of
consumer culture.

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sunnykgupta
Here in India, I started out with programming at an age of 12, today 2 years
after graduation, I am 11 times higher than the national median income.

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lportion
Yes (in the UK), we're just slightly above it as a household, but I'm more
ahead of it as an individual.

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noobermin
Wow, I'm actually below the median...and I thought that I lived well.

~~~
wingerlang
> thought

Then you probably do, no?

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re1ser
6 to 8 times. Up to 10 if I work hard. I'm working as a contractor.

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ForHackernews
Yes, about 2.4x median household income (just me, not my partner).

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solox3
No. I am currently $4000 behind the median (Canada, Small startup)

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eccp
From Chile, and way above the mean, something like 4x or 5x.

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rwbhn
Well above, even if restricting the group to college grads.

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pyotrgalois
Yes, 3 or 4 times. I am from Argentina.

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ffumarola
www.globalrichlist.com will give you some insights to where you fall globally.

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dllthomas
Substantially above.

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tdsamardzhiev
Yes, 3.5 times.

