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The analysis comparing cities is just (mean salary - mean rent), which is going to make places with high income inequality look better than they are for most people.

I'd like to see the 10%, 50% (median), and 90% quantiles for (after-tax salary - housing cost). I bet the rankings would be quite different depending on which of these you chose.




Absolutely this.

We know that income is generally power-law distributed, so we also know that the majority of incomes will be below the mean. An analysis like this is bordering on nonsensical. It's too sensitive to outliers to be useful, in my opinion.

A worked example: the median income per capita in Boston is $37,288[1] and there are 685,094 residents. The total income of people in Boston is then 685094*$37288 = $25,545,785,072. According to [2], Tim Cook's total compensation was $377 million in 2013. If Tim Cook moved to Boston, the mean per capita income would rise from $37,288 to ((25545785072+377000000)/(685094+1)) = $37,838. One person moving can make a 2% difference in mean income by moving to a top 25 city in the US, nevermind any of the smaller cities on that list.

1 = https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/bostoncitymassa...

2 = https://www.therichest.com/rich-list/world/top-10-people-wit...


FWIW they mentioned the highest salary was $187k


For large, sprawling cities like Denver, Orlando, Nashville, Omaha, etc etc mean rent is almost useless.

In Denver $1800 will get you a studio in desirable places to live, and will only get you a 2 BR out in deep suburbia or developments that come with 45 minute commutes. You're also going to have widely varying incomes between those two areas... i'd be willing to bet the after rent take home in the fringes of Denver sprawl is much worse than downtown due to ridiculous prices pushing low income workers farther and farther away from the city center while rent decreases at a much slower rate.

Also did they get their salary data from BusinessStudent or from Indeed? And where did they get their real estate data from?




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