Well let's pile some more random data onto this tire fire and jump to some conclusions. (edit: comparing 2015 to 2017)
How much do Americans earn?
2015 data [1]: median household income was $52K. If you're white. If you're black, the median is $34K. So, only like, 1/3 less. Or if you're asian, the median is $72K.
2017 data [2]: median household income apparently jumps to $62k. If you're white it's $65k, black it's $40k, asian $81k.
Then the Social Security data (from 2013) shows the median net compensation for individuals is $28K. And according to tax data, the bottom 50% of taxpayers make less than $34K.
Since the poverty level for a family of 4 (in 2017) is $25k, that means a majority of families of 4 (which, again have to pay 4x for more food, clothing, transportation, education, and miscellaneous) have a bit more than subsistence level money.
2017 data [3]: Census claims the poverty level for a household of 1 is $12k. What? Who the fuck is living in America on $12k a year?
Adding up all the people making less than $15k comes to ~28% of Americans, or 92 million people, just above to below poverty level (SSA data for 2017 [5]). But Census poverty data [6] says only 12% are in poverty. There's a huge gap between the SSA's numbers of people and their net compensation, compared to the Census's formulation of how many people are in poverty. How is there a gap of 52 million people in calculating the poverty rate? Can someone point out what's going on?
GDP is also higher than median household income, which doesn't take inflation into account.
The median Asian income is easily explained - only educated/relatively rich Asians can afford to immigrate. Most immigration is relatively recent (60s to present) so their status hasn't really had time to change a lot.
Citation? There are certainly rich Asians who immigrate, but I know plenty of people who immigrated and are absolutely not rich at all.
Many Asians who immigrate have little to nothing except an education, some don't even have that. We brought many over during the time frame of the Vietnam war who had nothing at all.
You're being downvoted, but if you look at a ranking of household income by ethnicity in the U.S., it's pretty clear that you're right. The highest earning ethnic group is Indian Americans. You can make the (terribly convoluted) argument that East Asians (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) are somehow white, but there's no getting around the fact that Indians are brown. At least as brown as Mexicans and probably browner (Mexicans tend to be about 40% European ancestry on average).
Here's that list for anybody who wants to take a look:
First off, it's not in any way accurate to refer to groups of people by skin color. I know "white" Mexicans and "brown" Caucasians.
Second, the parent comment is misguided for a number of reasons.
Anyone suggesting "all white people do <x>" are misguided because they're trading in racist stereotypes. But there is a trend that they are trying to point out, which is an inherent bias of the majority population who receive a greater share of opportunities than any other group in this nation, which is shown by things like overall increased income, increased job opportunities, increased representation in government, increased representation on corporate boards, increased representation in the media and entertainment, etc. It's not hard to see that it's been a "white man's world" for a long time now and it's only starting to be rolled back. Unless you're white, in which case it's very hard to see.
In addition, the statement that this one metric alone proves that white people don't oppress other groups is silly! It's one year's median household income in the US! Even if asians as a group make more per median household, that doesn't mean they don't face discrimination, it just means they're well compensated. Show me all of the leading asian men in American movies, and all the asian men on boards of directors, and asian men as leaders of political parties, and so on.
Taking one arbitrary economic metric and using it to try to disprove an obviously problematic multifactored cultural norm, is really reaching.
> But there is a trend that they are trying to point out, which is an inherent bias of the majority population who receive a greater share of opportunities than any other group in this nation, which is shown by things like overall increased income, increased job opportunities, increased representation in government, increased representation on corporate boards, increased representation in the media and entertainment, etc. It's not hard to see that it's been a "white man's world" for a long time now and it's only starting to be rolled back.
These ethnically-focused statistics are so incredibly pointless and misguided, I don't know why anyone would want to bring them up other than to be purposefully divisive. What's the "median household income" among blue-collar, poor whites in the Midwest? In the Rust Belt? What about their "share" of national "opportunities"? You're focusing on what's literally a tiny bit of information about an individual (a handful of bits, at best)-- namely their racial/ethnic heritage-- and treating it like it's the One thing that Explains Everything about our society, or at least our "cultural norms". That makes zero rational sense, the only reason such an argument might appeal to us is cognitive bias.
> greater share of opportunities than any other group in this nation, which is shown by things like overall increased income, increased job opportunities, increased representation in government, increased representation on corporate boards, increased representation in the media and entertainment, etc.
Money, i.e. resources, is the ultimate score. Ultimately, power (politics, corporate management) is primarily about managing resources (money) within companies, and within society at large. So, given that Asians are doing better as a group than white people, it's really nonsensical to say that they're opressed by them. It looks more like that are actually thriving. You could maybe make a convoluted claim that they are opressed and would be doing even better if they weren't, but that's stretching it.
> given that Asians are doing better as a group than white people
They're not. They have higher median household income. Median household income does not determine whether one ethnic group does better than another ethnic group. It only determines if their median household income is doing better.
And if you think money is the end-all-be-all, white people are the tops. "96.1 percent of the 1.2 million households in the top one percent by income were white, a total of about 1,150,000 households. In addition, these families were found to have a median net asset worth of $8.3 million dollars."
One thing, the median amount of money that a household has, is different than another thing, which is aggregate political, social, and economic power.
Or maybe it just takes a while for families to establish themselves? Over half of Asians in the U.S. are foreign born. With most of the remainder being the second generation.
That said, Asians are starting to get elected to political office. There are three Asians in the U.S. Senate (making 3% of all senators) and there are 14 Asian members of the House of Representatives (making 2.6%). That might seem low, given that Asians make up about 7% of the U.S. population, but over half of Asian Americans are foreign-born. I think the fairer comparison is to American-born Asian Americans (after all, it's hard to get elected when you're not a native speaker of English and you're missing shared cultural references). And that shows an attainment of political office in line with their representation in the population at large.
I can't find decent stats on Asians in the 1% of income, but if you have a source you like, I'm happy to dig in. The link you provided just has an "Other" category at 1.6%.
So you have an ethnic group that A) is many shades darker that even the darkest European ethnicities, B) speaks with an accent that is very difficult for native English speakers to understand, C) only had a meaningful support group of people with the same background in the last several decades, and D) is able to pull in 2x the income of white Americans and your position is that somebody's race is the most important limiting factor to their success in this country?
How much do Americans earn?
2015 data [1]: median household income was $52K. If you're white. If you're black, the median is $34K. So, only like, 1/3 less. Or if you're asian, the median is $72K.
2017 data [2]: median household income apparently jumps to $62k. If you're white it's $65k, black it's $40k, asian $81k.
Then the Social Security data (from 2013) shows the median net compensation for individuals is $28K. And according to tax data, the bottom 50% of taxpayers make less than $34K.
Since the poverty level for a family of 4 (in 2017) is $25k, that means a majority of families of 4 (which, again have to pay 4x for more food, clothing, transportation, education, and miscellaneous) have a bit more than subsistence level money.
2017 data [3]: Census claims the poverty level for a household of 1 is $12k. What? Who the fuck is living in America on $12k a year?
Adding up all the people making less than $15k comes to ~28% of Americans, or 92 million people, just above to below poverty level (SSA data for 2017 [5]). But Census poverty data [6] says only 12% are in poverty. There's a huge gap between the SSA's numbers of people and their net compensation, compared to the Census's formulation of how many people are in poverty. How is there a gap of 52 million people in calculating the poverty rate? Can someone point out what's going on?
GDP is also higher than median household income, which doesn't take inflation into account.
[1] http://www.mybudget360.com/how-much-do-americans-earn-in-201... [2] https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/demo/tables/p60/263... [3] https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/cps/tables/time-ser... [4] https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2018/demo/p60-26... [5] https://www.ssa.gov/cgi-bin/netcomp.cgi?year=2017 [6] https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2018/demo/p60-26...
edit: in the Census report (https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publicatio...) they mention that you have to adjust all pre-2014 numbers by increasing them by 3.14 percent, due to changes in reporting....