> For instance, do people who declare their occupation as landlord have some demonstrable income distribution x std deviations above some control group?
Not really. Being a landlord takes a bunch of money to sink into the real estate assets. If you don't put it in there you'd just leave it in a mutual fund or whatever and be making passive income of about the same order. Real Estate is a solid investment choice but it's not *that* much better.
Basically this argument is for the form "being a landlord looks like a working class job but pays better and that's not fair".
But the actual truth on the ground is "being a landlord is just a different way of being wealthy, and you have to fix plumbing on the side instead of working a day job in an office".
Maybe the number of bankruptcies of landlords versus other professions normalized for age (since many bankruptcies are health related and landlords tend to be older).
Is there some hard data somewhere that can be scrutinized rather than narratives and sentiment?
Well, sure, but "get to" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. It's just wealth. Your complaint isn't about the "gig", it's about the wealth. People can hold wealth in any of a zillion ways, most of which are invisible (c.f. Vanguard accounts, BTC, yada yada). Don't be upset with your landlord just because you can see their assets.
I mean to be really, truly Marxist about it, it's not the occupation of landlord but the rentier social relation that's problematic.
The theory is it extracts productive capital which could have a better multiplier effect allocated elsewhere such as education, research, public infrastructure, etc.
I'm sure there's some economic wonks that have long academic papers on this to support or refute this 170 or so year old idea, but I'm merely an amateur.
There was an economic movement after Henry George that very adamantly advocated for redoing this social relationship if you're curious. It was (most likely) the inspiration for the original version of Monopoly among other things. It might be regarded as a form of Economic Populism if you look at the adjacent beliefs of the prominent early 20th c. Georgists, but that'd probably be a 5,000+ word article.
Not really. Being a landlord takes a bunch of money to sink into the real estate assets. If you don't put it in there you'd just leave it in a mutual fund or whatever and be making passive income of about the same order. Real Estate is a solid investment choice but it's not *that* much better.
Basically this argument is for the form "being a landlord looks like a working class job but pays better and that's not fair".
But the actual truth on the ground is "being a landlord is just a different way of being wealthy, and you have to fix plumbing on the side instead of working a day job in an office".