Target Point - Chart wars & What is rich income?

A great, short talk by TargetPoint's VP and Director of Research, Alex Lundry, at DC Ignite. He addresses the issues of subjective messaging through visualization, the emergence of open data, some ideal data visualization tools, a set of quick lessons in graphic literacy, and a short list of recommended visualization books, all within the time span of 5 minutes.

Watch the movie below.

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"What is rich income"

- Another interesting article fromTarget point -

The most frequent response, the mode, was $100,000. The median response was $250,000 – that is, half of the country gave an answer above $250K and half were below. The mean is too heavily influenced by extreme values and is a correspondingly inefficient measure of the midpoint. We can also estimate a nationwide consensus at the 75th percentile, where ¾ of the country defines rich below the $500,000 mark.



Still despite the fact that all demographic effects are subsumed by income, we can’t help but point to a number of interesting and fun significant differences in the crosstabs. For instance:

• GENDER: men’s median response is $250k, while women’s is 200k.
• IDEOLOGY: conservatives have a higher “rich” threshold, $250k, than liberals, $200k, and moderates line up with conservatives with a median response of $250k.
• 2008 VOTE: mirroring ideology, “rich” to a McCain voter means an annual income of $250k (median), while an Obama voter sets the bar at $200k.

Finally, it’s important to put these numbers into their proper perspective: median annual household income in the United States is about $44,389 (from 2005 Census Bureau data); if we were to arbitrarily define the rich as the top 20% of household incomes the lower limit would be $88,030 a far cry from our survey’s median of $250,000. Even the top 5% of household incomes begin at $157,176, nearly $100,000 short of our survey’s median response.

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