Landmark #3: Wealth and Poverty
The next few pages are designed to help you examine your perceptions of how well off you are. The first exercises inquire about your perceptions, and the later exercises test those perceptions.
| Exercise | On a scale from 1 to 10, how rich do you
think you are? What percentage of the U.S. population is poorer than you are? What percentage of the world population is poorer than you are? |
The graph below, Income Distribution in the United States in 1992, is here for you to test your IQ -- your income quintile. Do you think your income is in the top 20% of all U.S. incomes? The bottom 20%? The middle? In the exercise above, what percentage of the U.S. population did you guess were poorer than you?
| Exercise | The graph below shows the distribution of
income among taxpayers in the U.S. It shows that
generally speaking not too many people have really high
or really low incomes, and most people have incomes that
fall somewhere in the middle. The way you'd normally use
this graph would be to locate your gross annual income on
the scale at the bottom and then draw an imaginary
vertical line to the top of the graph to find what
percent of American taxpayers earn less than that amount.
But you can't do that on this graph because I've drawn a
big black line across the income scale at the bottom. So
you're going to have to guess. Draw an imaginary vertical line on the graph where you think your income is. If you're married, count your income as being one half of the sum of your income and your spouse's income. According to your estimate, what percentage of Americans earn less than you do? |
Income Distribution in the United
States in 1992
The Bottom Line
Take a minute to guess how your income compares to the incomes of
other Americans.
