The top 10% of earners—households making about $250,000 a year or more—are splurging on everything from vacations to designer handbags, buoyed by big gains in stocks, real estate and other assets.
Those consumers now account for 49.7% of all spending, a record in data going back to 1989, according to an analysis by Moody’s Analytics. Three decades ago, they accounted for about 36%.
The top-level post uses a gift link. When it runs out, there is an archived copy of the article.
To expand further on what you’re saying, the problem with the linked article’s mathematical/statistical analysis is that it uses a slightly more sophisticated version of misleadingly using “average”/mean in a context where median would be more appropriate.
Specifically, they talk about the spending of the top 10% in the aggregate, and point to the threshold of when a household tips into that top decile. Well, that aggregated number is itself heavily skewed towards the higher end of that spectrum, where the people in the 99th percentile are contributing a lot more weight than those in the 90th.
Here are the cutoffs for income thresholds to hit each percentile at or above 90:
90: $235k
91: $246k
92: $260k
93: $275k
94: $295k
95: $316k
96: $348k
97: $391k
98: $461k
99: $632k
Note that this doesn’t even get into the 0.5% or 0.1%, which skew things even further. Even without that level of granularity, you can see that the median in this group is about $305k while the mean is closer to $350k.
When you include the billionaires, the difference skews even further.
That’s the math error at the center of this thesis. The facts reported might be true, but in a way that groups things together misleadingly.