I consider the “gentry” class much more of a flyover country thing than a California thing. Cali is flush with the professional class and filthy rich. Gentry is more like the people who own a few fast food franchises or car dealerships in middle America. There are certainly some people in Cali who are in the gentry tier by way of trust funds worth 10ish million or who cashed out of startups big but not mega big, who don’t have to work and who can buy basically all the creature comforts anyone could want but who aren’t inventing new ways to spend their money like those in the Super yacht class, but I think most of the tech bro stereotypes are professional class in my book. Lotta gentry types in Cali are farmland owners, too.
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Gotcha, the inclusion of the celebrities and performers in your original post made it read like something different to me 
saw this today, halfway interesting (mostly the differences between poverty and middle class) if obv generalized…
some dumb stereotypes in there
poverty is like 99% of the time not people’s own doing. I know I’m not the only person on this board to claw out of poverty and it nearly killed me, i still have brutal festering wounds, and I had a fucking small trust fund at the end of it to act as a safety net to boot. and i’m white as fuck. and i’m not stupid. so many people I look at, and I think there is truly no hope for them, and it’s completely not their fault, the system wants them exactly where they are and bucks violently when they dare step out of line.
just look at the economics of being poor. it’s meant to be hard to get out of. it’s on purpose.
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There are a lot of celebrities who could be living the zikzak ideal of 3-10 million net worth and then not having to work again, although many spend extravagantly and still need to work to keep up that lifestyle. But I do concede that there are a lot of such celebrities in Cali who I didn’t consider in response to your post. I am more of a SF/Silicon Valley guy than a Hollywood guy.
How are these charts derived? Is it supposed to be based off of w2 income?
Although I believe that the IRS does publish some taxable income statistics, a lot of the reporting on income trends and distributions that you find online comes from the census bureau. So often you’re probably looking at self reported data processed by the US Census Bureau. Check out appendix A in this report for some commentary on what they do.
The bar chart is from the Census data described in mosdef’s posts. The table with the more detailed breakdown by age group is from the Survey of Consumer Finances conducted by the Federal Reserve (Federal Reserve Board - About). It’s supposed to include all types of income, such as salary, investment income, and transfers.
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I think the IRS publishes some data as well, but it’s not a very good website in my opinion.
I actually spent a lot of time digging around in this stuff earlier this year. A fun project I was working on for work was trying to compare the income composition of our workforce to the income composition of the general population.
I have to think IRS data is pretty terrible at the top of the income distribution. I’m sure it’s fine for W-2 types but business owners and rich investors’ tax filings and actual cash flow are often (usually?) very different.
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Yeah that’s probably true. The positive quality of the IRS data is it’s completeness - you really do capture almost everybody because almost everybody files tax returns. The weakness in the data is any disconnect between reported taxable income and “true” economic income. That could involve actual tax shenanigans like hiding income, or more benign but important considerations like amortizations and deductions that are legal but mask true cash flow / wealth creation. And, of course, it misses the entirety of unrealized capital gains.
But what if I don’t want to miss my “work family”?
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Got 3% this year, which sure is better than most. They got me by the absolute balls though so I have no leverage to leave.
File under: ridiculous headlines
I don’t need to hustle, I generate Passive Income by working 80 hours a week at my job. #smarternotharder.
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God I wish I had video clips I could edit together of every boomer telling me to “just keep calling them, keep being persistent, put in the footwork, bother them until they give in” and all other 1983 job seeker advice I’ve gotten over the years
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that’s like the complete opposite of what i do