Introduction: Yes, I'd be happy to forego a pay rise and why not? Unless you're on the poverty line then what's the problem? The fuss some people make over a few quid is utterly beyond me - small-minded, selfish little homo-sapiens. Wake up people - there are much more important things in life than money. James, Bristol, UK http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/7205206.stm ////////////// General: See Joseph Rowntree Publications http://www.jrf.org.uk/research-and-policy/poverty-and-disadvantage/default.asp#publications National Statistics ‘Social Trends’: http://www.statistics.gov.uk/statbase/Product.asp?vlnk=13675 Wages: This is bloody complicated area cos so many ways to look at it and matters a lot at which workers you look at (all or only those full-time?) and whether you look at weekly or hourly wages (be careful in interpreting weekly wages for all workers cos hours differ). One of the main surveys of wage data only covers people above the National Ins threshold so lots of low paid are excluded. Try here: http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=285 Household Income: 2006 Economic Trends article (attached). For time trends back to early 80s see Tables 26 and 27 App 1 (there should be a more recent version of this article – it’s produced every year – but Econ Trends has been merged with something else so having problems finding it, I should be able to track it down if you let me know you want it.) Poverty: Households Below Average Income 1994/95 to 2005/06 Mainly poverty (fixed and relative thresholds), but also has income inequality and income mobility and includes some time trends back to 1979 http://www.dwp.gov.uk/asd/hbai/hbai2006/contents.asp Wealth: Wealth publication attached. NB. Debt is negative wealth /////// - 2nd Email See my responses below. hiya i can't find very much about pen's parade, I have seen Pen's Parade drawn as 10 people (one for each decile group of the distribution), just wanted you to get the idea. It's very effective. We can easily create our own - we just need to know what the median height of the population is and then we equate that to median income or wage and scale up or down to get the 'heights' of the other decile groups (given that we know their income or wage). maybe you can help me out i been using of 457 p week (2007) average wage , which is median (see http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=285) then i am looking at this http://www.dwp.gov.uk/asd/hbai/hbai2006/chapters.asp which is households below average income. So i looking at that, and it had 2 figures (page 2) saying: and Median income £362pw Mean income £443pw so basically is that median the same one after tax etc? No, they're very different. The median wage is the median just for full-time employees of their gross individual income from paid employment. I'm guessing but I spose this is about 20 million people (possibly less) - u can check. The other income figure is equivalised household disposable income. So this covers everyone living in private households - kids, old people, unemployed, workers etc (excludes those in institutions - hospitals, prisons, hostels etc - and homeless). I guess that would be nearly everyone in the country, approx 58 million people (? again u can check). The idea of this analysis is to get an idea of people's standard of living which is assumed to depend on their net (same as disposabale) households total income from all sources and it is assumed that households (household is roughly defined as people who share meals together) share their money equally between members. So net income from all sources (employment, benefits, pensions, investment income, child maintenance etc) is added together for all the people in a hosuehold to get total net household disp income. But because we're interested in standard of living (on which poverty measurement is based) we need to be able compare hoseholds with different numbers of people - people in a household iwth more money and more poeple doesn't necessarily have a higher standard of lving than a smaller hosuehold with less money. This is where equivalisation comes in. HBAI uses the McClement's equivalence scale which commonly used. Everyone in the household gets a weight depending on age and other stuff. It is assumed that kids need a lot less income spent on them to enjoy same standard of living as an adult (v dodgy - anoraks like me have been banging on for years that McClements scale is crap). The weights imply economies of scale from living together (prob fair enough). McClements scale gives a couple a weight of '1' so a household which consists of just a couple with a household income of £200 will have an equivalised inocme of £200. A household consisting of a single person with an actual income of £200 would have an equivalised income of £299. So that is the income measure you have the median for - the net equivalised total household income. The actual number for median income isn't terribly meaningfull because of the process of equivalisation. U can just say that it's equivalebnt to the median ACTUAL household net total income for a couple household. If you used a different equivalense scale the income distribution would look quite different. For example, one way to equivalise would be to give everyone in the household the same weight so you would just divide the total household income by the number oif people in the household. I think if you did this median income would fall because larger households tend to be poorer. But to do that you would have to go back to the raw data - we're talking a few weeks work for someone who knows what they're doing and months of work for someone else. There's a lot more on all of this in HBAI eg. see pg 11 of chapter 1. It's a bit out of date but here is a publication looking at how low-paid individuals avoid poverty so we discuss how wages and hosuehold income are connected. Here's the link: http://www.jrf.org.uk/bookshop/details.asp?pubID=645 what is the mean income gross? Don't know. People don't look at gross income much. It's worth wading thru HBAI or the Economic Trends article. and any idea about the mode? The mode income from Fig 2.1 looks to be about £260 for net equiv hshld income (income with highest point on graph). I would jsut say that altho the mode is taught as a measure of average or central tendancy I think it's a bit arbritrary and not terribly meaningful or easy to interpret - I can't think of any time I have ever seen it apllied in practice . But that's just my view. ps was reading on a bulletin board (of economist sorts) discussing income that the mode average wage is likely to be the minimum wage. can that be true?? It can be true but that's partly why I don't think the mode is terribly useful. Because you have a legal minimum at that point in the distribution you might expect to see a 'spike' at that point which could make it the mode. There's a lot of interesting stuff on how the intro of min wage has affected wages. See Low Pay Commission. ///// - 3rd conversation I got this from ASHE 2007 (http://www.statistics.gov.uk/StatBase/Product.asp?vlnk=15050) (columns are hourly wages: full time, part time, both) April 2007 Men 11.96 7.18 11.48 Women 10.46 7.29 8.97 All 11.34 7.27 10.14 my gosh that's a stunning difference for the part time! (and the gender gap obviously) Interestingly it has the figures for median gross weekly earnings which includes part timers too and it comes to: £374.9 Yeah. The difference between using the hourly result for all Ftime and Ptime and multiplying by (say) 40 hours (approx £404) and this figure of £374 is that the latter reflects: a) differences in hourly pay rates for full and part timers, and b) differences in weekly hours worked for full and part timers, whereas the former (hourly rate multiplied by 40) only reflects a). Which you use depends on what you are interested in: - the £374 figure represents actual money coming in from paid work - the £404 figure represents weekly earning "power" (what someone would earn at their current hourly rate if they worked fulltime). It's page 2. In the same table it has a column called 'All Employee jobs' which gives a figure of £361.7 - i presume this figure include young people on their minimum wage too? Yes, as far as I can tell it includes people not on adult rates of pay (young people on min wage and other age-related pay rates - I would think a lot of employees have such wage scales- and people on 'therapeutic' wages -) and people whose pay was affected by sickness or absence in the week of the survey.