What kind of a city will you be covering in your Craft class and in many of the other courses you take? A city with a lot of very rich people as this story from the Wall Street Journal New York section makes clear–Private School Tuition Bill Tops $40,000.
Here are some facts. If New York City were a country, its gross domestic product would rank 17th–behind Turkey and ahead of Switzerland. And the top 1% of New Yorkers account for 44% of the income in the city, a figure which has increased by double-digits in the last two decades.
You might also be interested–or appalled–to know that when the WSJ launched its New York specific section, it targeted precisely those rich people. The section is filled with stories about high-priced homes. They also emphasize private schools, they profile big philanthropists and they review fancy restaurants. Poor people rarely grace their pages, unless the story is about politics.
Greg David
Ah, yes, it’s pretty clear NYC has a lot of rich people. But how many and how rich are they? In an ideal world, I would like to see a comparison of the number of people who have assets or income totaling above a certain amount compared to the number of people who have assets or income totaling less than that amount, by US county if possible.
(whew!)
If you are still reading, I think the Federal Reserve might have that information. They have published some aggregate wealth data by region and I suspect more detail is available. This is the kind of reporting I am interested in doing, although I promise to never use the above sentence in a story. 🙂
Hello again! I found the data and made some charts. Everybody loves charts, right?
http://www.martinburch.com/upload/cuny/borough-income-rich-poor.png
http://www.martinburch.com/upload/cuny/income-disparity.png
And what these charts seem to tell us is a lot of the very poor live very close to the very rich.
Very interesting charts. The best work on this issue and the source of my numbers was the Fiscal Policy Institute, a labor-backed, liberal oriented research group in the city. They can be a valuable source of many stories