«
»
Richard Florida
by Richard Florida
Fri Apr 27th 2007 at 9:22am UTC

Creative Class & Income

Some numbers for you (based on current 2005 OES Data).

Total Employment (millions)
Creative Class33.7(31%)
Service Class50.0(46%)
Working Class25.5(23%)
Total Wages ($ billion):
Creative Class2,103(49%)
Service Class1,309(31%)
Working Class850(20%)
Total Discretionary(*) Income ($ billion):
Creative Class474(69%)
Service Class119(17%)
Working Class93 (14%)
These numbers are only for Metropolitan areas.

(*)Discretionary income and disposable income are not the same but are often used interchangeably. Disposable is just income (after taxes). Discretionary is income minus taxes minus the "costs of living". Estimate based on each region’s average wage for each class applied to a quadratic estimating equation (y = 1.9322 - 0.1102x + 0.0048x2) calibrated from reported discretionary spending by income level.

So, we can upgrade the 30-40-50 rule to be the 30-40-50-70 rule.

The U.S. Creative Class is …

  • 30% of the workforce
  • 40 million people (across entire country)
  • making 50% of all earnings
  • and having 70% of all discretionary income

    • Posted by: Kevin Stolarick

This entry was posted on Friday, April 27th, 2007 at 9:22 am and is filed under Creative Class. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Comments are closed.