Fred, I totally agree. But consider that less than 2% of households are much above $150k. Does it really make that much difference in the analysis to lump them all together?

My focus in the analysis was the bottom… septile? Those households under $15k. What do they need to do to not be poor? Answers: work more, get a HIGH SCHOOL education, get married, get a roomate, whatever. More hours, more education, more income earners.

The one vital trope “the new fiendish Frankenstein monsters of financial engineering” isn’t very good.

cliche. move along – nothing to see here – we ALL know why there was a crisis – go read something about how to get out of the crisis – for realz.

Here’s something – The Smart Growth Manifesto:
http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/haque/2009/01/davos_discussing_a_depression.html

Huh? Is Samuleson suggesting that FDR returned employment to its pre-recession levels (“full employment”) in seven years?

Yikes.

And this is also the second post that seems to suggest that the American electorate has shifted left, which I find hilarious.

Methinks people read into election results far too much. Electoral voting follows a pretty understandable ebb-and-flow, with agency accounting for deviations.

People that believe the US is *really* democratic because of the last election are as silly as those who believed Americans were neocons 4-8 years ago.

But I suppose its harmless, and incidentally serves as an excellent signal that the individual is data-mining for arguments and explanations of reality that fit their political predispositions.

Samuelson is correct. This economic crisis is the final apotheosis of the right-wing policies and governance of the past 30 years. We’ve had 4 business-oriented Presidents since 1980, all more or less pursuing the same failed and now-discredited policies.”

Why do you hold that because a guy is a Nobel Prize winner he can’t be a partisan hack or an an FDR deciple? Why does, in your estimation, a Nobel Prize give it’s recipient free reign to rewrite very recent history to leave out the tech bubble and the 9-11 attacks for consideration as a significant turning point in the economy?

“Bush was only the most recent, and the policies pursued under him – including Iraq – have simply brought the crisis to its ultimate realization.”

Remind me, in what years were you ever POTUS? Right.

It’s sarcasm.

Look, we know a lot of things from this data.

1) total number of households.

2) households in each income range.

3) demographic data about the households (number of income earners, educational attainment, hours worked).

4) You know how many households at each level of demographic data fall into each income range.

You just need to process the data:

1)Divide number of households for each demographic level by total number of households in that income level.

2) Multiply it by the demographic level. For example, the number of households with 1 income earner gets multiplied by 1.

3) Take the average for the income level.

Using this procedure, for example, I found that the under $15k income range (with a median income of $7500) worked an average of 350 hours, had an avergae of .39 income earners, and an average of 12 years of education. This is what got regressed.

The excel file I used is here. Feel free to run your own regression if you think I’m wrong. I explained in a previous post exactly what I did.