Arwa Mahdawi writes:

It’s an average American salary. What could it be? $800,000?
It costs over $100,000 a year to attend the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. I don’t know what you get for that money exactly but insights into the everyday economy clearly aren’t on the syllabus. Nina Strohminger, an assistant professor at Wharton School recently asked her students how much they reckoned the average American makes a year. A quarter of the class, she reported in a viral tweet, thought it was over six figures; one student thought it was $800,000. The real figure? Around $53,838, according to figures from the Social Security Administration (SSA) last year.

Now, clearly, this is just an informal poll broadcast on Twitter; it’s not a peer-reviewed scientific study. Still, it touched a nerve with a lot of people because it’s a reflection of the fact that the super-rich seem to live on a completely different planet than everyone else. According to data from the New York Times the average family income of a Penn student is $195,500; 19% of its students come from the top 1% of earners while only 3.3% come from the bottom 20%. Wharton is the alma matter of people like Ivanka Trump and her father. Wharton is a place, to risk being somewhat over simplistic, that largely takes in people from rich families – these people then go on to become politicians and titans of industry and make even more money.

If this poll just demonstrated that a few overprivileged students are incredibly out of touch that would be one thing. However, the myopia represented at Wharton is mirrored in society as a whole. As a Harvard professor noted in the Twitter thread, research shows that what you think others make depends on how much you make yourself. People tend to massively underestimate the gap between the rich and the poor. [Continue reading…]