This chart tells you how rich is rich - if you can read it

Via twitter, John B. sent me the following YouGov chart (link) that he finds difficult to read:

The title is clear enough: the higher your income, the higher you set the bar.

When one then moves from the title to the chart, one gets misdirected. The horizontal axis shows pound values, so the axis naturally maps to "the higher your income". But it doesn't. Those pound values are the "cutoff" values - the line between "rich" and "not rich". Even after one realizes this detail, the axis  presents further challenges: the cutoff values are arbitrary numbers such as "45,001" sterling; and these continuous numbers are treated as discrete categories, with irregular intervals between each category.

There is some very interesting and hard to obtain data sitting behind this chart but the visual form suppresses them. The best way to understand this dataset is to first think about each income group. Say, people who make between 20 to 30 thousand sterling a year. Roughly 10% of these people think "rich" starts at 25,000. Forty percent of this income group think "rich" start at 40,000.

For each income group, we have data on Z percent think "rich" starts at X. I put all of these data points into a heatmap, like this:

Technical note: in order to restore the horizontal axis to a continuous scale, you can take the discrete data from the original chart, then fit a smoothed curve through those points, and finally compute the interpolated values for any income level using the smoothing model.

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There are some concerns about the survey design. It's hard to get enough samples for higher-income people. This is probably why the highest income segment starts at 50,000. But notice that 50,ooo is around the level at which lower-income people consider "rich". So, this survey is primarily about how low-income people perceive "rich" people.

The curve for the highest income group is much straighter and smoother than the other lines - that's because it's really the average of a number of curves (for each 10,000 sterling segment).

 

P.S. The YouGov tweet that publicized the small-multiples chart shown above links to a page that no longer contains the chart. They may have replaced it due to feedback.

 

 

Comments

[Joaquin]

Great job! I really like it. What would be great is for the width of the bands to reflect the number of people in that earning category... that would easily indicate how big is the population "consensus" for a particular threshold of what rich means.