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Notes -
This article was doing the rounds on Twitter yesterday and has two problems.
Data Definitions: The UK disposible income definition was post tax pre transfer while the EU definitions was post transfer. The OECD database wasnt clear if they took the pre or post transfer definition from BEA for the US. The disposable income of the lowest decile Britions (which most of the hullabaloo is being made of despite the medians looking healthy) would improve dramatically. I woildn't be suprised if this is the case, since a lot of inequality work falls in this pitfall, including pretty much all of Piketty's work.
Second, Notice that the US is where you would expect it in the median. Given that income typically follows a Pareto distribution with a right tail the median is near the central mass of the distro. Thus for the median to be higher with a lower 10% decile, the slope of the left hamd side of the distro has to be much higher. the UK and US income deciles likely surpass the EU ones and near the Swiss ones at the 20%-30% mark.
Its amazing how much damage bad infographics can do.
Could you point out a dataset with all proper adjustments applied? Or several datasets which could be combined into proper one? Wiki page (median income table) refers to this monstrous oecd table, which has almost no values after 2019. Do I understand correctly, that wiki took measure="median disposable income (current prices)" and adjusted it by PPP?
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