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Really? In Manhattan those are called "poor people". More seriously, that's low enough to include a lot of people who are merely strivers and have not become elite, as well a large part of the urban PMC (e.g. Google NYC is full of such people) who will never be elite (as in either being or at least having significant part-ownership in a Senator or state legislature)
It's low enough to include people that aren't even strivers. While granting that it's still a good income, it's also an amount that you can make in jobs that you can more or less stumble into and stay at pretty comfortably without trying to rise much. I'm struggling to resist linking my old company's Glassdoor for doxing reasons, but it's not particularly prestigious and has plenty of pretty ordinary roles (both technical and non-technical) in that salary range. Having the postgrad degree is helpful, but not required.
I can't help but think they cherrypicked a group that fits their conception of who's causing the problems. I don't even necessarily disagree with the core claims, but the way they're getting there doesn't look honest or rigorous to me. A guy that got a master's degree and makes $200K at a software company is "elite", but the suburban guys that own car dealerships and pull down seven figures aren't? I'm not buying it, particularly if we're talking about who's more likely to have meaningful political influence.
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150K personal income is pretty good, even in Manhattan (at least I assume they're talking personal income). That's higher than the household average in every county in America, nearly double the per capita average.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-income_counties_in_the_United_States
The report indicated that they were talking about 1% of the USA population.
150k is 91p for individual income. There's no way that 9% of Americans (30M people?) have personal ties to senators or have "ai regulators" over for dinner. It's hilariously broad.
150K urban postgrads, all three are needed.
The elites I know aren't American but I assure you that's the kind of thing that happens. They all know eachother. The AI regulator in question is one of those people who goes flying around the world to be in the room, making EU policy. He has one of those CVs that just goes on and on, founded this and that, on the board of x, y and z.
America is bigger and wealthier. There's a ton of $150K urban postgrads who aren't part of that scene.
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Most people making 150k are probably urban college graduates. It's hard to make that kind of money with a high school diploma.
I can assure you that the elite slice of the population is much less than 9%.
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How broad is too broad to be considered "elite"? If you told me that 10% of a population were elites, that doesn't sound too weird to me.
Let me run a quick sanity check. Hmm, 30 seconds of Googling is telling me that in Medieval Europe the nobility were around 1-3% of the population (except in Castille where it was around 10% at certain times, but that seems to be an outlier). So perhaps 9% is too broad.
You can call it "elite" if you want since it's an arbitrary term. But the idea that your average CS graduate is hobnobbing with senators is laughable.
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