Overconfidence

The hatred that men bear to privilege increases in proportion as privileges become fewer and less considerable, so that democratic passions would seem to burn most fiercely just when they have least fuel. I have already given the reason for this phenomenon. When all conditions are unequal, no inequality is so great as to offend the eye, whereas the slightest dissimilarity is odious in the midst of general uniformity; the more complete this uniformity is, the more insupportable the sight of such a difference becomes. Hence it is natural that the love of equality should constantly increase together with equality itself, and that it should grow by what it feeds on.
—Alexis de Tocqueville

If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment.
—Ernest Rutherford

The topics below are multifaceted and can be discussed at arbitrary depth. My intent is to narrowly focus on areas where I believe popular perceptions deviate significantly from low-dimensional analysis.

Taxes

The following tables were built from the federal income tax statistics published by the IRS for the year 2018.1

Gross income Number of returns Taxable income Tax generated
$0 to $30,000 61,400,475 $209,627,463 $21,301,366
$30,000 to $50,000 27,527,892 $614,917,720 $66,645,578
$50,000 to $75,000 21,460,676 $908,232,889 $110,300,560
$75,000 to $100,000 13,685,409 $880,485,810 $114,647,454
$100,000 to $200,000 21,146,537 $2,325,807,851 $355,463,300
$200,000 to $500,000 6,905,670 $1,722,797,847 $339,601,130
$500,000 to $1,000,000 1,108,430 $679,065,650 $173,709,324
$1,000,000 to $1,500,000 241,713 $264,924,951 $75,614,172
$1,500,000 to $2,000,000 98,583 $154,372,748 $45,578,917
$2,000,000 to $5,000,000 142,011 $382,447,835 $115,495,700
$5,000,000 to $10,000,000 34,788 $215,846,207 $64,449,712
$10,000,000 or more 22,112 $582,918,123 $159,209,821
Rate Number of returns Taxable income Tax generated
0% 10,367,975 $81,502,833 -
15% 14,631,699 $309,494,340 $46,424,496
20% 1,304,641 $603,966,605 $120,793,322
25% 225,855 $11,813,127 $2,953,309
28% 12,424 $3,826,428 $1,071,400

Income Inequality

The following charts were built from data published by the Congressional Budget Office.2

The chart below displays the inflation adjusted average household income by quintile, from 1979 to 2018.

The chart itself, or something similar, is probably familiar to most readers. The sentiment it conveys is that income growth in the past four decades has been overwhelmingly captured by the top quintile. It is common for discussions on income inequality to focus on this fact, and to be followed by calls for various forms of income redistribution. What is missing from this picture is the fact that we already have many income redistribution programs in the United States today, and their effects are not captured in the chart above.

The Congressional Budget Office publishes the same data after adjusting for taxes and transfers, which includes programs such as Social Security, Medicaid + CHIP, SNAP, Supplemental Security Income, and others. Including taxes and transfers paints quite a different picture.

Taking this into account, we can see there has been significant income growth across the board, with the lowest quintile being the second highest beneficiary.

In addition, the share of income by quintile has been relatively stable, with the highest quintile mostly capturing income from the fourth and middle quintiles.

Incarceration

The following chart was built from data published by the Bureau of Justice Statistics in Prisoners3 and Jail Inmates4 for the year 2019.

Discourse on America’s incarceration rate occurs on well trodden ground. Most people are familiar with the statistic that the United States contains about 4.2 percent of the world’s population, while housing around 20 percent of the world’s prisoners.

The chart below displays a snapshot of the incarcerated adult population within the American criminal justice system in 2019. This system consists of state prisons, federal prisons, and local jails. Detailed offense data is included where available.

A common perception is that our prison system is full of people committed due to minor and nonviolent drug offenses. The chart above should dispel this myth. Drug offenses make up a small minority of offenses, and possession alone an even less significant minority. While detailed offense data is not available for federal prisoners, the Bureau of Justice Statistics notes that more than 99% of federal drug offenders were sentenced for trafficking.

Firearms

The following graphs were built by combining multiple data sources. Global civilian gun holdings data was gathered from the Small Arms Survey5 for the year 2017. Global firearm homicide rates were gathered through Wikipedia6 as a secondary source, and cover disjointly the years from 2013 to 2019. State level gun ownership rates were taken from a publication by the RAND Corporation7 for the year 2016. State homicide rates were taken from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program for the year 20198.

I considered not including this section because of the fact that a single authoritative data source does not exist, and there are nuanced and principled disagreements on which data sources are the most accurate. For example, it is agreed that gun registration records are not representative of gun holdings in the United States, as not all states require registration, and in states that do, many guns were manufactured before registration was required. Some data sources, such as the one produced by the Pew Research Center, thusly rely on survey data. The RAND data source used below combines survey data with adjustments that are based on proxy measurements, such as the firearm homicide rate, or subscriptions to Guns & Ammo magazine. While such considerations leave a lot of room for ambiguity, I feel that the following graphs are revealing nonetheless.

The perception being discussed in this section is that there is a strong relationship between gun ownership rates and homicides.

The graph below is a plot of a country’s homicide rates against its firearms per capita. The countries included are those with a score over 0.85 in the Human Development Index for which data was available.

What is readily apparent is that the United States is an outlier in both gun ownership and homicide. But what relationship exists among the other nations? Let’s look at the same graph with the United States removed.

This should demonstrate that no strong relationship between gun ownership and homicide is apparent. Let’s zoom in on the United States, and see what patterns exist at the state level. The graph below is a plot of a state’s homicide rates against its household gun ownership rate. Note: Florida and Arizona are not included as they do not provide data to the Uniform Crime Reporting Program.

A similar pattern, or rather the lack of a pattern, exists at the state level as well.

Education

The following charts were built from data published by the National Center for Education Statistics.9

The perception being discussed in this section is that the funding of public schools by local property taxes are responsible for large scale funding disparities between schools, and in any case that increased funding correlates strongly with educational outcomes.

The following graph shows inflation adjusted revenues for public elementary and secondary schools, from 1919 to 2017.

Here is the same graph but showing the relative contribution by funding source.

The following graph plots reading scores on the PISA assessment against spending per pupil for all countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

While it appears that too little funding hurts outcomes, no relationship is readily visible above the lowest funding levels. In addition, we can see that the United States already spends more than almost all other countries when it comes to public education.

Health Care

Fishing

The following charts were built from data published by the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations.1011

  1. https://www.irs.gov/statistics/soi-tax-stats-individual-statistical-tables-by-tax-rate-and-income-percentile.↩︎

  2. https://www.cbo.gov/publication/57061.↩︎

  3. https://bjs.ojp.gov/library/publications/prisoners-2019.↩︎

  4. https://bjs.ojp.gov/library/publications/jail-inmates-2019.↩︎

  5. https://www.smallarmssurvey.org/database/global-firearms-holdings.↩︎

  6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-related_death_rate.↩︎

  7. https://www.rand.org/pubs/tools/TL354.html↩︎

  8. https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-2019↩︎

  9. https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/2020menu_tables.asp.↩︎

  10. https://www.fao.org/fishery/statistics/en.↩︎

  11. https://www.fao.org/sustainable-development-goals/indicators/1441/en↩︎