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submitted 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) by ki4jgt@feddit.org to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

The US Census Bureau defines lower class as the lowest 20% of incomes.

Pew defines it as the lowest 2/3 of the median.

If the highest income is $100, 20% is $20.

At 2/3 the median, if the median is $30, lower-class is $20.

Is there a reason they're tying income classes to people within those classes, and not what it costs to survive within the economy?

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[-] AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.world 3 points 5 days ago

For one thing, it maximizes the amount of information the census contains: if you’re splitting a group into bins, the splitting with the lowest entropy is the one with equal-sized bins. If the bin sizes fluctuate with time (as a proportion of the overall population), the amount of information the census captures will vary as well. If your definition of lower-income includes 100% (or 0%) of the population, then assigning someone to a category tells you nothing about them you didn't already know.

this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2026
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