A piece of neo-communist propaganda is making the rounds:
Unsurprisingly, many people just believe what it says without any criticism or any doubt, even though it's just a random picture created by a random anonymous person making random claims, providing absolutely no sources. (This is, in fact, a rather interesting psychological phenomenon: Why do so many people tend to believe such unsubstantiated claims made by completely anonymous faceless individuals who don't even cite any sources? Are people really this incapable of critical thinking and skepticism?)
Also very unsurprisingly, those numbers are completely meaningless and are not even close to anything resembling the real world.
Did the author of the picture just slap some random numbers on it from the top of is head, or did he actually do some calculations? Perhaps a bit surprisingly, whenever there are these types of claims (particularly when they are politically motivated), the numbers are often the result of some calculations rather than just being completely made-up on the spot.
However, unsurprisingly, the calculations are completely wrong. The YouTube channel Math The World did some digging and investigation on how the author might have gotten those numbers.
If you do the actual calculation using the known yearly incomes of the top richest people, the median income drops by just a few dollars by excluding those.
Turns out that when you apply several egregious mistakes in your calculations, you get something approaching those values.
For starters, that "average income in the United States" is not the arithmetic mean of the incomes (which is what people most usually refer to when they say "average"), but the median income, which is quite different. The picture also doesn't specify whether that's individual income or household income (again, quite different numbers).
Also, quite egregiously, in order to come up with those numbers the author had to calculate the total income of the entire country and did so by multiplying that median income by the number of people in the United States. This does not give you the total income. It gives a completely meaningless number. You don't get the total sum of all samples by multiplying their median by the number of samples. What you get is a completely meaningless number. (This does work with the arithmetic mean: Indeed, if you multiply the mean of all the samples by the number of samples, you get the total sum of all the samples. However, this doesn't work with the median.)
But, as Math The World calculates, even if you do this, ie. use the incorrectly calculated total income of the country, you get slightly closer to the numbers in the picture, but still nowhere even near. (Using this wrongly calculated value the average income drops by about a hundred dollars when dropping the top 1000 richest people. Nowhere even near the 40 thousand dollars.)
Turns out that the author of the picture most likely didn't use the income (which is how much you earn in one year, after taxes) of the top 1000 richest people, but their net worth, which is a completely different thing, and has nothing to do with your income. In fact, the yearly income of the top 1000 people in the country is not public knowledge (with only a couple of exceptions.)
Indeed, the two things are completely unrelated. You could have a yearly income of 10 thousand dollars and a net worth of almost 0 dollars (which may well be the case if you eg. live in a rental apartment where you don't own almost anything, and you spend every penny of what you earn). Or if your income is 10 thousands dollars and you are a huge penny-pincher and hoarder, who has been hoarding stuff for decades, your net worth could be hundreds of thousands of dollars. But that's just because your net worth is the value of everything you own. It's completely unrelated and independent of your yearly income.
In other words, what the author of the picture most probably did was to take the net worth of the top 1000 people in the country and equated that to their "income" (which is just what you earn in one year, after taxes.)
And... even then you get closer to those values but still not quite there. Even equating net worth to income (which is completely wrong), we are still not there. The drop in "average income" is still not that big as claimed in the picture.
What Math The World hypothesizes is that the author of the picture took the total lifetime sum of net worth of those 1000 top people, not their current net worth, added it all up, and equated that to their yearly income. Which, of course, are two completely different things.
He is calculating the average yearly income of individuals (or households, it's not clear) using the wrong way to get total sum of incomes, and equating the lifetime total net worth of the richest people as their "yearly income", and coming up with those numbers. He is comparing completely unrelated things to each other, and using the wrong formulas to calculate using them.
As the YouTube channel points out, in actual reality if we excluded the top 1000 richest people in the country, the median household income of the country would drop just by a few dollars or so. It would make absolutely no difference.
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