Photo: iStockphoto.com
Andrew Beveridge, who does demographic analyses for the Times, has sifted through census data to come up with some trivia on a woefully undertaxonomized (and, some would say, undertaxed) cohort: the city’s idle rich, or, as he calls them in his Gotham Gazette study, “New Yorkers who don’t need to work.” The numbers are impressive. Per Beveridge:
Amount a person needs to earn annually in investment income to be counted as not needing to work: $60,000
Number of people in the tri-state area who “don’t need to work”: 140,000
Median personal income of these people: $191,200
Percentage of them who live in Manhattan: 16
Percentage who live in the suburbs: 40
Percentage who work, anyway, despite not needing to: 25
Percentage who went to college: only 60, surprisingly
The Idle Rich [Gotham Gazette]
