David Brooks' 100K statistic explained

If you follow this sort of thing, you may recall that a few weeks ago, David Brooks claimed that "Over the last 10 years, 60 percent of Americans made more than $100,000 in at least one of those years, and 40 percent had incomes that high for at least three." based on research by Stephen J. Rose. It was one of those statistics that just looks wrong and it turns it was, though the fault seems to lie mainly with Rose's less-than-clear prose and his algorithm for calculating adjusted household income for individuals (an individual living alone could make considerably less than six figures and still have an adjusted household income of 100K).

Andrew Sprung (who was on this from the beginning) has the details:

I should not have cast my inference that Brooks was misquoting Rose as a near-certainty without being able to verify it. Literally, there was no misquote -- or rather a minor one, converting Rose's "fully 60 percent of adults had at least one year in which their incomes were at least $100,000" to a more active verb formulation: "Over the last 10 years, 60 percent of Americans made more than $100,000." Brooks' re-cast also edits out a ghost of pronoun slippage in Rose's studiedly vague formulation: "adults" had years in which "their" incomes were over $100k. While "their" grammatically agrees with "adults," keeping both in the plural somehow highlights the elision by which household income (the term Rose uses in earlier writings citing similar statistics) becomes the income enjoyed by the individuals in the household.

(h/t to Brad DeLong)