Find Out if You’ll Be Poor With This Economic Risk Calculator
6sqft once presented readers with the Wealthometer, a tool that analyzes your assets to determine where you fall in the distribution of wealth. In today’s society, however, we’re often more concerned about our future status than where we are currently, which is where this economic risk calculator comes in. Created by the New York Times, it addresses anxieties about “widespread economic insecurity and soaring levels of income inequality.”
The not-so-upbeat tool culled data from hundreds of thousands of American case records that began as a study in 1968. It uses a mere four factors — race, education, age, and marital status — to determine the likelihood of one falling below the poverty line in the next five, 10, or 15 years.
The findings from the research are rather glum, underscoring inequality across the country. For example, “the five-year risk of poverty is 5 percent for an American who is 45 to 49, white and married, with an education beyond high school. In contrast, the five-year risk for an individual who is 25 to 29, nonwhite and unmarried, with an education of high school or less is a whopping 72 percent.” It seems that other factors like location, health, and occupation would make the results much more accurate, as would breaking down the current categories more specifically (i.e. Bachelor’s vs. Master’s degree and ethnicity). But nonetheless this is a clever little tool that exemplifies some much larger issues facing America today.
Find out if you’ll be poor here.
[Via NYT]
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