Last year, I wrote a blog post looking at the most common jobs in each income decile in Ohio, which was inspired by an NPR blog post looking at the most common jobs nationally. I’ve recently been working on another project that had me looking at the most common jobs for low income people in Ohio, so I thought it would be interesting to see how the most common jobs have changed if at all.
Incomes went up
The first thing I noticed when redoing this analysis was that the incomes were higher in 2022 than they were in 2021 across the board. This is a good sign for workers who were faced with rising prices during 2022.
Although there is no one definition of the middle class, if we look at the middle deciles we see that the income boundaries moved up by about $3,000 - $4,000. The increase in incomes seems to be larger for people who previously earned more, suggesting that the economic gains were more strongly concentrated at the top. Low-income workers still saw a wage increase, but theirs was much smaller.
Moderate income mobility within professions remains the norm
In both the 2021 and 2022 data, many of the most common professions appear across multiple income brackets. This is largely because these are the most common occupations, and there are bound to be people earning lots of different salaries within each field, but it tells us that there is room for upward mobility in lots of these occupations as well.
The most relevant example of this is the laborers / freight, stock, and material movers. Many people working in that profession can have incomes ranging from deep poverty all the way up to the upper middle class.
There are some examples of industries that appear to only employ people at extremely low wages. Many consumer-facing service industry workers appear as common employees only in the lowest income brackets. It seems as though people working in these professions would need to change careers in order to achieve upward economic mobility.
The top-earning professions never earn less
One thing that strikes me about the most common jobs in the highest income brackets is that we don’t see them lower down on this list. In other words, there aren’t really many lawyers and doctors who fail to earn in the highest categories.
On the other hand, this means that if you don’t already work in one of these professions it is very unlikely that you will find your way into the highest income brackets. There appears to be a cap on upward mobility right near the high end of what most people would consider upper middle class. To break into the upper class, people need to be working in certain fields.
What occurs to you looking at these data?