(We Chinese in America Media Editor Tang Zhao, January 21, 2022) Students at Penn's Wharton School generally overestimate the average annual American salary. What is the average annual salary of the average American? Nina Strohminger, a professor of legal studies and business ethics at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, pointed out that when students were asked this question, 25 percent said the average American annual salary should be more than six figures. One student even answered "$800,000, but the actual figure was around $45,000. Regarding the gap between the students' understanding and the real situation, she tweeted: "I really don't know how to look at it."

Nina Strohminge wrote on Twitter on the 19th that Wharton students generally overestimate the annual salary of the average American, which has been warmly echoed by netizens and has become a hot topic on Twitter. Nina Strohminge’s tweet received more than 9,600 comments, and more than 210,000 netizens liked it. Stefanie Stantcheva, an economics professor at Harvard University, responded: "Low-income people think that everyone else is low-income, and rich people think that everyone else is rich."

In an interview with The Washington Post, Ken Jacobs, director of the Center for Labor Research and Education at the University of California-Berkeley, said that when estimating the finances of the general population, many People usually think in terms of closeness to their own experience, not based on reality.

Jacobs: "The idea that a salary of 200,000 or 100,000 is considered a normal salary is very strange, because such a figure is so overestimated."

The Washington Post reported that the Wharton School’s annual tuition is about $80,000, and the average annual income of local residents in the western part of Philadelphia, where the school is located, is about 34,000 yuan.

According to the Social Security Administration (SSA), the average annual salary of Americans was $53,383 last year, and the median annual salary was $34,612.

Statistics from the Department of Labor show that the median weekly wage for U.S. workers in the fourth quarter of 2021 was $1,010, which is roughly equivalent to an annual salary of $52,520.

The Washington Post analyzed how the middle-class should be defined in the United States. In recent years, it has been hotly debated by public opinion. The vast majority of people consider themselves middle-class, but many people cannot tell how the middle-class is defined.

The Washington Post reported in 2017 that middle-class households earn between $35,000 and $122,500 a year. The report said that an annual salary of $100,000 is still classified as a middle class, but it is already very extreme, "75% of American households have an annual income below this level.”

The picture is a schematic diagram. (Pexels)

(Source: Compiled from Online Information)