Where Does the Top 1% Really Work?

Shannon Stapleton / Reuters
Dashiell Bennett 15,164 Views Oct 24, 2011

If the Occupy Wall Street protests are aiming to take down the "1 percent" of Americans who control the increasingly largest chunk of our nation's wealth, perhaps they need to redirect their efforts to somewhere other than Wall Street.

According to Nicole Lapin of CNN, financial services professionals make up just 14 percent of that top 1 percent of wage earners. Their average salary of $311,000 per year, while quite gaudy, falls just below the threshold needed to break into the highest-earning subset.

The biggest single group of professionals in the top one percent is actually doctors, who make up 16 percent of that subset. That must have made things awkward yesterday when doctors and nurses joined the masses in Zuccotti Park to call for more health care reform. (Executives and managers outside of finance make up 31% of the total, but Lapin didn't break them down by industry.)

David Carr of The New York Times would also like to offer up his bosses as targets for the mass uprising, pointing out in his column today that media executives are some of the worst offenders when it comes to CEOs who reap multi-million dollar bonuses and golden parachutes by slashing budgets and laying off rank-and-file workers. Go ahead and add them to the list.

So those who want to direct their anger at the winners in the income inequality sweepstakes might want to look beyond the lower of half of Manhattan. There's plenty of other folks closer to home that you might want to have a word with.

Want to add to this story? Let us know in comments or send an email to the author at dbennett at theatlantic dot com. You can share ideas for stories on the Open Wire.

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