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Tuesday, October 23rd, 2012
| Time | Event |
| 9:10a | Income For Young, Middle-Aged And Elderly Americans, In Two Graphs Income For Young, Middle-Aged And Elderly Americans, In Two Graphs<input ... ></input> <input ... ></input> <input ... ></input>We've done a bunch of posts about household income and spending in America, and we've often sliced things based on the familiar divisions of rich, middle class, and poor. But there's another, useful variable to consider: Age. 
The households of middle-aged people earn about $20,000 more each year, on average, than households of people in their late 20s and early 30s. And they earn roughly $30,000 more than people age 65 and over (note that this difference includes income from Social Security and retirement). 
None of this is terribly surprising — income over the life cycle is a curve, and it peaks when people are in their late 40s and early 50s. Still, it's useful to recall that when we talk about average household income for the nation as a whole, we're lumping in lots of disparate households. A 24-year-old who makes $27,000 a year is in a much different position than a 45-year-old making the same amount. A few notes on the data: * All numbers represent pre-tax income. * Income earned through work includes both money people earned on their full-time job and freelance income. * Government assistance and benefits includes unemployment compensation, food stamps and veterans' benefits, among other things. * "Other" includes financial support from others as well as rental and property income. * The data come the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Here's the spreadsheet. Copyright 2012 National Public Radio. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/. 9()) |
| 3:53p | Episode 412: How To Fix The Patent Mess Episode 412: How To Fix The Patent Mess<input ... ></input> <input ... ></input> <input ... ></input>Two big patent cases this summer in the smartphone industry: 1. A jury finds that Samsung violated Apple's patents, and orders Samsung to pay Apple $1 billion. 2. A judge throws out a case between Apple and Motorola (now owned by Google). The judge goes on to write an article in the Atlantic arguing that there are too many patents in America, and lots of industries could probably get along fine with no patents at all. These radically different rulings were just the latest reminder that the world of software patents is a mess. Big companies that should be focused on inventing the next great thing are instead spending billions of dollars buying up patents and suing each other. Small companies have to worry that someone with some random patent is going to sue them and shut them down. On today's show, we talk with Mark Lemley, who has some ideas for fixing the patent mess. Lemley is a professor at Stanford law school and an expert on software patents. Lemley also works for clients in the private sector, including Google. For More: See When Patents Attack, our big patent story from last year, and The Case Against Patents, a paper by the St. Louis Fed. Download the Planet Money iPhone App. Music: Fillagar's "Guilty Good Intentions." Find us: Twitter/ Facebook/ Spotify/ Tumblr. Copyright 2012 National Public Radio. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/. 9()) |
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