Yep, thank you very much for releasing the raw data too. I've just been playing with it a little, but here's some interesting factoids I've pulled out so far:

* The only people to mark "Private" as their income had at least a bachelor's degree.

* Out of the responders, the average income for people with a High School education was 58,967.73, some college was 70518.36, and a bachelor's degree was 72603.26 (Note that I removed anyone who marked >1 million as their income, since it skewed things massively).

* The median incomes were HS: 50,000, Some College: 55,000, Bachelor's: 65,000.

I also noticed that several people marked that they made $0 this year, but were not unemployed or students. Would anyone mind clarifying that one?

Good stuff! I think the employed, no income might be startup types who aren't paying themselves (just a guess).

Your assumption is correct (at least for me).

I marked self-employed and $0 because I'm working full-time on my own stuff and have no income. I'm living off of savings. (I actually considered putting -$6000, but decided that would be too weird :)

There were a few people who put a negative number, but the only one I saw when glancing through only put -1 (I would assume that was another joke number).

There are 5 -$1's and a -$15,000, from self-employed, student, or small business mostly. More interesting to me are the number of people (211) making $0<$5,000, reported mostly as unemployed or student. I wonder what the breakdown is among unemployed. How many are discouraged, actively seeking, or even retired?

I didn't do the survey. If I had, I would have said I was "employed" as I'm working on two startups. But have income of zero.

Are these differences statistically significant (according to the data) ?

I hope you'll send me a link to your results. I'm too busy with classes to do much, but I'd love to see some deeper information. I'll be posting my machine learning results in a few weeks as well.

OK