Owning an iPhone is the Number-One Way To Guess if You're Rich or Not, Research Finds (businessinsider.com)

An anonymous reader shares a report: In the United States, if you have an Apple iPhone or iPad, it's a strong sign that you make a lot of money. That's one of the takeaways from a new National Bureau of Economic Research working paper from University of Chicago economists Marianne Bertrand and Emir Kamenica. "Across all years in our data, no individual brand is as predictive of being high-income as owning an Apple iPhone in 2016," the researchers wrote. There are details and caveats to the research, but the economists found that owning an iPhone gave them a 69% chance to correctly infer that the owner was "high-income," which they defined as being in the top quartile of income for households of that type -- like single adult or couple with dependents, for example.

Comments

no individual brand is as predictive... yeah

[gyepi]

"no individual brand is as predictive of being high-income as owning an Apple iPhone in 2016,"

Seriously? Owning a Bentley is a worse predictor of being high-income than owning an Apple iPhone? Are we sure there are no further qualifications here?

Re:no individual brand is as predictive... yeah

[The Evil Atheist]

They defined high-income as in the top quartile. That's a lot of 'tile. Sure, owning a Bentley may predict higher incomes, but no use for predicting for top quartile.

Re:no individual brand is as predictive... yeah

[ShanghaiBill]

Seriously? Owning a Bentley is a worse predictor of being high-income than owning an Apple iPhone?

Yes. I know plenty of people in the top quartile, and none of them own Bentleys.

If you want to determine if a randomly selected person is in the top 25% by income, asking if they own a Bentley would be a very poor discriminator.

Top quartile cutoff is $78k. If your household income is above that you are "rich" according to TFA.

Disclaimer: I am top quartile. I own an iPhone 6 refurb. I do not have a Bentley.

so pay attention slashdotters

[nimbius]

If you're shopping online with your user agent set as
Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 6_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/536.26 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/6.0 Mobile/10A5376e Safari/8536.25
You might pay more than someone coming from Firefox or Chrome. This wont impact IE or Edge users as they prefer to shop in person for the most flavorful brand of crayon.

Re:Image over function

[ShanghaiBill]

It seems to me that owning an iPhone shows that you are more concerned about image over function/capability.

This isn't 2007. Nobody is impressed by an iPhone.

Re:Owning a luxury car (or jet/yatch) is even bett

[Gavagai80]

Both iphones and Ferraris sometimes only predict that your parents are high income.

Re:Owning a luxury car (or jet/yatch) is even bett

[NoNonAlphaCharsHere]

Ferraris, feh. Owning a senator is how to tell if you're rich or not.

Re:Owning a luxury car (or jet/yatch) is even bett

[nospam007]

Owning a Ferrari is a sign that you are going bald and have a small dick.
It has been that forever.

Re:Owning a luxury car (or jet/yatch) is even bett

[Immerman]

They're talking about wealth - not income. And thanks to the low class mobility in the U.S., the number one way to become rich is to be born to rich parents.

Re:Owning a luxury car (or jet/yatch) is even bett

[EvilSS]

Owning a Ferrari is a sign that you are going bald and have a small dick. It has been that forever.

Can confirm: Thick hair, big dick, no Ferrari.