Memes

It's only that high if you narrow the scope to only full-time and employed for the whole year. This neglects how much (or maybe rather how little) the us values a large proportion of its labor. I didn't check the math on the percentage they gave, but it's at least in the right ballpark from some very rough napkin math- 60% of below median is 30% of total, and if we make a not amazing assumption that the "curve" of earnings is linear, then we can just shift the median by the given 30%, which if you shift up from 47960 you get 68.5k, or if you shift down from 60070 you get 42k.