Most Similiar Income Distributions to New York

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Most Similiar Income Distributions to New York

The Census bureau breaks down household income into 15 different ranges, e.g. Less than $10,000, $10,000 to $14,999.  You can then convert them into percentages to get an income distributions. Then you can use distance formula to calculate the distance between distributions to see how similar income distributions are.
 
New York State's income distribution is most similar to California, Virginia, Illinois, Connecticut and Rhode Island. If you looked at just median income, and not the individual income classes, you would see states that are most similar would be Rhode Island, Delaware, Minnesota, Illinois and Utah. This is misleading, as under emphasizes the poverty and very wealthy parts of the big states.