Economist Writing Every Day reported that a U.S. survey analysis found respondents reporting hearing difficulty had the same unemployment rate as those reporting no disability and the highest average income among employed disability groups.
Zachary Bartsch's Oct. 23 post used unweighted records from the U.S. Census Bureau's 2024 American Community Survey (ACS), focusing on respondents ages 24 to 45. He omitted the self-care difficulty category because its sample was too small for his calculations. The analysis counted 6,609 records for respondents with hearing difficulty and 885,302 for those reporting no disability; these are sample counts, not population totals.
The Census Bureau's 2024 questionnaire asks whether a person is deaf or has serious difficulty hearing. The National Deaf Center says this functional measure does not establish whether someone identifies as Deaf.
Bartsch's education comparison included only people with a high school diploma or equivalent. His results placed the seeing-difficulty group slightly ahead for doctorate attainment; respondents reporting hearing difficulty led the other disability categories by share at the associate, bachelor's and master's levels. For people with a high school credential or an associate degree, the hearing-difficulty group also had the highest average income, including compared with respondents reporting no disability. At the bachelor's level and above, the no-disability group averaged more, while the hearing-difficulty group remained ahead of the other disability categories.
A separate National Deaf Center dashboard reports that 23.9% of respondents ages 25 to 64 in its deaf/serious-hearing-difficulty category had a bachelor's degree or higher, compared with 39.1% of respondents categorized as hearing. Its age range and comparison groups differ from Bartsch's, so the figures do not directly test his rankings.
Bartsch said the findings were consistent with his earlier research on the U.S. deaf population in the 19th century. He also raised vocational training at schools for deaf students as one possible explanation for the income pattern among people with lower credentials, but did not establish it as a cause.
