Alex Tabarrok has challenged the validity of my conclusion that tort lawyers' effective hourly rates have increased by more than 1,000 percent in real terms in the 1960–2002 period. Using data for the median income of all lawyers in 2002 ($90,290) and the mean income of “deans, lawyers and judges” in 1960, Tabarrok concludes that “real income for lawyers has increased by only 59 percent since 1960.” On its face, this claimed increase of less than 1 percent a year in real terms flies in the face of data about real increases in tort claim values and the volume of tort litigation.

A close analysis of Tabarrok's methodology shows why he went so far off the track. First, he uses median rather than mean income. The imprecision this imports is illustrated by income data compiled by the 2000 U.S. Census, which shows that the mean income for lawyers in 1999 was nearly 50 percent more than the median. This probably understates the disparity between the mean and the median because a segment of tort lawyers' annual incomes are in the multimillion-dollar range – many multiples of the median income level.