• Crowfiend@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    Using median makes it a loaded statistic skewed in favor of the minority (in this case, the wealthy).

    Over half the country is living paycheck-to-paycheck, so that median number is already in the ‘well-off’ category by default, making them irrelevant to the main point of discussion.

    • FlowVoid@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      You have it backwards. The mean, not the median, is skewed by outliers.

      If there are ten people in a room with $100 and one with $1000, the median is $100 whereas the mean is $200.

    • iknowitwheniseeit@lemmynsfw.com
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      7 months ago

      Is that true? Median is literally taking the value in the middle. So if there are 30 million 70 year olds then it would be picking the 15th millionth person and using their savings.

    • dogslayeggs@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      You might not know what median means (math pun!).

      Averages or Means are skewed by outliers, not the median. The median is just picking the middle number in a list of numbers. There is no skewing possible. If you have 99 people making $1 per year and one person making $1B per year, the median is $1. The average/mean is $1,000,000.99 which is way skewed.