• 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 $10 and one person with $1,000,000, the median is $10 whereas the mean is ~$90,000.

    • 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.