this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2024
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Is this fact/accurate??
Excluding top 1000 drops the average in half??
Definitely a reason to only ever use median instead.
Median is the middle point of the population and has its place when the range doesn't skew too much. I think a good representation of income is by percentages, as in "90% of people make $x,000 or below". This chart had dated (2010) data but its a better representation than I've found elsewhere
Massive skews and tails are why you use median.
Its median is tool for understanding data but it doesn't paint a complete picture and can't be representative without other context. For example, if you have a bimodal distribution, the median doesn't tell you much just how like the average doesn't tell you much. There are other examples like this.
what? the mode is $15k/yr?
Whole lot of wage theft going on.
15-19, yeah. I pegged it a little higher from what I was able to gather, around 23k. Some of that is just how the data is displayed though. Here at 5k it's entirely likely that you're seeing the federal minimum wage outweigh other factors, (7.25*2080=15,080). By fifths and quartiles it can come in a bit higher, but always below the median. And I don't think that gets nearly enough attention.
Thanks. That graph shows the Mode, which skews even lower.
Nah there's no way this is accurate.
For what it's worth, AI models are saying just excluding the top 10 wealthiest Americans actually drops it from 68,700 to around 40,000 based on data from 2020.
Take this with a giant shovel of salt... But it does kind of corroborate the numbers presented.