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.