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0 pointsbloppe3d ago0 comments

Actually, median is exactly what you want. It strips out outliers. It's the "middle of the pack" person. Mean is the one that would be skewed by outliers.

And "the poor are getting poorer" is simply untrue for the last 10 years. They had a pretty bad time from 1980 - 2015, but in the last 10 years, their real income has risen faster than any other quintile: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/growth-in-real-wages-over-t...

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willis9363d ago

Median says very little about distribution and says almost nothing about how the tails are doing (which are real people that are easily ignored).

That page breaks about a second after loading. It's enough time to see the graphic, but not enough to see the methodology for data collection. Can you share how that data is collected? Afaik government sources do not track real income distribution.

bloppeOP3d ago

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CXU900000LB0102M (47% increase since 2021)

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CXU900000LB0103M (26%)

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CXU900000LB0104M (23%)

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CXU900000LB0105M (22%)

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CXU900000LB0106M (17%)

Yes, the bottom quintile has a lot more variance, but the argument that the poor are being left behind has been really hard to make for the last 5 years. Coupled with high inflation, which erodes the savings of the rich, they're actually getting a bigger slice of the overall pie.

croon2d ago

There's a case to be made for "real wages" not capturing what they're meant to capture though, at least if you look at housing [1].

And this isn't even considering the productivity growth over time having a widely asymmetrical distribution, ie not captured by the median person.

[1] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/charted-american-income-vs-...

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