• Maggoty@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    A. You don’t know how medians work. In a set of [1,1,1,1,5,8,9,9,9] 5 is the median. But you wouldn’t say that’s representative of the average worker. You’re looking for the mode. Which would be 1 in that data set.

    B. .8 percent is not the hot news you’re looking for.

    • iopq@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      5 is more representative than the mode, since it does show that about half make more and half made less

      1 is ignoring the rest of the data completely

      • Maggoty@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        If this was a representative sample the ones would have rebelled already. This is a teaching example.

        • iopq@lemmy.world
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          7 months ago

          Not really, if the 1 is $100,000, should they feel worse than the $500,000 and above?

            • iopq@lemmy.world
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              7 months ago

              Yes, but my point is not everyone should be equal, everyone should have enough money to live

              Those are very different goals

              • Maggoty@lemmy.world
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                7 months ago

                Did I say we should make everyone live on the exact same income?

                For giggles though if we distributed our GDP equally it would be about 106,000 after the government budget is taken out. And that’s without accounting for not having to pay Medicaid/SSI/SSDI/etc… anymore.