That’ll be Why the Median is Barely Over 40

That can't be right though... 1000 people isn't nearly enough to drag the average income down 5k BELOW the median income in a nation of over 300 million. It should still be higher due to the long tail on the high side of incomes.

Proof: Average income in top 1% is 819k https://www.unbiased.com/discover/banking/how-much-income-puts-you-in-the-top-1-5-or-10#:~:text=To%20be%20in%20the%20top%201%25%20of%20earners%2C%20you',earn%20an%20average%20of%20%243%2C312%2C693.

Solve the weighted average:

819 * 0.01 + x*0.99 = 74.5

Where x is the remaining average. X≈66.3k, and that's excluding the ENTIRE 1% which is over a MILLION people at least, depending on how you count it. America is big.

I guess the lesson here is don't trust unsourced factual claims in political memes because they are probably just made up
- Anime girls will never lie to you.
- You mean information on an obvious anti-US propaganda community might not be particularly high quality?
- 86% of statistics quoted on the internet are made up.
- Yep. And never trust information embedded in a jpeg if it doesn't include a source!
Yeah, these numbers don't make sense.
To explain the first panel alone, by removing the top ten earners from the data set, you'd move the median to.the lower end by 5 "slots". I'm confident that there are more than 100 people in the USA who make between $65k and $75k (I know at least 25).
If they mean the average/mean, that still doesn't add up. Assuming that the US population is about 350 million and that 350,000,000 - 10 ~= 350 million.
NGL, formatting the equations and walking then out step by step is a pain, esp on mobile, but the answer I came to is by multiplying the difference in mean values (~$10,000) by the US Population (350 million), which yields $300,000,000,000 or about 10 billion per person once evenly distributed.
Elon Musk (2nd richest man in the world at time of writing) has a net worth of less than $5 billion rn, but the numbers here imply that the top earners in the US made at least 60x that amount.
TL;DR: I'mma need some sources on this.
Edit: on my app (Voyager/Wefwef) I can't save draft comments to go look at the meme while commenting, so definitely have some things off from.what the meme was saying, but they're close enough I'm leaving as it.
Also, spelling/grammar
- Your slot argument only makes sense for median, when the picture is about means. I still think it's off though.
- Is that supposed to be a net annual income for Elon rather than a net worth? His net worth 270 billion.
But I think this is only about wages right? It doesn’t take into account growth in net worth based on shares, does it?
Exactly my first thoughts but then I remembered it's Lemmy. These morons operate on the "trust me, bro" system 🤣
- Given the comments in this very thread, that doesn't appear to be accurate. I only opened this thread because I suspected inaccurate data.
You might be underestimating the wealth of the top 10.

This is also why the publiclly discussed focus is on household income, which is mostly two incomes. Prior to the 80s single income housholds were the majority.

Maybe more than 2 when you add in the children!
- I always assumed in the US "household income" went off tax filings, so it would only be individuals, or married filing jointly

Remember kids, always account for outliers in your datasets and also eat the rich.

Or don't. Worst kind of food poisoning. Bioreactors are safer.

The rich are consolidating the market and republicans are too busy incorrectly blaming Joe Biden who is trying to support labor by implementing safety measures and holding businesses accountable.

You say this as if it's accidental
- It’s only accidental when the poor and uneducated republicans do it

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.
- what? the mode is $15k/yr?
- Thanks. That graph shows the Mode, which skews even lower.
Nah there's no way this is accurate.
Median simply eliminates outliers. If the picture is true, the median should be around 35k
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.

For the second frame of this to be true, assuming 157 million working Americans, each of the top 10 earners would be making over $150 billion a year on average. This amount is close to the net worth of the world's richest people, and couldn't possibly be their annual income.

edit: fixed error

What? The world's richest people are not in the 1,5 billion dollars range. They are in the 200-100 billion dollars. And it would be surprising if they didn't earn 150 million just from owning this amount of wealth each year.
- Sorry, I meant to write $150 billion a year, not $150 million.

Makes sense 36,000. 8K goes to taxes. End up with 28,000 for my entire life for a year. And I work very hard

5k if you're single. 3.5k if you're married. In PA at least. Not sure where you live but your numbers seem extreme.

I see lots of people are pointing out that these numbers don't make sense. Here are some of my thoughts.

I'm not an economist so I'm probably making some very basic mistakes but...

GDP per capita is $76.3k [Google] Average household size 2.6. [Google] So GDP per household is $198.4k [Calculator]

That is the mean productivity per household.

But the median income per household is $75k [Google]

So what happens to the $123.4k of productivity (198.4k-75k) per household that isn't paid to workers? It's in the outliers and is asset appreciation isn't it?

very disinfectant mistakes
I'm staring at this trying to figure out if autocorrect did you wrong and if it did, what was it originally
PS: A very disinfectant mistake
- Mt dew in the cup on the right. Windex in the cup on the left. They used different amounts of ice to balance the colors.
- Yeah I had to replace my phone's screen and the digitizer has never been the same. I've corrected it to something sensible, I'm not sure what my original word choice was though.
Dont know if i dont get the sarcasm. But why are you using the household size? Why is everybody in the household working fulltime? I would think the >2 household are the kids :D
- I used median household income to account for the fact that not every person in a household is earning. I wasn't confident that median individual earnings would include people that aren't earning.

Guys, stop trying to figure out the average. You guys should look for the mode (the most common income, not all income added and divided).

Edit: If anyone has the mode for american income, I'd love to hear it. I can't find it. Just the median and average.

the mode is probably 0.
e.g. there are plenty of people with exactly 0 income. there are few people with exactly another income.
- Yup, Wikipedia says all exponential distributions have mode 0
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exponential_distribution
- It might work a bit better if incomes were bucketed into 5k brackets before taking the mode. From there, I guess you can take the mean or median of all the incomes that comprise the bucket?
- That's not helpful though.
Got this from a thread further up. This seems to indicate that the national Mode is $15k - $20k
Isn't this different for each state?
- Yes. That's another good thing to get into. If you have the resources, please do everything you can to bring wealth inequality into the limelite.

Which is why it’s vital to know the pitfalls of statistics.

Averages aren’t a baseline, and understanding the data’s intricacies is pivotal to good stats.

Anytime there’s generalizations, especially as they grow in size, you’re discounting the little guy, and the devil is in the details.

Sauce?

https://www.statista.com/statistics/203183/percentage-distribution-of-household-income-in-the-us/
Keep in mind that household income really means 2 income sources, not average American income
- Thats not the source of any of the stats in the meme though? There's no way the average income outside of the top 1000 is that low. Heck, that's not even a large proportion of "the 1%"

This why statistics are so frustrating you can make them say anything.

Well, not anything... It's pretty recognized that in most cases, median provides a more realistic and representative measure than average for this very reason (outliers).
- The median is an average. It's less susceptible to skew than the mean, the most commonly used average.
- median provides a more realistic and representative measure than average for this very reason (outliers).
  Must be a hell of a lot of people earning SO much less than the median wage if the average wage excluding only 1000 out of ~335m is already significantly lower..
- The average annual salary in Canada in 2021 was $59,300
  The median income in Canada is $68,400, after taxes, according to Statistics Canada's income survey (2021)
  Huh.. seems backwards in Canada's case....
I lament statements like this because I work with statistics and you can't just make them say anything. I hate that people use this to dismiss real facts.
You always have to look at the distribution, which is hard to do well. Simple statistics and averages hide so much detail, it's often ineptitude more than outright deceit.
This is why words are so frustrating, you can make them say anything.
- This is why saying is so wordy, because you can anything make you want

This, ladies, gentlemen, & all other variadic param[] of polymorphic gender identifier: average is just about useless when your income distribution is skewed to hell.

The following elaboration of 'skewed to hell' brought to you by our grammatical sponsor(s) who felt a single sentence would be asking a bit much:

skewed to hell:
much like a contemporary Big Box Home Improvement™ 2x4^†,
even after you have laboriously picked through the entire 2 pallets of this week's pathetic delivery of stock,
each one weighing as much as an Olympic bar (~45 pounds for the metric challenged),
overladen with pumped-up moisture content,
with employees giving you the stink-eye because their boss is the assistant viceroy to the vice-supervisor II who reports 'directly' to the district junior manager of "end-cap yo' ass from on high I crave the retail facing',
trying in vain to select the most choice and optimal specimens,
still ending up not being able to see anything but sap, knots, and disappointment as you look down the length,
as you strain to assess its deviation from a long-lost baseline against the fluorescent lights,
activating your ADHD superpowers,
contemplating economic and environmental policy failures of multiple decades,
questioning your life choices,
ultimately defending a clumsy attack on your sensibilities by the special human who parked blocking the store entrance and hotdog stand because it can't be arsed to use a parking spot and would not be qualified to park in the 'pro contractor' area anyway as judged by peers

Regardless, the income distribution is about as normal, perky, and bell-shaped as a Petunia in Death Valley.

^† Note: 2x4 is given in nominal measurements, not actual dimensions - do your research

You ok? Just getting home from Lowes?
Here's a tip for you: find a real lumberyard.
- That was like reading a Dr. Bronner's shampoo bottle
ADHD superpowers? My ADHD superpower is staying up (against my will) for 2 days straight half-alive before an important event, but not being able to stay awake past 3 pm when I need to be somewhere at 5 pm. And any amount of sleep/napping below 7 hours somehow making me more tired than I was before

Oh yeah? what happens if you exclude the bottom 1,000? 😏