Forgive me. The median household income in the United States is $74,580. Medians aren’t skewed by outliers the way that means are; medians just say 50% of households make more than this and 50% make less.
You could remove thousands of households from either side without much change.
Adding weight to this - the median personal income is over $48,000. So removing the top thousand people most assuredly does not reduce average income to the $34,000 range.
I saw a friend of a friend post this and I felt that I showed great personal restrain in not correcting the huge error in the meme... but it wasn't easy, because that meme is very wrong.
ok, then I'll rephrase. Because of the statistical preference for medians, there is no average. the census bureau has reported mean household income by race/ethnicity but not across all households
this doesn't say median, it says average, and I think it is supposed to mean "mean"
no idea if it checks out with the arithmetic mean but it might, given that the top 10 people hold over half of the money in this joke of a country
Posterity because the whole discussion made me think about how the differences between a population's mean and median is a measure of inequality. In my mind you spill one into the other.
I'm not speaking on the meme right now but it's very likely this number is different due to the layoffs from the last 12 months. I would be interested to see it.
I mean it's a good catch that you looked up the thing actually in the meme he was criticizing instead of using a completely different thing like he did.
Memes still probably wrong, but people should not debunk income statements with household income numbers.
