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Median household income seems like a pretty bullshit metric when talking about parts of the country where it's not uncommon for multi-million dollar ridgetop ma
by forgetfreeman 3y ago
Median household income seems like a pretty bullshit metric when talking about parts of the country where it's not uncommon for multi-million dollar ridgetop mansions to coexist with gross poverty. All of the high elevation country I've visited (disregarding obvious outliers like Denver and the front range) had a few things in common: very wealthy people enjoyed having homes there and the rest of the locals were dirt poor with no obvious opportunities for social or economic advancement.
- incangold 3y agoThis is so important and I notice studies missing it all the time. Tragedy and desperation mostly kick in at the bottom of the distribution, especially in the US where median income is in most places not completely awful. So controlling for the bottom 20th percentile or something makes way more sense.
- CaptainNegative 3y agoWhy is this a bad case for using the median, which is normally pretty resilient to influence from outliers?
- wnoise 3y agoBecause the variance (or any other measure of spread) is a useful explanatory variable that is ignored and left on the floor. Switching from mean to median, while more "robust" doesn't actually capture something new, just something old slightly better.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]