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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
by bloppe 7mo ago
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-time-by-income-group-usa-1979-2023/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/growth-in-real-wages-over-t...
- willis936 7mo agoMedian 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.
- bloppe 7mo agohttps://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CXU900000LB0102M https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CXU900000LB0102M (47% increase since 2021) https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CXU900000LB0103M https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CXU900000LB0103M (26%) https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CXU900000LB0104M https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CXU900000LB0104M (23%) https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CXU900000LB0105M https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CXU900000LB0105M (22%) https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CXU900000LB0106M 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.
- croon 7mo agoThere'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-home-prices-1985-2025/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/charted-american-income-vs-...