I agree that it's complex. My point was more that to make sense of a complex system, as this certainly is, statistics are an essential tool. As you hint at aver

I agree that it's complex. My point was more that to make sense of a complex system, as this certainly is, statistics are an essential tool. As you hint at averages don't tell the whole story, but they do give a rough overview. Outliers, clusters, standard deviations, etc. make good tools too, unfortunately few people understand how to use them correctly - me included. This is probably why graphs are so common: they convey a lot of information in a way that most people can understand.