@ John Wright
My point, (which I obviously didn't make very clearly), is precisely that using the "median" conveys to readers that "its about it in middle." Dean points out that its a better measure of "central tendency" than the average because the distribution is so skewed and I agree with that. I suggest mode is even better because its the "most common value" and may more closely reflect the reality of the situation for more people than either the mean or the median because of the nature of the underlying distribution. My assumption is that most casual readers interpret these numbers from what they know about a "normal distribution" with a large grouping around the middle (2/3 within one std. dev. from the mean) and smaller portions as you get further from the mean. My point is that the wealth distribution in the country looks nothing like that, and using these statistics masks what's going on.
We have a wealth Gini coefficient of .87 in this country, (.92 when you exclude single family home wealth). This is very typical for a banana republic. A good way to interpret this is that 87% of the area under the curve between equal division of wealth, and one person owning everything, is gone. The scale is from 0 (equal distribution of wealth) to 1.0 (one single person owning everything). We are .13 (or .08 if you don't count single family homes) away from a single person (actually family) owing everything in a country of 320+ million people. It seems quite odd to me that, in a country with $67 trillion dollars of wealth, we are discussing whether a retired person who is "about in the middle for people of that age," would be able to get by in their retirement with a "nest egg" of $170,000, and never questioning why, in the richest country in the world, the people in the middle have so little wealth (and this at age where their wealth usually is at its peak). Look again at the ranges in my original post. We are arguing over the change in the register because the vault has been emptied.
My point is that using these "central tendency" statistics with such a skewed distribution obscures this reality; a reality that we should really be talking about. You said you're an engineer. Would you use the median or mean strength value to design a structural member or would you be more concerned about the "lower tail of the distribution"? Means and medians have their purpose, describing the wealth distributions in this country just doesn't happen to be one of them. - Perplexed
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