And yet, in spite of all of our advancements, very near to half of our country earns a below average income.

The fact that anybody would find what I just said a motivator to do/say/feel/think anything is sad, unto itself.

Next time somebody calls out sick in your office, offer up the following: "I read a study where fully forty percent(!) of all 'sick days' are either on Mondays or Fridays!" Gauge the reaction and [re-]calibrate your Dunce-o-Meter™ accordingly.

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"Compassionate Conservatism"?!?! That is a stupid phrase. Conservatism is inherently compassionate. It is liberalism that is cruel for the sake of maintaining a constituency.

Do you ever wonder about the limits of use these technologic advancements will have ? Humans are still humans. Technologic advancement has given us more freedoms to communicate. More freedoms in MANY areas.

We're still what we are though. We haven't evolved as quickly as technology itself has. Which makes the original question I asked something to think about. We may be blinding ourselves to some harsh realities with our technologic advancements and a time may COME where we'll be required to pay some dues we owe because we've allowed ourselves to ignore reality by hiding behind our technologic advancements. In otherwords, we can easily allow ourselves to become fat, lazy and apathetic. In this weakened state we're prone to .... ?? Harsh reality ? Ma nature ? We haven't somehow placed ourselves beyond the reach of these things.

yeah, especially when accompanied by pics of such lovely ladies. Jeez can you imagine how much nice soap you could make out of those two ? All you'd need is a 10 gallon bucket of lye .. and of course the willingness to slaughter some cattle.

You know, if you think about it, Impugn, exactly half the country earns a below average income.

The part about calling in sick makes even less sense.

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This land was made for you and me
-Woody Guthrie

The only thing I am motivated to do/say/feel/think by your statement is my god we need to have some basic threshold of intellectual capacity for people to be allowed to vote.


Nah, I would just say, hope you feel better (and if they have a statistically improbable number of "sick" days on Mondays and/or Fridays I would tell them to make sure they bring in a note from their doctor)

It is a simple, unassailable fact that there are three things that are almost always within the complete ability and control of an individual which they can do to virtually eliminate the chances of them living in chronic poverty:
1. Don't have children until you are married
2. Don't get married until you graduate highschool
3. Graduate highschool

If you control the statistics for those factors, sustained poverty is virtually non-existent in this country today. Factor in substance abuse and the poverty rate becomes an asterix.

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"It's a good feeling to shoot a bad guy. Something you democrats would never understand. Americans are homesteaders, we want a safe home, keep the money we make, and shoot bad guys!"

----Denny Crane

Change your board moniker to Captain Obvious. Or Captain Oblivious. Or Captain MakingImpugn'sPoint. All equally suitable.

No, mon frere, "very nearly half" is accurate. "Exactly half" is not. Exactly half is 50%. The percentage of people below average (defined as 50%) is: 0% < x < 50%. This is to say less than 50%. Not equal to 50%.

*EDIT: It's possible for it to be either "exactly" or "nearly" 50%, but neither is absolutely true. Depends, in this case, strictly upon whether the sample amount is odd or even. Meh. Mea culpa. Doesn't change the sentiment that follows...

Aside from the math lesson, my [hopefully obvious] point was that regardless of the aggregate income of any given population - however big or small - by definition, half [or very nearly half] of the people will not be doing as well as everybody else.

Yet, somehow, some people seem upset by the fact that people can be below average. Seem surprised, even.

It's like discussions of IQ. Have you ever heard anybody [accurately] identified as having an IQ of less than 100 - outside the confines of a conversation about mentally retarded people? Probably not. Even the turds on the DummiesUnderground website give GWB credit for being around 120IQ. That's odd, don't you think? By definition, it being an Intelligence Quotient, a score of 100 is exactly average. Very nearly half of our population should be below that score.

Where all the white women, er, I mean, sub-100 IQ people at? They can't all be in Hollywood...oh, wait, I said, "outside the confines of a conversation about mentally retarded people"... Meh, it was a rhetorical question, anyway. No need for you to step forward.

As for my "statistics RE: sick days" blurb...I'll give you another opportunity to make sense of it on your own. Here it is again:

Sometimes this board is just too easy. *sigh*

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"Compassionate Conservatism"?!?! That is a stupid phrase. Conservatism is inherently compassionate. It is liberalism that is cruel for the sake of maintaining a constituency.

A great deal MORE than half our country.

Half the country earns below a MEDIAN income. Which is not the same as average. The average is round by summing all incomes and dividing by the number of people; the median is the income where equal numbers of people make more as make less.

Here's a hypothetical to illustrate the difference and why it matters.

Say you have 10,000 people.

5,000 of those people make $10,000 a year.
2,500 of them make $20,000 a year.
1,250 of them make $30,000 a year.
1,000 of them make $40,000 a year.
200 of them make $50,000 a year.
50 of them make $1,000,000 a year.

The total income of all these people added together is $192,500,000, which means that the average income is $192,500.

Do half the people make less than that? Actually, everyone but that top 50 make less than that, which means that 99.5% make less than the average.

The median -- the point at which as many people make less as make more -- is $10,001 a year. This is a much better indicator of the broad prosperity of the economy than the average, and in this hypothetical it's not pretty.

But in our actual real-world economy, it's even worse.

Thank you for demonstrating once again how dangerous statistics can be in the hands of people that don't understand them.

First of all, no rational person would conclude, based on the data you provided that the average in come is $192,500. That is the medianRather anyone wanting to present a realistic picture would arrive at $23,750 as the average income, with would mean only 75% makes less.

That said, the real-world distribution of incomes is not nearly as bottom-heavy as you presented, and therefore much better:



I think a case could be made for statistic-controls far more than gun control. Statistics in the hands of irresponsible people can lead to more negative impact for a society than guns! *grin*

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"It's a good feeling to shoot a bad guy. Something you democrats would never understand. Americans are homesteaders, we want a safe home, keep the money we make, and shoot bad guys!"

----Denny Crane

You got THAT right.

Lord, you spout off some meaningless numbers to someone that has no idea how to interpret them truthfully

Gad, you can "prove" almost anything doing that. You're not really "proving" though.

No.

You're simply manipulating public opinion

We see a lot of this now days. Hey we can be herded around like sheep by some guy (politician or dishonest academic) quoting statistics in a dishonest way, why NOT ? If we're dumb enough to act like herd animals .....

Well, I'm afraid, Marcus, that what you have demonstrated here is that YOU don't understand them, even in their strictly technical aspects:

I'm sorry, but if by "rational" you mean to include an understanding of mathematics, then any rational person would conclude that $192,500 is exactly the average. The point is that "average" does not mean "typical." It is another word for "mean" (not "median" as you stated). It is calculated exactly as I said, by summing the incomes of all persons and then dividing by the number of persons. Given 100 people, if everyone makes $1,000, or if 99 make nothing and one makes $100,000, the mean or average is still $1,000. This is what makes statements about "average income" so inherently misleading.

The median is $10,001 (although the way I set up the example it could also be $19,999, since nobody makes between 10k and 20k), as I said.

Take another look at my example. It's not bottom-heavy. It's top-heavy. Those top 50 people make almost a third of all the wealth there is to be made.

As for your graph, I'm afraid I can't comment on it in much depth because without a proper legend I can't make any sense of it; for example why are there two bars for each income bracket, and why do the numbers of people, if that's what it is, only go up to 10,000? This needs explaining, along with the full context, before any further comments can be made. If you had provided a link instead of just a picture, I could check these things out for myself, but you didn't.

Here's a little something in regard to our so-called recovery, our economy that the president and the current presumed GOP candidate both say is doing fine:

Income Picture, August 29, 2006

What?

We are being lied to and manipulated?

By whom?

For what purpose?

What are the goals of the liars and manipulators?

I think that you guys are having an argument of arcane semantics and that you both full well understand the concepts at play.

As it were, "average" is a vague term and can colloquially be used to describe means, medians, or modes, though it is most commonly associated with means ("arithmetic mean", technically). I think that in certain discussions/arenas, however, "average" is understood to refer to the median or the mode, depending on context.

It seems a small point.

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"Government big enough to supply everything you need is big enough to take everything you have... The course of history shows that as a government grows, liberty decreases."

-Thomas Jefferson

FWIW, I fully understood both jokes

One of my favorite ways to think of this was always to imagine the results if you ask a classroom full of parents to raise their hands if they thought their child's intelligence was above the class's median intelligence and watch as 90+% of the hands went up. It seems that a lot of education, particularly elementary education, plays a shell game these days to convince parents that 100% of the children are smarter than the median. This is done with a whole bevvy of new disorders, conditions, and learning strategies... but, I digress.

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"Government big enough to supply everything you need is big enough to take everything you have... The course of history shows that as a government grows, liberty decreases."

-Thomas Jefferson

Some interesting posts.

While I enjoyed the OP, it is not a good example of how many Americans are hurting financially. Many Americans who actually work are having a tough time making ends meet. Sure, some of these people have no one to blame but themselves, as many have bought cars, homes, clothing, jewelry, etc, that they can't afford, but for many others, they are responsible people who are just having a tough time trying to keep up with inflation and stagnant/declining real wages.

As to statistics, the government has become the king of manipulated numbers...........

Washington Manipulation of GDP Data to Hide Recessions

US in Recession Despite Manipulated Employment and Inflation Statistics :: The Market Oracle :: Financial Markets Analysis & Forecasting Free Website

Washington Manipulation of GDP Data to Hide Recessions :: The Market Oracle :: Financial Markets Analysis & Forecasting Free Website

US in Recession Despite Manipulated Employment and Inflation Statistics « Dissent Mag

Does the Government Manipulate Economic Data? at Emac’s Stock Watch | Fox Business

A REALLY GOOD ARTICLE

Hard numbers: The economy is worse than you know - St. Petersburg Times

Since the 1980s, Washington has changed and manipulated the way it measures almost every major economic stat — inflation, GDP, unemployment, even money supply — to fit its own political agenda.

John Williams ( Shadow Government Statistics - Home Page ) is a real number cruncher, and he has exposed this deception by continuing to measure those key numbers the same way the government used to, using the same metrics the government used to swear by!

You think we're NOT ?

"Whom" are we talking about ?

Or rather "Whom(s)" ?

If you're unaware of who the manipulators and who the manipulated ARE ...

... you've been well manipulated.

Or, you're a manipulator playing games with those of us who see right through you

There's your opportunity to dismiss what I'm saying as "crazy paranoia."

For "what purpose" indeed. What purpose do you think ?

As if it isn't obvious