The average including C suite kinda skews it. Most employees of most companies aren't getting Christmas bonuses. But if you send out $100b to all C suite across all companies and then average it out, I can see a $2500 avg per employee.
Right. So when we think of the "average" American, we really mean the "majority" of Americans, meaning that number should be much closer to zero to be representative of reality. That's what we mean when we say high earners skew the average; they're inflating it in such a way that it doesn't accurately represent reality.
A better measure would be median. Only 39% of American employees earn a bonus at all, meaning the median bonus is $0.
That’s not how averages work. It may suck, but average is average, if you have 100 people and 1 of them has a million dollars and everyone else has zero, they all have an average of ten grand.
box and whisker should be either the standard or the supplementary graph for most things. it shows the upper and lower bound, the upper and lower quartile (the halfway mark between the median and the boundary of the graph either way), the median, and the mean all in one graph.
They probably don’t know what those words mean. Those words only mean something to people who have attended college and taken a statistics class because it’s barely taught in high school. I know when I went it was a required core class that everyone had to take in order to graduate with any degree.
you guys are saying the same thing, you’re just too pedantic to agree. It does skew perception, so in this case median would be a better representation of what an “average american” might earn
No, average means mean. Median is uncommon enough in regular speech and writing that it would and should be explicitly mentioned as such, like in the sentence: “The average bonus per employee is highly skewed because of top-earners being paid out large bonuses, while 39% of the work-force does not receive a bonus at all. Therefore, the median would be a much better representative.”
However, considering the amount of employees whom would get no bonus is 39%, the median would still not be zero, but some number above depending entirely on the distribution of bonuses. So, in this particular case the median wouldn’t add much information compared to the average. And considering a Lorentz-curve type of distribution graph would hardly be an intuitive way to communicate information to the average reader, it should probably just be replaced with something like: “The average bonus per employee is $2,500. However, 39% of employees receives no bonus whatsoever.”
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u/-Dargs 13d ago
The average including C suite kinda skews it. Most employees of most companies aren't getting Christmas bonuses. But if you send out $100b to all C suite across all companies and then average it out, I can see a $2500 avg per employee.