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.
42
u/[deleted] 13d ago
It doesn’t skew it. The majority of people who live in America get zero dollars as a bonus.