Quote:
Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield
If the median Trump voter is at the national average, we can safely assume that Trump voters are not affluent.
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Translation: I do not understand math.
ETA: Apparently I'm avoiding work again, so let's play with very basic statistics.
Here's a set of data with a median income of 72:
1, 3, 4, 5, 72, 347, 774, 852, 982
Can we say that 72 is typical of incomes in this group? No. Can we say that the typical person in this group is not affluent? No. Can we say that in general, people in this group are struggling? No.
Of course, this set is not likely to reflect the real world, but it illustrates what you can and cannot say about a group based on the median.
Here's another set of data with a mean, or arithmetic average, of 72:
0, 0, 0, 144, 144, 144
Can we say that 72 is typical of incomes in this group? No. Can we say that the typical person in this group is not affluent? No. Can we say that in general, people in this group are struggling? No.
Now, we could say that assuming a normal distribution of incomes, an income of 72 is typical of the group, except that we know that incomes are not normally distributed, especially on the high end.
Here's another set of data, this time with a mode of 72:
0, 1, 3, 7, 72, 72, 72, 72, 72, 72, 747, 894, 999
This is what you're looking for if you'd like to generalize about what's typical in a set of data we know is far from normally distributed.
Anyway, again, the Trump voter median income is about 40% greater than overall median income, which tells us that the set of Trump voters is, overall, significantly more affluent than the generally population. It either contains a lot more higher incomes or a lot fewer lower incomes (someone else posted data suggesting it's the latter, btw, a fact your could have used in your favor if you weren't busy arguing in favor of your straw man and against the observation that the poorest didn't support Trump).
If you want to compare that information to the overall mean income, you're going to need the mean income of Trump voters. The fact that the median income is higher than overall median may suggest that the mean is also higher than overall, but we don't know that for sure because we don't have any information about the distribution of incomes within the sample.
Okay, that was a waste of time.
