Re: Two Types of Distributions Found In Nature

Huh?

It's nothing short of amazing how many sheeple will, upon no basis whatsoever, parrot the nonsense that average mean income is a meaningless number.

I've seen that on previous posts on this issue.

How is the oligarchy doing it?

Don't confuse the rightards.

Bret Cahill

If you don't want to discuss a quantity, just declare it meaningless.

Bret Cahill

I like so we are now going to discuss why you ain't making the average mean income which is total income divided by total hours worked, i. e., $60/hr in the U. S.

There are three and only 3 answers:

1. You is dumber or lazier than average.
2. You is gittin' ripped off.
3. both of the above

Bret Cahill

No need to ask you if you are making less than average mean.

We already know you are dumber than a bowl of ramen noodles..

Bret Cahill

If they'll discuss it here then they are Democrats.

Bret Cahill

Before I thought IQ couldn't be a normal distribution because some have IQs above 200 while no one, I thought, could have a negative IQ.

Then I became acquained with newsgroups rightards.

Maybe IQ _is_ a normal distribution.

Only if you are a complete idiot.

Bret Cahill

Ok, thanks (and thanks tg for the explanatory link).

So what conclusions would you draw from that?

So you think wealthy people are ashamed of their wealth?

Actually I'm like the little dog Toto in _Wizard of Oz_.

All I do is pull back the curtain and let others make the conclusions.

Bret Cahill

That hardly implies these quantities don't exist in other distributions.

The delta function is zero everywhere except one point where it is infinite.

Bret Cahill

No, I mean the mean, not the median. The median is the representative value right in the middle of a distribution. Half above, half below. The mean is the average of all values, skewed by outliers.

Of course the distribution of wealth is more skewed than annual income. Wealth accumulates over time! While the mean anuual family income is close to double the median -- over seventy thousand dollars vs. about forty thousand dollars -- the median family wealth is only one hundred thousand dollars, while the mean is close to half a million!

Actually, Robert, it's all part of a related pattern. Control and power through any and all means possible. Wealth, the prison system, the media etc. Take everything, give nothing. The American way.

I'd move to Denmark or Finland in a second if I had citizenship there. America is EVIL!!!!

It's not the the rich are ashamed. They are afraid. Or, if they aren't, it's possible they should be. When Revolutions occur, the rich tend to get strung up. And, in any case, they certainly make the best targets for robbery. No matter how well armed they might be.

But the entire thing rests on an assumption that's so crazy even rightard economists will not vouch for it:

There is only _one_ distribution in Nature where the median value is meaningful but the average mean value is meaningless.

Who with any basic tech, math or science background is going to believe THAT one?

And the best part of it all is, it was done right out in the open just like Cheney's war crimes.

Bret Cahill

That's a stretch. One may find median to be a more useful statistic, but mean is far from useless--it can give good information when you understand the shape of the curve, or it can be useful for misleading and inflaming passions if the nature of the curve is not understood.

Well, that's true. While the median might provide a more meaningful statistic relative to most individuals, the mean, particularly in comparison to the median, provides some measure of income inequality. (But there I have talked about income distributions; I hope the demons hounding Brett don't escape from his head and come after me now.)

What is that one distribution in nature? The one that comes to mind for me is time until the next rainfall. When the weatherman reports in the morning that there is a 50% chance of rain during the daylight hours, he is estimating that the median time before the next rainfall is the time between then and dark. It would be very unusual for him to provide an estimate of the mean time before the next rainfall. I think that there are probably lots of similar things in nature, though. Which were you thinking of?

Yes, it is.

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Bret's a bit inclined to overstatement, but he has a point. The American media is at great pains to emphasize how "nice" the rich are, how "useful" they are. Even totally useless rich parasites like Paris Hilton are somehow presented as "cute", when, in fact, they are killing the poor by their lifestyles and deserve to be punished for doing so.

So, the media tends to deemphasize how extreme and pervasive the inequalities of wealth are in the United States, and the negative consequences of this. For example, the health care system is so bad in the United States that Cuba -- with its socialized medical system

-- actually has exactly the same average life expectancy as the United States, despite the comparative poverty of the island. But no studies are done on how the capitalized health care system in the U.S. kills the poor. So, the rich deny there is any problem. Hemophiliacs, for example, live twenty years longer in England than in the U.S. The Hospitals simply deny them their blood. Too expensive, you know.