Re: Two Types of Distributions Found In Nature

Private industry is not investing in fusion

So?

Should it be?

I mean, you gotta make a case here, Izzy.

Private industry had no trouble investing in the steam engine, in railroads, in electricity, in aviation, in radio, in television, etc. etc.

Fred Weiss

They won't until oil costs enough to make the speculation interesting.

In truth, the track record of people trying to replace oil has been abysmal - but cheap oil has made it a foolish thing.

IMO, we have to go back to the Standard Oil era for the example

- rock oil was, in the hands of end consumers, 1/4 the cost of whale oil.

-- Les Cargill

Wrong. That isn't how you calculate an average mean.

How would you calculate it? It might be a fairly meaningless statistic, but I don't see any problem with its calculation. And he refuses to disclose anything about his statistic except the above. Trucker has guessed that he is using GDP as total income. Of course, by that statistic, a very large proportion of Americans (anyone on unemployment or other form of welfare, retirees, any child with a passbook savings account, homemakers who have any savings or investments, anyone whose salary is over about $50K to $60K, etc. is likely to have mean income of over $60/hr.

You calculate the mean by adding a series of number x1 + x2 + ........xn and then dividing by n.

If anyone does 0 hours of work and has any income (which millions of people do) then their income per hour is infinite.And since you can't add infinite numbers together, you can't calculate the mean.

That gives you an average of the rates, taken across individuals. Another mean is sum(f(x))/sum(x), the weighted average, which gives you the mean across x, and allows for x=0. Mathematically fine, but meaningless in Bret's little ditty, since so many folks, as you and I agree, are in the x=0 category, for which f(x)/x is undefined.

But we can perform a kind of renormalization such that 0=1 hour. Surely one must spend at least that much time "earning every penny", as Massah Weiss likes to say, of one's trust fund income.

-tg

The above is silly. Suppose one has the total sum and the sample size and the reported. Then, to calculate the mean, one takes the quotient.

The above is poorly expressed. People that do no labor obviously are not in the population for which the mean wage per hour is calculated. This doesn't imply the mean wage per hour is undefined.

Perhaps Andy's point is that Bret's numerator isn't the sum of wages, but includes more. I made that point on 30 October:

Bret also seems to accept, maybe only for the sake of argument, lies economists like Mankiw tell. One's wage is not a reward for working hard or being intelligent.

Maybe Andy's point is that workers cannot directly receive the value-added by their labor. Deductions from that value-added include, for example, "reserve or insurance funds to provide against accidents, dislocations caused by natural calamities, etc.", "that which is intended for the common satisfaction of needs, such as schools, health services, etc.", and "funds for those unable to work, etc.". But that point has nothing to do with the arithmetic of how one calculates a mean.

Some here were trying to change the issue from _income_ to wages.

What next? Changing the issue to farm wages?

Farm wages may be a very fine topic for discussion but here we are discussing the more general term income.

Wages are only a part of income.

I would never -- I repeat NEVER -- say anything to cause rightards to scream bloody murder, to flame 'n dodge.

Now you did it. They will all be flaming you now, from the "liberal" [corp. sponsored] elitists at the _NY Times_ to the disreputable "market" economists at Hoover, Heritage, Am. Enterprise, Cato, the Chicago School, etc.

It's his unwitting point.

That's why the "market" economist apologists look so ridiculous on sci.math groups.

Bret Cahill

There isn't, you're a nutjob.