Homework assignment

Consider the following:

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the average household income was $73,298 in 2014 (the latest year for which complete data is available). The median household income in 2014 was $53,719.

Does a $20,000 difference seem like a big deal in these two different measures? What explains the discrepancy? Which measure do you think better captures the central tendency (or lay person’s sense of “average”) of the distribution of income in this country?

In addition, read the following brief Forbes article (note that it’s a couple years old, but may still be relevant to our thinking in 2018).

https://www.forbes.com/sites/bobmcteer/2014/11/05/perception-versus-reality-the-median-versus-the-mean/#67f556064c62 (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.

Do you think the most basic choice of which descriptive statistics to use can greatly influence how people understand their world? (This is a leading question). Do you have other examples of how using median vs. mean can change our view of a dataset?