Inspired by a question about standard dev, this one is a question that has been bugging me for years. I’ve been using the mean and stdev a lot in my work and during my college years, but I never really used median and mode outside when it was introduced. I’ve seen no use for it so far. So, ELI5? especially to those people who use this frequently.
In: Mathematics
I’ll tell you in literal terms:
You want to figure out what the most accurate adverage income for a population is. The richest guy has 100 billion dollars and the poorest guy is 130,000 in medical debt and is living on the street outside that Billionaires hotel. But, out of 1 million people in that city 23% earn $39,000 a year, the plurality income. This is the mode.
Say, however, the 500,000th richest person earns 42,000 a year, and is thus halfway in the middle of the earning chart. This is called the median.
Say you add up all the total wealth of the population and divide it by a million. This is called the mean, and is an inaccurate representation of wealth distribution and state of affairs of the economic situation of a society because of the oligarchistic society we live in, it’s usually 50% higher than the mode of median
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