Sunday, April 14, 2013

Germans are "poorest" in Europe

Technically, that is probably "BS". But it made the news anyway, everywhere.

The quotes put around the finding by some publications indicate that we may not be alone in our brash interpretation. And, in fairness, the methodology of the survey has been questioned.

We don't know what in the findings is true, it certainly makes sense that Luxembourg appears very high on the list. Could it just be that we are seeing another study where "average" is the evil word that it really is?

Is everybody out there just too lazy to calculate median values, or don't even economists know how to do it?

We suspect the latter may be true.

How useful is "average"?

As useful as a case of crabs. Very useful to them but not to anybody else.

Think about the various Occupy movements what you will, but for a brief moment they taught the rest of us what 1 percent can mean in terms of wealth of a society.

We at the K-landnews won't take any average values very seriously, we use them to poke fun at things but not to run our lives.

A simple way of remembering to distrust average is this: Imagine you have a country MyCountry with a total of 3 people, one earns 100 000 dollars a year, the other two earn 0 dollars. There is a neighboring country Badlands with 3 people, all of them making 33 333 dollars a year.

Then there is a report "Average income in MyCountry is 33 333 dollars a year, caught up with rivalling Badlands".

Where would you rather live?

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