Originally Posted by $5 submissions

I loved statistics 101

Standard deviations FTW

My favorite example of why MEDIAN figures are better indicators of actual income than MEAN figures--the Colombian Drug Lord Example. If you have a drug town and there's 1000 people that live there, if you use MEAN figures, the AVERAGE income of the town's inhabitants might be 50K. That's not accurate since 999 are dirt poor peasants and there's one big drug lord making a TON of cash. Using MEDIAN income, you get a more accurate view of what the true income and economic status of the town is.