

Why does pay go up in a pay freeze? Statistics. - JacobAldridge
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-12216428

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mjb
Articles like this illustrate why the media should be delivering statistical
data in ways that people find easier to think about and avoid common pitfalls
of statistical understanding. The mean (typically called 'the average' in
publications for a general audience) is a subtle thing which reacts in ways
that are hard to predict to some changes in the data [1]. Other statistics,
like the median, are much more easily reasoned about and don't succumb as
easily to weird numerical behavior.

It would be great if the media would steal some of the techniques of
exploratory statistics (like the Box plot[2]) to make statistics more
approachable by a general audience. I am certainly not advocating dumbing-down
the data - but rather presenting it in a way that isn't as hopelessly
misleading to people who don't have a strong background in statistics.

[1] If Bill Gates came to my party, what would happen to the mean net worth?
[2] Which, as I just learned from Wikipedia, isn't named after well-known
statistician George Box.

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JacobAldridge
Couldn't agree more. I'll always remember the mean/median difference because
of my Grade 6 teacher. He was about 6 foot 6, and he made us do the math on
"Average heights in the Grade 6 classroom".

We had a small class size, so the results were demonstrably different and
therefore memorable!

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yummyfajitas
There is quite a bit of speculation (c.f. Tyler Cowen) that something along
these lines occurred in the US private sector as well, with both productivity
and wages.

Basically, when the recession hit, firms shed their low/zero productivity
workers. During the recovery, as Keynesian stimulus raised AD, they didn't
rehire their low productivity workers.

[http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2011/01...](http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2011/01/scott-
sumner-on-zero-mp-workers.html)

