CorpoMedia© is pushing race hatred HARD by miss- stating the meaning of some numbers.

[annabanana]

"Black and Hispanic people are MUCH poorer than White people on average in these trying economic times". That should be read as 5 obscenely rich while billionaires and everyone else in the toilet.

But by shoving a wedge between the economically suffering along racial lines they are being extremely irresponsible and it's unnecessary. And they are ALL doing it. Who sent out that memo anyway?

[Journeyman]

1. Actually, from yesterday's news: "Wealth gap widens between whites, minorities". . .

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x4935898

[eppur_se_muova]

2. Agree they should use medians, not averages ...

Forty homeless people are in a room. Average net worth: $0. Bill Gates walks in. Average net worth of all people in the room: $1.1 billion. So the "average person" in the room is a billionaire.

This is the WRONG way to cite statistics. There is no "average person". The nearest intellectual concept to an "average person" is the median (which just means "middle") -- the midpoint of the wealth curve. 50% have more than the median, 50% have less. The median wealth of all the people in the room is $0 -- there is one lucky outlier, who doesn't reflect the reality of the situation for the rest, and shouldn't be allowed to skew the figures, or their interpretation.

An increase in the average wealth (or wages, or anything else) in a country where the population is not rising too rapidly basically reflects the increase in total wealth, without acknowledging the inequality of distribution in any way. Think about the definition of average -- just the total,divided by the number of people. If all the new wealth goes into the hands of one person, the average has gone up, but almost no one has seen an increase. This is relected in the median, not the average.

[econoclast]

3. Pew Research. And the actual numbers ARE median, not average

If the talking heads are saying "average" they are citing the numbers incorrectly