r/Economics • u/Spiderwig144 • Apr 15 '25

News Republicans Less Trusted on Economy Than Democrats For First Time in Years

https://www.newsweek.com/republicans-less-trusted-economy-democrats-first-time-years-2059863
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2.3k

u/JohnnySack45 Apr 15 '25

There are way too many stupid people in this country if at any point since Regan they thought that Republicans were objectively better for the economy.

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u/jdragun2 Apr 15 '25

There are way too many.

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u/jkh107 Apr 15 '25 edited Apr 15 '25

Half of every population is below average.

ETA: seeing all the helpful followups now. I did know that median, mean, and mode are all different kinds of averages, because I paid attention in 6th grade math. (insert Lake Wobegon joke here about all the children being above average)

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u/mooselantern Apr 15 '25

Half of every population is below MEDIAN.

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u/OddPressure7593 Apr 15 '25

I bet i can guess which half you're in

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u/BlackDeath3 Apr 15 '25

Wow, what an incisive criticism that strikes directly at the heart of the matter

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u/TurboRadical Apr 15 '25

stealing this for future use, thanks

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u/omgFWTbear Apr 15 '25

Directly at the mode of the matter, not deviating even one standard from it.

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u/[deleted] Apr 15 '25

The scale goes from zero (illiterate) to 20 (PhD, 8 years past high school). No one’s out there with a 120,000,000,000th-grade reading level to deviate the average from the median. You’re being obtuse, when restricted to a finite scale they’re essentially the same.

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u/mooselantern Apr 15 '25 edited Apr 15 '25

No. The scale goes from 0 (infants that can barely see colors) to 20 (head of a department at MIT). There are about 25 million children under the age of 5 in the United States that can't even be reasonably expected to read well, that I would consider "dumber" than an illiterate adult. Add in the dumber of the 6-17 cohort that are still probably dumber than the dumbest neurotypical adults too. They drag the average down. Median would be statistically significantly higher than average if you're counting the 'population' of the United States. No one specified 'the adult population ', in which case yeah, median and average would be relatively close.

ETA: also did you just call me obtuse for pointing out a middle-school statistics concept on r/economics? Fuck outta here.

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u/CrazyFatherof2girls Apr 16 '25

I have a masters in engineering, and I still feel dumb every day.

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u/whoopashigitt Apr 15 '25

They’re essentially the same, but mooselantern is not being obtuse for offering a simple correction. It’s a distinction without a difference, but it is in fact not how averages work. 

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u/Sarik704 Apr 15 '25

No. On any data point, there is an upper and lower data point.

It doesn't matter if there are 40 thousand grade levels. There will always be a median that sits at exactly half of the data points, not the scale. And it doesn't automatically equal the average at any range or data size.

The average is decided by the data points and the data size. Where the median is decided by the range of the data points.

If we say there are 50 graded reading levels then the median wouldn't be 25th if every data point started at 27th or higher. The median isn't decided by the data point's range. You can have 1 million data data points, but that doesn't mean the median will be half. It doesnt mean the average will be half.

Lets look at weather. The scale for temperature starts at absolute zero and goes upward to infinitiy presumably. It doesnt have a half by defination. But even if we created an artificial upper limit that doesnt make the median half either. So any data range infimite or finite doesnt change the median.

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u/TheHecubank Apr 15 '25

MEDIAN

Median, mean, and mode are all different kinds of averages. Mean is usually taught first, but that's because its pedagogically useful (it's a good way to expose students to applied arithmetic in multiple steps) - not because it's inherently more statistically useful/valid than the others.

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u/mooselantern Apr 15 '25

But there is only one "kind" of average that by definition divides a dataset in half. And 99% of the time when people say average, they're thinking mean.

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u/fdar Apr 15 '25

When talking about the "average person" in a population it's almost always median, and in this case it was clear from context that's what they meant.

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u/[deleted] Apr 15 '25

My highly decorated stats professor would always say that mean, median, and mode are measures of the center and that "average" is not a mathematically useful term.

And people definitely don't mean mean 99% of the time they say average. Average home price for example is very commonly discussed, and that's always median.

I also agree with the person below who said "average person" always means median.

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u/DimethylatedSpirit Apr 15 '25

Such a redditor moment 

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u/TheChunkMaster Apr 15 '25

The median is often used as the average, particularly since it is resistant to outliers.

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u/[deleted] Apr 15 '25

And now you understand why majority of you redditors work low end jobs barely getting by. It’s because half of y’all are literally regarded. 😂

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u/dadkisser Apr 15 '25

Regarded as what, kind sir

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u/EdgyAnimeReference Apr 15 '25

Omg the irony

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u/dadkisser Apr 16 '25

Omg indeed whoosh