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Tim Walz’s net worth is less than the average American’s
(fortune.com)
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this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2024
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Of course it's age adjusted. What good does it do to compare accumulated wealth between a 60 year old and an 18 year old?
It's incongruent with the headline. "The average American" is not the same population as "the average member of the 'pull up the ladder' generation."
Not really. To do a cross generational comparison, you would look at average wealth of 18-25 year olds in the 80's to compare it to today's cohort in that age bracket to show age adjusted disparity. But comparing the average 60 year old to an 18 year old doesn't mean much when one has had 42 more working years and the other has greater future earning potential.
You can't just bait-and-switch the headline. Don't say "these things are equivalent" and then turn around and say "it doesn't make sense to compare these things."
The defacto standard for economists recording and reporting average and median net worth has been to bucket it by age cohort for at least the last seventy years. Using common meanings of the terms isn't baiting and switching it intending to deceive or bury the lede.
They could have left a naked "average" at the end of the sentence and it would have made sense to assume 'appropriate methods'. They could have thrown in an appropriate qualifier do describe the cohort they're comparing him to "most people approaching retirement age."
They chose to say "the average American" which makes the statement somewhere between misleading and an outright fabrication.
If we're going that route you may as well take issue with the word "average" instead of using mean, median, or mode. Because the lack of specificity there is even greater than leaving off the age modifier.
But the whole thing is a weird pedantic exercise anyway. They are reporting using the standard models in a way that makes sense to the reader.