[ryandrake]

I guess it's just always important/helpful to keep in mind that the average is almost certainly going to be misleading when the distribution is extremely skewed, as is the case for household income. It's usually a mistake to talk about averages in these cases, when the median is almost always going to be more meaningful.

[danwills]

Agree, but can't we just include both average _and_ mean? And maybe min/max while we're at it? Seems like that could give a much clearer picture (without even needing a graph!?)

[tsimionescu]

Min & max are also meaningless for most distributions, so probably you should instead look at P1 and P99 or something, and all of a sudden you're now talking about 5 numbers when all you wanted was a quick point.