{"id":31844,"date":"2023-01-01T11:49:55","date_gmt":"2023-01-01T11:49:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/themint.kinsta.cloud\/?p=31844"},"modified":"2024-01-03T11:31:50","modified_gmt":"2024-01-03T11:31:50","slug":"some-are-more-equal-than-others","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themintmagazine.com\/some-are-more-equal-than-others\/","title":{"rendered":"Some are more equal than others"},"content":{"rendered":"

There\u2019s more to extreme wealth than first appears. Mark Thomas<\/strong> points it out.<\/p>\n

We are all used to inequality. There is inequality of height, weight, shoe size and just about every other human characteristic. And we are all used to thinking of people as being \u201cof average height\u201d or as \u201ctall\u2019 or \u201cshort\u201d.\u00a0<\/p>\n

We expect most people to be at or close to average height and we understand that there are fewer noticeably short or tall people. That is the kind of inequality we can get our minds around.<\/p>\n

On Average<\/div>
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When we graph the number of people there are in a population at any given height we generate a shape like the one in the figure Height distribution in the US. <\/em>It peaks at one height \u2013 the one that is the most commonly seen \u2013 and falls away to show that smaller percentages of people are at lower or greater heights. A bell-shape like this is typical of a \u2018normal distribution\u2019.<\/p>\n

The normal distribution curve here shows that only about 4% of people are less than 163 cm tall, and only about 2% are more than 193 cm tall. The tallest man in the world was Robert Wadlow, who was 272 cm tall. That is less than double the most common height. If you repeated this analysis with shoe size, you would get the same kind of result. Nobody has feet which are a metre long.<\/p>\n

There are three kinds of average that reflect the spread of measurements of quantities that follow a normal distribution like height, weight, shoe size and so on. The one we most commonly use is the mean \u2013 the value you get if you add the heights of everyone in the population and divide by the number of people \u2013 which is 178cm in the height graph. Statisticians call this the (arithmetic) mean<\/strong> \u2013 the other two are:<\/p>\n