First: I wanna clarify this. I know that loads of people read like 100 books a year, or read all the time. I know these people exist. I’m asking about people that are like… average. An average american who just… reads. Doesn’t track everything or sets goals of like 100, or never stops reading… Anyway, I’ve been searching this up, and i find answers like 15-50, even 100. I find this highly unlikely, especially for average US citizens. Half the people i know don’t even pick up 5 books a year, let alone 15! I just don’t believe these stats. I read somewhere that people read 8 a month on average? That can’t be right for an average person. That’s like 2 books a week… I know people do read this much, but still… For an average person? So be real… how many books do people actually read a year?
You are confusing the significance of average and median. To illustrate, consider a sample of three people. If one reads 1 book, one reads 5, and one reads 50, the average person in that group has read 18.6 books. The median person has read 5 books.
In the same way, the average skews higher than the median for all Americans because the average is brought up by a relatively small number of people who read an enormous amount of books. So even though the median American only reads like 6 books a year (i.e. most Americans read 6 or fewer books), the average is brought up to something like 12-15 (depending on the survey) on behalf of a decent number of readers that are reading 40+ books a year.
It is important to note that, the way OP asked the question, the median American (or “the average American”) is exactly what you would be interested in looking at, not the average number of books all Americans have read.
The average and median are different things. They are calculated in specific ways. To find out what the “average American” is doing in any particular thing, you calculate exactly that value. My point is that the average tells us less here about how people are likely to behave than the average because of the way the average is affected by concentrations in distribution.
The mean and median are two different things. They are two different ways to measure the “average.” If it’s clear from context that a question would be better answered with the median, it’s not a great transgression to give that value. (Yes, in certain mathematical contexts we tend to use “average” synonymously with “mean” unless specified otherwise, but we’re in the world of casual speech right now anyhow.)
But to your original comment, you’re absolutely right, OP is thinking of “median” when they are asking this question, but the data they are getting is the mean.
I understand the difference between the mean and median.
I’m saying that, when we speak of a non-numerical entities, such as “Americans”, “average” means “typical”, since one cannot add and divide humans. There is no value to calculate.
For example, if I say “the average Zebra lives in the savannah”, it’s clear I’m simply speaking of the typical zebra, right? Not some mathematical process involving numerical values associated with their various habitats. Same here. It’s likely OP meant to ask about the average number of books, though, not the average American.
Maybe I’m missing something in your argument but I’d argue the reverse: OP absolutely meant to ask about the median American not the mean number of books.
When they say average (or typical American), I think this is exactly what they mean. Some people read a lot, some don’t read anything, find someone in the middle - how many books are they reading? If I was in a plane or at the DMV and tried to strike up a conversation about books, what is the chance they could participate?
That’s how I interpreted their question, which is all about the median/statistical quantiles.
At the risk of sounding pedantic, I’m going to piggyback on your comment, because this is something that comes up in my work and is confusing for a lot of people, and has become a bit of a bugaboo.
Average and mean are often used interchangably, but they are NOT perfect synonyms.
Average essentially just means ‘a number that best represents a data set’. While the arithmetic mean is the most common way of finding that, median and mode are also methods (and there are other, more complex methods in some cases, as well as best practices for some data such as removing outliars, etc).
This is important because there is no objectively correct way to find the ‘average’ of a set of data.
It’s a judgement call and it is sometimes used by bad faith actors to skew a message or just by people who don’t really know what they’re doing. If you’re reviewing research, it’s always important to clarify how they obtained their average and consider if that was the best method. (Similarly if someone says something “doubles your risk of X”, make sure you find out what the original risk was! The double of .0005 is probably not something you have to worry about. “Doubles the X” is a great way of making a number sound big when it might not be large at all.)
Wow. TIL.
mean, median, and mode are all a type of [statistical] average, there are other types of averages as well.
I feel like there’s no way the median American reads 6 books a year. There’s studies coming out every year that 50 percent of Americans read below a 5th grade but these people are reading 6 books anyway. I would be surprised if the true median( not like it could ever actually be found) would be anything other than 0 or 1
i think you’re severely overestimating the number of people who read 40+ books a year