68% Fall Significantly Below the Average

When listening to a podcast earlier today (one I normally like), the guest made a fairly spurious comment that I thought would be interesting to unpack.

The claim made by the guest was that "68% of Native Americans earn significantly less than the average American". Let me start off by saying that I'm not insensitive to social inequities that exist for Native Americans. I'm far from an expert on the subject and I haven't looked into the data much, but I trust that there are frequently economic, social, and possibly racist barriers making live difficult for this group of people.

However, if that is indeed true, as I trust it to be, then the data ought to speak for itself. I found this particular phrasing of the claim to be rather peculiar. This was the first point at which I started to believe that the guest had a bias and an agenda, and therefore, wasn't a reliable source of information.

Let's first consider a slightly different statement such as "68% fall below the national average". We expect, by definition, that 50% fall below the national average. So this presentation of the data seems to exagerate the exact inequity. For me, a better presentation of this same information would have been a discussion of quartiles or at least mean and median.

The statistic was not sourced, although I can't necessarily hold that against the speaker. I don't source every single fact I say in conversation. If true, then this statistic does raise concern. There's an 18% spread here which is worth looking into.

Yet the actual claim was that the fall significantly below the average. What the heck does that mean? What percentage fall below the average significant or otherwise?

When data is presented in this way, even if empirically correct, it leads many people to become skeptical of the source of information. I finished the interview particularly disappointed by this and further comments in the same vein. The guest's general thesis was that there are many hardships for Native American people and that some of those inequities derive from the relationship they have with the federal government. He seemed to be in favor of certain reforms. I suspect I might have agreed with him had the information been presented in a less leading way.