The per capita income in the USA may be $45,000 (let’s just call it that, for hypothetical’s sake), but when you filter out the billionaires and tycoons and the rest of the 1%, wouldn’t it be more like, $34,000?
When a billionaire moves into a town, do statisticians typically report the per capita wealth as spiking dramatically, or do they omit him as an outlier?
Is there any organization that tracks “per capita income of the 99%?”
That’s what medians are for. What’s the median income?
ETA: Per capita income in the United States as of 2012 is $42,693.
Regards,
Shodan
You need to distinguish between wealth and income. Billionaires normally don’t make billions in income. They make their money from investments. That shows up in those statements that “The bottom half of the world’s population owns the same as the richest 85 people in the world.”
The per capita income will be higher than the household median (see this chart), but it won’t be as out of proportion as the wealth figures.
Which is the other way that “per capita” income can distort. The first of those numbers is median per household, the second is mean per person. So they’re almost completely incomparable to each other. Ideally we’d get the other two values (mean household and median personal) in order to do a real comparison.
The problem, as the OP says, is that when it comes to income, no one earns less than zero, but there is no maximum. This has less effect in a large population like the US, but in a smaller economy like the UK it can be significant.
Did you hear about the statistician who drowned in a river with a mean depth of 1 foot?
Why would you want to filter out the top 1%? What are you trying to show? Mean and median can be valuable but don’t tell you anything about the distribution. Statistics are valuable when used appropriately but you’ve got to know what you’re trying to show.