Pi-Consulting

The law of averages states that, if you are standing with one foot encased in a block of ice and the other foot in a bucket of scalding hot water, you should in theory be perfectly comfortable.

Dangerous things, averages, particularly since they have a habit of obscuring more truths than they reveal, and masking contradictions.
How much do we really learn from average statistics? In reality, Mr. And Mrs. Average are probably harder to find in today’s America than almost anywhere on earth. (And if you did find them, they probably wouldn’t still be married, at least not to each other). For all the USA’s apparent homogeneities, if you take a Latino in Texas, a black in Detroit and a white New Englander, you will find that they lead entirely different lives, and typify totally different cultures. Demographics and the science of socio-economics explain part of this — the gap separating America’s richest and poorest citizens has widened perceptibly since the 1970’s, for instance — but differences run much broader and deeper than that.

With each passing year, the average American has less and less in common with his fellow-Americans. Ethnicity, culture and social issues lift and separate new groupings. Shifts in the role of women, changes in marital and sexual mores and mutating family units all compound the fragmentation effect. Socially liberal attitudes spread in some places, while the “moral majority” emerges as a real majority in others. Contradictions proliferate. A result of the social litmus test represented by the Clinton-Lewinsky affair, for instance, was that the average American appeared to be seriously concerned about “moral decline” in public life, and yet simultaneously remained steadfastly opposed to Washington’s “sanctimonious moralism” in dealing with it. American life seems full of contradictions.

Dangerous things, averages.