Opus 2019-226: What is a moderate?

The classic idea is someone who is not extreme, in the middle.  We have a lot of people claiming to be moderates whom are anything but.  The issue is how you determine the middle.  Statistics has three different ways of determining that spot:  Median, mode, mean.

Median is what I would consider the best way to determine the middle in politics.  To find the median you need three positions.  You start by identifying the farthest points on the left and right.  Then you find the middle.  That is the moderate position.  If you have a spread of incomes and the top income is a million dollars and the bottom is twenty thousand dollars then the median is $520,000.  That is the average I think of when I say I am right of center.  I know I am not a moderate.  I also know I am not at the extreme.

What the liberals mean when they say moderate is the mode.  The mode is a type of average that says the middle ground belongs to the largest group.  The liberals in this country actually seem to think that most people agree with them.  It is certainly true that all members of the fourth estate and academia agree with them.  To them that means that they are in the center and thus moderate.  In this example if you had one millionaire and his servants then the mode would be the servants wages.

What pollsters mean is what most people think of as the average.  You take all the responses, add them together and divide by the number of responses and it gives you an average.  It is possible that no one is even close but it is the middle.  If you have someone with a million dollars and another with none then the mean if $500,000.  True but meaningless if you will.

So what is a moderate?  It depends on how you are figuring your idea of average.  It is another case of distorting without actually telling an untruth.  And there is also the assumption that you are seeking to communicate truth.

homo unius libri