Competition

 

All I Really Want To Do

Now I ain't lookin' to compete with you
Beat on, cheat on, mistreat you
Simplify you, classify you
Deny, defy, mystify you
All I really want to do
Is baby, be friends with you
Baby, be friends with you

Reality is NOT a competition.  No wagering please!

Reality is random.  Fair betting requires random events.  Therefore there should be betting on reality, correct?  Not exactly.  There is betting by individuals, but collectively there should be no betting.  Betting requires a zero sum game: i.e. winners AND losers.  Reality is NOT a zero sum game, there is expected to be at least a change, and hopefully growth, from the current reality. So betting individually may make sense, but betting collectively does not make sense.  If there is change, and again hopefully growth, it should be shared by both winners AND losers, because in a fair game, the winners in the past could be losers in the current contest.

If the total value of a system increases, then the median should increase.  However it is possible that the increase could go only to the current winners, or a subset of the current winners. In this case, the mean might increase while the median decreases, or stays the same.  The problem is that popular wisdom is that the average is the mean, because that is easiest to compute, i.e. system total divided by individuals in the system. Actually, average is the centrality of the normal, which is by definition the median, where half of the individuals have more than the median and half have less than the median. If the mean is the median, as it is in normal distributions, that popular wisdom isn’t a problem.  But if there is a gap between the mean and the median, it indicates that the situation is NOT normal.  If the gap between the median and the mean is increasing, this also indicates that the situation is becoming more ABnormal.

I wish I could say that the gap has been decreasing, but based on US Census reports, the gap has been increasing. 

This is not only because people have confused the mean and the median  https://dbeagan.blogspot.com/2018/08/wonderful-world-dont-know-much-about.html , inflation has masked the impact, and the tax code has exacerbated the effect, https://dbeagan.blogspot.com/2020/06/taxman.html.

Competition should be between groups, not between individuals within groups. Let’s not compete. Let’s be friends.