Ms. Rosett: I’m not goint to defend the UN, and, in fact, I think it makes the League of Nations look good, and if I had my druthers, I would abolish it. But the use of averages has no meaning without accounting for education, experience, location, responsibility and other factors. An example of how averages can be misleading is a comparison of average reading scores in Texas and Wisconsin for K-12. Texas has a lower average reading score in Texas than Wisconsin. When, though, each state’s reading scores are broken out by demographics – white, black and Hispanic – we find that whites in Texas have higher scores than whites in Wisconsin, and so do blacks in Texas compared to blacks in Wisconsin, and Hispanics in Texas compared to Hispanics in Wisconsin. You might ask, how is that possible? Well it turns out that in each state, whites have higher scores than Hispanics who have somewhat higher scores than blacks. (That is a value free statement.) The reason that Wisconsin’s AVERAGE reading score is higher is that it that it has a much lower percentage of Hispanics and blacks than does Texas. So, whites get a much heavier weight in the average in Wisconsin than do white in Texas.

Bottom line, for the kinds of comparisons you’re impling, you cannot use averages.