“Average Joanne”  Meet Jessica, the Average American

Is there such a thing as an Average Joe in the United States? Or does the sum of the average American features paints a very specific portrait: an American who doesn’t actually exist?

In 2003, Kevin O’Keefe began a nationwide search to find the Average Joe, the “most average” American. Armed with a notebook full of facts — many of which were contradictory — he searched for a person who possessed them all. He published an account of his journey in his 2005 book The Average American: The Extraordinary Search for the Nation’s Most Ordinary Citizen.

The criteria he used had as much to do with the country itself as with the individuals. For instance, O’Keefe looked for someone who lived within 100 miles of the shore and in a state represented by at least one Democratic senator. “As it is, it feels as if much of the population was removed from consideration unfairly,” one reviewer wrote on Amazon.

The reviewer has it right. We can create people who represent the sum of averages for a city, state, or nation. But when we add all those characteristics together, who do they really represent?

Washington, D.C.

Ashley heads to work around 7:30 every morning after she works out, showers, dresses, and has a smoothie. A 34-year-old Black woman with a master’s degree, Ashley earns about $105,000 a year working as a portfolio manager for a nonprofit in Washington, D.C. Ashley, the “average” resident in Washington, D.C. | © Stefan Dahl via Canva.com   She’s pretty average for the District. Ashley makes the half-hour drive to work for most of the two or three days a week when she goes into the office. She lives with her partner. They’re not married yet and maybe won’t ever be — that’s still up in the air. Ashley doesn’t have to hurry home after the school bells ring as she and her partner don’t have any children — the average age of first birth for women in D.C. falls somewhere between 30 and 35.

Like many D.C. residents, Ashley describes herself as liberal. She supports the right to legal abortion, is in favor of same-sex marriage, and is a member of the Democratic Party, to whom she’s contributed about $1,417 over the past year. She mostly votes Democratic when she goes to the ballot box for her D.C. ward representative. But residents of the American capital city do not have representation in Congress, something she is very much in favor of changing.

Ashley is both the exception and the rule in D.C. That’s because she is a composite of District averages found in the U.S. Census and in data derived by the District government. So, Ashley represents the typical District resident, embodying all the majority traits. Slightly more residents are Black than White, and 53 percent are women, with an average age of 34 and a mean annual income of just over $105,000.

Putting all the traits together results in a person, but Ashley is in no way average. Her persona falls apart if we look at any single one of her traits. She may represent the District, but she is not representative of its Black or female residents. That is a very wide gap to bridge.

Wealth

Washington, D.C., like much of the United States, is characterized by a stark divide, and that’s where Ashley lives and works. In the District, that divide has historically been geographically visible, bisected by the Anacostia River, a watery line dividing the affluent, mostly White Wards 1 and 3 from the more economically challenged Wards 7 and 8, which are majority Black.

These Black residents earn roughly one third of the median income of White residents — somewhere between $36,000 and $40,000 — and have double the unemployment rate. Black residents are three times less likely to have a bachelor’s degree and four times less likely to have a graduate degree. One in seven of these families experience food insecurity and, as a result, are more than twice as likely to be obese and three times more likely to have a heart attack.

D.C. exhibits one of the starkest differences in wealth distribution in the nation, including the country’s lowest median net worth and some of the greatest wealth inequity. A 2016 working paper from the U.S. Census Social, Economic, and Housing Statistics Division found that District residents had a median net worth of $52,201 but a mean net worth of $11,153,890. D.C. is home to millionaires and billionaires, such as Ward 3 resident and chocolate bar heiress Jacqueline Mars and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.

Mississippi

Over in Mississippi, 32-year-old Christopher has just gotten home from his night job as a cashier. A White high school graduate, he describes himself as conservative. An evangelical Protestant, he has a strong belief in God and goes to church every weekend, as long as he isn’t working. Like many White residents of the state, he votes Republican, largely because he feels the party represents his values: He’s against abortion and thinks marriage should be between a man and a woman, although he himself is unmarried.  Christopher, the “average” resident in Mississippi | © Robert Kneschke via Canva.com He’s the average Mississippi man, living paycheck to paycheck. He rents a one-bedroom basement apartment in a converted house for around $900 a month. Rent is a good chunk of his $26,807 annual income, which he supplements with a side gig driving for Uber, but he gets by with a little help from his mother. He earns the average income for his state, while the median pay is listed as $49,111. Mississippi is the poorest state in the U.S. with a poverty rate of almost 19 percent.

His drive to work is only 20 minutes, which is fine when his car is in working order, and he has gas — neither of which is guaranteed. On those less fortunate days, he walks. Public transit is not very dependable outside of Jackson and the coastal areas of Mississippi, so people only take it when there is no alternative. On Saturday, Christopher goes to his ex’s house to pick up his six-year-old son for the weekend.

Nearly 50 percent of kids in Mississippi live in a single-parent household, mostly headed by Black mothers. However, the average man in Mississippi is white. This is where Christopher’s persona begins to fall apart. While the number of interracial couples in the U.S. overall increased by between 0 and 2.4 percent from 2012 to 2016, the increase of married interracial couples in the state of Mississippi — historically the seat of tremendous racial inequity — was among the lowest in the nation. So, to encapsulate both of these average traits, Christopher would have to fall outside of some notable norms in the area.

Health

Christopher’s income as a cashier is pretty good, but it’s about $400 too high to qualify for Medicaid, even if, as required, his son is counted as his dependent rather than his mother’s. For a while, Christopher drove Uber, but he abandoned the idea when his car broke down. He can’t afford private health insurance, even under the Affordable Care Act (ACA).

Life expectancy in the U.S. is just over 77 years, but it’s declining. That number also conceals the variation among Americans. Women can expect to live to be 80, 6 years longer than men. There is also a racial disparity: Black men have a life expectancy of 68, but for Hispanic women, it’s 82. Life expectancy varies by state too; the average baby born in Mississippi in 2020 can expect to live 71.9 years, about four years less than in D.C. and six years less than the national average.

The United States is the only wealthy industrialized nation without universal health coverage, a major factor in quality health care and outcomes. Despite the 2010 Affordable Care Act, 8.3 percent of Americans had no health insurance in 2021. Uninsured rates were highest in Texas at 16.7 percent versus 3.8 percent in the District of Columbia.

Suburbs, California

Jessica, a married mother of two, lives in suburban California. In the morning, the 38-year-old wakes her two children, hoping they’ll get on the bus to school since she has to drive to work before they get picked up.  Jessica, the “average” U.S. resident | © Monkey Business Images via Canva.com Living in the suburbs, the car is key to Jessica’s life. Every morning, Jessica spends twice as long in the car as Ashley, about an hour to make the 31.5-mile trip to the office, where she works as a training development manager for a local company.

She describes her political views as “moderate.” She votes Democratic but identifies as independent, supports legal abortion in most cases, and believes America is the greatest country in the world, although she acknowledges that the rest of the world sees this differently. She thinks people generally have a positive view of those who live in the suburbs like her. She doesn’t think democracy is working in the country, but she still has hope for the future.
  Turns out, the “Average Joe” is actually an “Average Joanne.” Jessica represents the average American. According to the U.S. Census, she is an overweight White woman who is about 38 years old, married, and lives with her husband and 1.7 kids in a 3-bedroom single-family home. She drives to work alone for 26.8 minutes and earns about $67,521 annually. She has a mean debt of $146,500 and a net worth of $122,000. She says she is upper class. She pays a $1,500 monthly mortgage on a $244,900 home, has two cars, a smartphone, private health insurance, and about $20,000 in social security (SSA) income.

Obviously, that makes no sense. At 38 years old, she could not be drawing social security. Women do not become eligible for social security until they turn 67. Notably, Jessica has no college degree, yet she exceeds the earnings of a high school graduate by $26,000. That’s not impossible, but is it average? The average suburban resident does have a college degree. And how representative is Jessica? Although about 47 percent of Americans were married in 2020, only about 19 percent of them were living with children under the age of 18. Meanwhile, 30 percent of households included a dependent child or an adult over 65. She looks nothing like Christopher, the single father sharing custody in Mississippi, and she doesn’t bear any resemblance to Ashley, the unmarried Black woman in D.C., either.

Politics

In many ways, American beliefs are linked to geography. About 175 million Americans live in the suburbs and small metropolitan areas, while about 98 million inhabit its urban core counties. A 2018 Pew Survey found that more Republicans and Republican-leaning independents tend to call rural areas home. The majority of Americans in cities identify as Democrats or align more closely with liberal values. Over the past 20 years, the study found, these tendencies have only grown stronger. Meanwhile, average Americans living in the suburbs, like Jessica, are roughly split in their partisan loyalties.

In late 2021, Siena College in New York released the results of the American values study (AVS), a survey of more than 6,000 Americans on their beliefs. The study polled a relatively even number of Trump and Biden voters from the 2020 U.S. Presidential election. It found that Americans are politically divided into nearly even thirds: 35 percent left of center, or more liberal; 34 percent right of center, or more conservative; and about 31 percent falling squarely in the middle.

While those divisions were even, the study also found that nearly all Americans report identifying with a core set of values: equality, liberty, and progress. That’s true regardless of location, politics, gender, race, ethnicity, and age.

These are only three different characters from across the United States, but they demonstrate the considerable heterogeneity across the country in family arrangements, income level, education, and life expectancy. These statistically average Americans represent some of the data, but no singular persona can represent the staggering differences nationwide, let alone the diversity in demographics of race, gender, and generation.

09/2023