That, um, sounds like an urban legend to me. Links?
Unfortunately I don't have a link to a source available. It might be an urban legend from an untrustworthy source. A bunch of my knowledge of statistics comes from formal education without online sources but that doesn't even mean that it's necessarily trustworthy as I wouldn't be surprised if my statistics professor would have a retold a urban myth about a case like this.
Given how Russians handled the issue of Mendelian genetics I wouldn't be too surprised if it's true ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trofim_Lysenko ).
If you want to convince people that the communist economic model is better than the Western one, thinking in terms on median income instead of mean income as important helps. I think I picked up that meme somewhere in the context of possibilities of shaping data to your liking.
Means, motive and capabilities are all there.
If you want to convince people that the communist economic model is better than the Western one, thinking in terms on median income instead of mean income as important helps.
Income (and wealth) in societies tends to be distributed according to a power law. That makes the mean a bad estimator regardless of your ideology. The Western economic literature almost universally uses the median when discussing income and wealth comparisons.
If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.