Wouldnt mean salary be a better representation of the public then median?
In: Other
They tell us different things.
The mean is the result of adding up everyone’s salaries and then dividing that total by the number of people in your sample. The median is the result of sorting everyone by salary, and then picking the person in the middle, meaning you have as many people earning at least as much as the median, as you have people earning at most as much as the median.
Let’s say we have five people, and these are their salaries.
Alice: $5
Bob: $15
Carla: $20
Dave: $25
Emma: $1000
The mean here would be (5+15+20+25+1000)/5=$213, and the median would be $20. You can see that the mean is being very heavily skewed by Emma’s earnings, and makes it look like wages are much higher than they are. Median, on the other hand, is less susceptible to being affected by extreme values. It doesn’t matter how much Emma earns, or how little Alice earns, we get the value squarely in the middle. But median doesn’t tell us anything about the distribution of the values. If Alice and Bob were only making $1, while Dave and Emma made millions, the median would still be Carla’s $20.
So which one is better? Neither. They convey different pieces of information.
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