Wouldnt mean salary be a better representation of the public then median?
In: Other
Because in general when talking about salary you’re making an argument about the purchasing power of the average person. Let’s say the commodity in question costs X dollars, and let’s assume the commodity is something expensive but you don’t need to buy one very often, like, say, a car. Then, if the median income is greater than X dollars multipled by some multiple which accounts for other expenses, taxes, etc, you can make an argument like “this commodity is affordable”, given that 50% of people can afford it (the upper 50%). Conversely, you can also make the argument that “most people” (50% or greater) are living “comfortably”, since they can afford such commodities, which gives you a bit of a picture of the financial health of your society.
You can also use median to make the inverse argument; if there is some life necessity, like housing, whose price is prohibitively high relative to the (multiple of choice of) the median salary, then you can say something like “there exists a housing crisis because housing is unaffordable for 50% of people”.
If you use mean, you can’t make such an argument. As others have said, if 1 person makes a million dollars and 1000 people make 10 dollars and your commodity X is 1000 dollars, then your mean might suggest that the average person can afford that commodity but really only the top guy can.
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