Wouldnt mean salary be a better representation of the public then median?
In: Other
Different statistics say different things.
You use Midian numbers when you have large outliers and your goal is to represent the “typical” number. This applies to income* quite well.
With income, you have a relatively small percentage of income earners who earn a HUGE amount of the total income. That means an average is somewhere between the “normal” people and these huge income earners. That means the average, or mean, is going to skew higher than the normal person earns.
Let’s switch to a new example. How many fingers does the typical person have?
Answer: the typical person has 10 fingers. But the average person has fewer than 10 fingers due to the number of people with missing fingers due to accidents (and people born with extra fingers are less common than those with fewer fingers).
The average provides a true number, but not a useful one. The median provides the best answer.
*I changed from the word “salary” to the word “Income” because I know the distribution of incomes, I am less certain on the definition and distribution of the word “salary.”
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