I was looking up the average networth of 30 year olds in the United States and it said: “The average net worth is $122,000 and the median net worth is $35,112” my brain is too smooth please help.
In: 8
A lot of these seem more like “ELI25” rather than 5.
For median, you just line them up in size order. The one in the middle is the median.
For mean, you take an average: add them up and divide by the number of individuals.
Mean is good for things that are a little more stable. Say, the average high temperature. That gives you a good idea what the high is likely to be on a given day.
The problem is, the mean can be skewed by outliers. If you have a neighborhood where everyone except for one person is making $50k per year, but one person living up on a hill on the edge of town makes $1,000,000 per year, the mean (average) could be $100k. That’s not really a good representation – everyone except one person makes $50k. It’s just one person throwing the average off. The median (of $50k) is a better representation.
Another neighborhood where everyone makes $100k will have both a median and a mean of $100k. In that case, $100k is a good representation. And you can see how those two neighborhoods could be very different.
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