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
You get median pay by basically listing all the different pays and sallaries there are. And choosing the middle value. Average is that you take all the people who get paid for their work, and divide it by all the people who are working. Example.
Here is a list of numbers: `1,2,2,3,3,3,4,4,4,4,5,5,5,6,6,7,8,9`. The average is 4,4; Median is 4. Lets change that last 9 to 100. The median remains 4, while average becomes 9,21.
Lets make another list where we have `9 x 1s, 8 x 2s… 2 x 8, and 1 x 9`. Lets imagine that this is the income pyramid of our economy. The median would be: 3, and average 3,7.
Average income in a economy accounts can go up, even when most people are getting poorer, as long as the richest get disproportiannylly rich. Consider that if you include Jeff Bezos, in to calculations about average wealth of an average american person; his portion would be 350 dollars. Exclude Jeff bezos from the calculations and suddenly every American is 350 dollars poorer, statistically. Keeping Jeffy in the dataset however doesn’t meant that every American is 350 dollars richer.
So to explain the numbers you gave. There are few people who are so obsencely rich that they can skew the average to be 4 times the median. However no matter how much wealth the top 1% has, median doesn’t change. The top 1% can get richer and richer and the median doesn’t go up, the average will go up; the poorest can keep getting poorer and poorer, but as long as rich people get more rich than poor people poorer, the average keeps going up.
Median is just basically if you line up 7 people according to their wealth. The person 4th in the line (the middle one) is the median wealth. Now… persons 1,2,3 can get poorer and poorer and median stay same. The persons 5,6,7 can keep getting wealthier and wealth, and the median stay the same. However for the median person to get richer or poorer, means that amount of people needs to change, or overall wealth among all people has to go up. Because remember, if the person now in spot 4 of the line get richer than person 5, they swap places and person who was 5 becomes the new 4 – and they are now the median.
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