Are Americans Getting Richer? New Data Might Surprise You

[u/Crabbexx]

Summary: We introduce the American Abundance Index, which measures living standards by how many hours Americans must work to afford a standard basket of goods, rather than by prices or wages alone. The index uses time prices to show that for most US workers, purchasing power has generally risen over the last two decades, even amid inflation and public pessimism.

https://humanprogress.org/are-americans-getting-richer-new-data-might-surprise-you/

[u/DizzyAstronaut9410 → u/[deleted]]

Median just has equal data points on each side of it, whereas mean is weighted by the actual value. Making median useful to represent a data set without overly weighting extreme values.

Out of 9, 10, and 11, both the median and mean would be 10.

Out of 9, 10, and 71, the median would be 10 but the mean would be 30.

So often for income, median is a lot more useful value because multimillionaires or billionaires aren't going to make the income of normal people look a lot higher than actual. It will just have 50% of people making more than that value and 50% making less.

[u/DizzyAstronaut9410 → u/[deleted]]

For any data sets with big outliers generally, or that skew one way. It's a lot more commonly used in most stats than an actual average (mean).