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The poor, the rich and the ultra-rich
The reality behing the “average” salary
Although I am not an economist, economics is a subject I enjoy a lot because it simultaneously describes the situation of people around the world and lends itself to very interesting analyzes due to its purely quantitative nature. Consequently, this would not be the first time that I share data, analysis or economic news, but this time I want to take the opportunity to clear up a confusion in which I see that many people fall: the averages. When ‘average wages’ are mentioned in economic terms, the word average does NOT refer to ‘the one in the middle’.
If you recall from your high school statistics course, the median is the one that measures ‘the middle one’, and the mean (or the average) is calculated with an arithmetic process that describes ‘something’ of the distribution of the data. When the data is balanced, the mean and median tend to be close or very similar values, but when the data is unbalanced, they measure completely different things.
