Doug to FT: Eye popping

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Sat May 5 13:00:55 PDT 2001


Michael Pollak wrote:


>[I love the idea that the "average" household is at the 95th percentile.
>Are averages like that, instead of medians, used often in supposedly
>respectable publications when they discuss income and wealth? I thought
>it was considered a pretty base trick.]

Most "respectable" publications don't do it - it's usually journalists and Wall Street hacks who are guilty of this offense. By the way, I learned this detail in a Federal Reserve Bank of New York publication. Most of the time, though, there's not *that* much difference between median and mean; the mean income in the U.S., for example, is somewhere around the 65th percentile.

Doug



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list