If you are being explicit, “median” is a perfectly fine word. Shorter than “average”, too.
The problem is that if you write for a general audience many people might not know what median means. I think in the average person the words that are chosen make the person think of the right concept. I think that the “average person” think’s that the “average citizen of the world” has a “average income”.
If I speak of what the “average person on the street” thinks then the word average doesn’t equal “sum/amount”. The word is understand to point to to a quality that’s not defined by a fixed mathematical formula. It takes math training for people to associate the word with the fixed.
In our statistics for bioinformatics class the general idea that they taught us was that it’s usually a bad idea to use the straight arithmetic mean as is, as using it means one measurement errors can throw of your whole data set. Data-cleaning is usually needed to get useful statistics.
When I see the word average I don’t associate it with a specific formula but with ‘we want to know a statistics that represents “the middle” of a data set’. A middle that’s appropriately calculated for the context in question.
In think that’s the sense that most people who are not well educated in math use. They don’t focus on a specific formula.
The notion that the GWWC calculator is firmly aimed at mathematical illiterates has the slight problem that they put a note right there which says “We use equivalised income” with a Wikipedia link.
So you are saying they bothered to explain “equivalised” but didn’t bother to explain “average”?
I think it’s quite obvious which what’s meant with “average”, if you talk about the fact that many people are poor. On the other hand it’s less obvious what’s meant with income.
The problem is that if you write for a general audience many people might not know what median means. I think in the average person the words that are chosen make the person think of the right concept. I think that the “average person” think’s that the “average citizen of the world” has a “average income”.
People who don’t know what median is will certainly understand “average” as “sum up all the incomes and divide by the number of people”.
Under the assumption that your audience doesn’t know what a median is, using the word “average” to refer to median would be deliberately misleading.
If I speak of what the “average person on the street” thinks then the word average doesn’t equal “sum/amount”. The word is understand to point to to a quality that’s not defined by a fixed mathematical formula. It takes math training for people to associate the word with the fixed.
In our statistics for bioinformatics class the general idea that they taught us was that it’s usually a bad idea to use the straight arithmetic mean as is, as using it means one measurement errors can throw of your whole data set. Data-cleaning is usually needed to get useful statistics.
When I see the word average I don’t associate it with a specific formula but with ‘we want to know a statistics that represents “the middle” of a data set’. A middle that’s appropriately calculated for the context in question. In think that’s the sense that most people who are not well educated in math use. They don’t focus on a specific formula.
The notion that the GWWC calculator is firmly aimed at mathematical illiterates has the slight problem that they put a note right there which says “We use equivalised income” with a Wikipedia link.
So you are saying they bothered to explain “equivalised” but didn’t bother to explain “average”?
I think it’s quite obvious which what’s meant with “average”, if you talk about the fact that many people are poor. On the other hand it’s less obvious what’s meant with income.
Not to me it isn’t. I would normally take it to mean the total divided by the number of people, not the 50th percentile.