A more equal society
Roy Hattersley notes in The Guardian that the recent trend towards a more equal society shown in the IFS survey is reason enough to vote Labour in the forthcoming election. [Via Harry's Place]I'm still trying to get The Times to issue a correction over its misleading -- at times just plain wrong - reporting of the same IFS study. It has admitted it was wrong over the council tax (so we're just awaiting a correction) but still believes that the first part of this sentence is ok "A cut of 0.2 per cent in disposable income might not feel too painful to the average family but the real hit is much harder".
There are various definitions of average, and certainly the mean is one of them. But it's a real horses-for-courses thing. It would have been ok to use the mean if the sentence had read "A cut of 0.2 per cent in familes' average disposable income might not..." but not if it reads "to the average family". Taken in this context, where 'average' is meant to mean 'typical' then you should use the median. The average family has the median income, just like it has the median number of children rather than 2.3.
Obviously there are no hard and fast rules to follow. But we must appeal to common sense, as William Hague might say. To use the mean means that the 'average' family (wrt income changes) lies in the top 20% of the income distribution, which makes no sense at all.
posted by Matthew @ 4/04/2005 08:27:00 AM
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