this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2026
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Above a certain point in wealth one's income is basically a slice of the wealth everybody produces, so the more the people the more wealth in aggregated they produce, the faster these types increase their wealth.
It's the reason why countries' GDPs are quoted as a whole rather than per-capita basis - whilst per-capita is what matters to most people as individuals (ideally the median rather than the mean), for those in power and the local elites it's the entire country's GDP that matters because their power and wealth is linked to the whole quite independently of how many people are producing it (think of it this way: market dominance, political influence, Press control and other forms of controlling how much wealth one gets are mainly country-specific or at least have less "power transmission" between countries than they do inside countries, so given that those tools to extract a slice of country-wide wealth are mainly country-specific, more people in that country means more returns from having such tools).
For the very rich immigration is always desirable even when importing people with lower formal education and less well integrated than the locals - even if the average productivity goes down (and hence per-capita GPD) because the newer, less expert and less well integrated workers, produce less wealth per-person that those already in the local worker pool, for those getting a slice of the aggregated wealth produced in a country even a little more from lower productivity workers, is always more for them.
Probably a really stupid question, but why is the median used for wealth and GDP rather than the mean (with the top and bottom sliced out)?
The wealth distributions are so called "normal" statistical distributions (basically a peak in the middle with a low on each side), so most people are at and around the central peak whilst only a few people are at the extremes, and in these the median which is at the top of the peak tells you the most common situation. Meanwhile for wealtht the mean is just mathematically the total wealth divided by the number of people.
In other words, the median tells you the most common situation, whilst the mean tells you how much is the total wealth divided by the total number of people (for wealth a purelly mathematical value which doesn't really represent any human situation).
(Edit: changed maths below for clarity)
An example - if there are 10 people with 1 chicken each and 1 person with 100 chickens
Going back to wealth, one stupidly rich person and a lot of very poor people produces a mean were they're all supposedly middle-class - which is not at all representative of the wealth of most people - whilst it produces a median which says the most common situation is to be poor.
This extreme example, by the way, is very close to the situation in the US - most people in America are (according to some OECD data somebody posted here a couple of days ago) poorer than for example the Portuguese (pretty much the tail of Europe), but the mean of wealth for America says that per-capita Americans are almost 3x as wealthy than the Portuguese, and the reason for this is that America is WAY more unequal than Portugal, so whilst most Americans are poorer than most Portuguese, the small fraction at the top which is the upper-middle class in America is much better off that the same in Portugal and a handful of Americans at the very top are incredibly more wealthy than the wealthiest Portuguese.
Thank you very much for going out your way to do this explanation. It’s something that’s bugged me for a while and I’ve not found a good explanation behind it.
I’m assuming based on this then the median often offers a better “reasonable” person in a given demographic and includes everyone, over mean with top and bottom excluded.
And obviously from your explanation median makes wealth comparisons between nations more accurate.
Well, median, mean and mode are all imperfect, but mean is by far the most imperfect because it ignores the distribution of values per data point (so in this case the distribution of wealth per individual) whilst median and mode do not and so tend to fall towards an indicative value (i.e. wealth level) around were the majority of cases are.
By the way, I made a mistake in my previous post and wealth is not a "normal distribution", though it is similar.
A normal distribution looks like this but the wealth distribution is not balanced on both sides since the upper tail of cases (i.e. the richer) is theoretically unbound, whilst the lower tail of cases is either bound (at $0 if debt is not included) or only goes up to a certain point if debt is included (basically only up to the point were people will lend money to other people).
Normal distributions (so, the Mathematical, perfectly balanced ones) have amongst other things the property that mean = median = mode so if wealth was a perfect normal statistical distribution then using the mean would not be a problem.