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Comment by jamroom | Hacker News Reader

Being median income I have a feeling that the US median is "pulled up" significantly by the top .01% of earners in the US - I have a feeling they account for a far larger amount than the top .01% of German earners.

Also - this does not take into account additional costs such as healthcare that will pull down the US amount.

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I think you are mistaking median for mean. Mean gets pulled up, median doesn't. It's literally what the guy at 50% mark has.

Since this is the median and not the mean, it seems that the top .01% should have no impact or bias here.

The statistic here tells us that the person right in the middle of the American income distribution makes more than the person in the middle of the German income distribution, even when disregarding the actual incomes at other points in that distribution.

That's not how the median works though. You're thinking of mean.

It's not an average, it's a median. That is, there are as many people who have incomes higher than that as having incomes lower than that. How much higher is already inconsequential, a few may have astronomical incomes without affecting the median.

The definition of median is precisely that the top 0,1% affect it only 0,1%.

But household income is very tricky to measure and for example its unclear if they include health expenditure in exactly the same way

I’d have to dig into the numbers, but the wealthiest Americans get their income via capital gains and dividends, which I’m not sure would be included in those figures.

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