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Comment by cwbuilds | Hacker News Reader

That's income, not disposable income. It's also median, instead of mean. It's also wrong. Median income in the UK is £39,039 which is about $49,500.. You linked to the US Wikipedia page twice.

OECD is the source for disposable income.

US: https://oecd-better-life-index.truth-and-beauty.net/countrie...

UK: https://oecd-better-life-index.truth-and-beauty.net/countrie...

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Yeah, OECD is saying the mean disposable income is the US is almost the same as median household income.

Either some of the numbers are wrong, or your (OECD’s) use of mean is misleading… the mean of Bezos’ and my disposable incomes is a very large and mostly useless figure.

Mean personal disposable income being comparable to median household income isn't too surprising and doesn't necessarily indicate any error. Mean is much higher than median, individual is much lower than household, disposable is much lower than total. You are comparing numbers that are different in all three axes (in ways which do not point in the same direction), so really any relationship between them would be plausible without detailed knowledge of the exact distribution of all the relevant components.

They're completely different metrics. If you want to compare median income:

UK - $49,500 (https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/personal...)

US - $83,750 (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N)

I'm struggling to understand what you're trying to prove other than that you don't understand statistics.

Point is the median person earns about the same as the mean disposable income. So the mean disposable income isn’t telling us too much about the quality of life, or financial state, of a typical American. From what I’m seeing, it’s just reflective of our increasing income disparity.

Taken to an absurd degree… the mean of my income and Jeff Bezos’ income tells is nothing about my income beyond “much less than Jeff”.

Okay, well the ratio of mean disposable income for the US to the UK is 1.59:1, while the ratio of median income is 1.69:1

So your preferred metric for quality of life actually shows a greater disparity between the two countries..

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