Michael

The Guardian is using data that only includes "full time" workers. Usually international organizations (World Bank, OECD, etc.) don't use individual incomes but household incomes for comparisons since it is much easier to skew the results for individual incomes and if individual incomes are used, it doesn't account for things such as job participation rates. France has a high individual income for full time workers but a low job participation rate so their "median" household income is not high. However in the US, the "median" household income is accepted to be about $52,000 but someone always gets that to be about $70,000 which is a figure that some use to make a point. The figure probably gets to about $70,000 by eliminating households that don't have reported incomes and/or only have government social benefits income (retirees and the poor). Another document had US wages at about $10.50 per hour which would seem impossible unless both the husband and wife in many households worked more than 40 hours per week and/or have a large source of unearned income to get to the $52,000 per year median household income.

When calculating incomes, unless you know what is being included or excluded, it is hard to determine what it is referring to. If unearned income is excluded, the figures will be different than if it is included. No one statistic accurately portrays everything. Even in the table from Wikipedia, the "median" was lower and the "mean" was higher than your provided figures and without full disclosure, neither may be represent what someone is trying to determine.

It probably depends on what you are looking for depends on which statistic you want to use and in the case of the original OP, the Guardian figures might be better to use.

J.JsOH

Hmmm, now where is that Ignore Button again, ah, here it is.......

BristolUK

Somewhere on this forum in the last year or so (I think) I posted information from the Guardian that suggested about half the UK were earning around £22k or less.

Michael

The following are the median household incomes and average wages for 2011/2012. It seems weird that average disposable wages generally exceeds median disposable household incomes but that is what averages can do.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_household_income
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_wage

cheers

For what its worth, the hardest class for me in University was Statistics, which is what you are talking about.

I've been jealous at the incomes in the UK because they are higher than in the US, for the most part, but there maybe a correction coming because the pound is now slipping against the dollar in the last few weeks.

Cheers