Average Income (2008)
The average income is around $45,000.00 per household. The typical home has two people working for around $22,500.00 each. The data is always a bit skewed. A lot of income doesn't get reported for tax reasons and a lot of people make millions and that skews the data upward.
To get an average, you add up all the income and divide it by the number of people. Since the top 3% make more money than the other 90% it skews the data upwards by a lot.
If you take the mean, you get closer to the truth. The mean is taken by arranging all the wages in a horizontal line. Then, you pick the one that is right in the middle. That is the mean. The mean is also skewed and doesn't quite show the real incomes of people. One reason is that there could be lots and lots of zeros on the lower side of the mean. For this very reason, the data set must be studied by a human to get a real idea of what is going on.
Some researchers will throw out the overly high or overly low data to get a better average or mean. However, most statistics show the average. It makes people feel better because it is always skewed upwards by the billionaires and such.
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