The average person at this BBQ makes $45 million
Ten neighbors at a backyard BBQ, with ordinary incomes. Watch what happens to the "average income at this party" when one very rich guest walks in — and what doesn't happen to the median.
Both numbers are legitimately "the average." The mean adds everything up and divides; the median is the middle person. With ordinary data they agree. Add one extreme value and the mean follows the outlier — a 500-fold jump — while the median moves from $80,500 to $87,000.
So when a headline says "average income rose," check which average. A rising mean can describe a town where one person got rich and everyone else got nothing. Incomes, house prices, net worth — anything with a few enormous values at the top — are exactly where the two averages tell completely different stories, and where the choice of which to report is itself a framing decision.
The ten BBQ incomes here are invented for a clean example (the real U.S. median household income was $80,610 in 2023, per the Census Bureau) — but the arithmetic is exact: these ten numbers plus one $500M outlier really do produce a $45.5M mean and an $87,000 median.