[xhrpost]

Median is $2,300 which brings this into perspective a bit more.

http://www.valuepenguin.com/average-credit-card-debt

[conception]

Thanks for this. Was about to go nuts about how useless an average is on this sort of thing.

[nostrebored]

Well the median is an average so...

And honestly both averages should be presented together, paints a terrifying picture

[theandrewbailey]

Median is the middle value of all values in a sequence. Average is the sum of all numbers in a sequence, divided by the count of values.

Take [0,2,100]: average is 34, but median is 2.

[trentmb]

nostrebored is just pointing out that the median and arithmetic mean are both averages.

[nostrebored]

I'm being needlessly pedantic, but yeah.

[ArkyBeagle]

Median != mean. Usually, "average" is expected value, or mean.

[LeifCarrotson]

You're thinking of the mean.

[gnaritas]

Both median and mean are averages.

[gcr]

The median of a list of numbers is the value that minimizes the sum of absolute differences to each value, sum([abs(median - x) for x in list])

The average of a list of numbers is the value that minimizes the sum of squared difference to each value, sum([squared(mean - x) for x in list])

They're both summary statistics in that they're single numbers used to describe a dataset, but a median is not a "kind of average." The mean is the mean and nothing else.

[gnaritas]

Incorrect, median, mean, and mode are all types of averages. Usually when people say average they mean the mean, but they're all different kinds of averages trying to identify the central tendency.

"Average: a number expressing the central or typical value in a set of data, in particular the mode, median, or (most commonly) the mean, which is calculated by dividing the sum of the values in the set by their number." -- Google