[balance_factor]

Different things can be shown by different measurements. Income disparity in Brazil is high, so you have a few people like Jorge Paulo Lemann worth tens of billions of dollars, and then a lot of poor people. So per capita GDP there is more an indication of how he is doing than everyone else (GDP divided by population).

One metric we can use is hours worked per week. Obviously, the less hours of required work needed, the better for the average worker. Of course measurements like this are not the focus of many blog posts. And you yourself are probably deficient in this respect to many hunter-gatherer bands, who do less than 40 hours of work per week. They spend the rest of their time in leisure activities. Marshall Sahlins "Stone Age Economics" goes into this. You yourself are probably required to work more hours per week than native people in Polynesia and other areas.

[frandroid]

"Worth" is a product of accumulation over many years. GDP is a yearly measure. So you should compare Lemann's yearly income to per capita GDP.

Then once you start looking at individual incomes, you can look at the median income rather than the average income. Could be interesting to compare GDP per capita (which is an average) with the mean income, but I don't know if that's another apples to oranges.

As for number of hours worked, that's more a feature of the economic system and culture than wealth. We're so wealthy and so much is automatized compared to the middle ages that we could provide for everyone's basic needs with 15 hours of work a week or something, but we've decided that we need cars and cell phones and new clothes every year, and we've turned homes into investment vehicles, so we need to work more.

[chiaro]

>Obviously, the less hours of required work needed, the better for the average worker.

This isn't obvious at all. Because of increased capital (skills, knowledge, labor-saving and output-multiplying machinery and technologies) an hour of my work is worth, in real terms, more in a contemporary society than were I to be raised in a h/g society. The net marginal benefit of an additional hour of work is a factor of both this, and the value of leisure time.

With the capital, human and otherwise, at most of our disposal, anyone here could subsist on a native polynesian standard of living with considerably less work than a native polynesian.

[Retric]

Brazil has 207.7 million people. One guy making even 5 billion $ per year is only 25$ per person worth of GDP.

[ComputerGuru]

In a country like Brazil, there are people that would very desperately like those $25 precisely because of aforementioned disparity.

But that's the problem with a naive metric like GDP, which suffers from every documented problem with arithmetic mean.

Median income would paint a starkly different picture for the likes of India and Brazil.

[Retric]

Brazil is actually ranks in the top half of country's by per capita earnings at 8,840. http://databank.worldbank.org/data/download/GNIPC.pdf

The median income is a little over half that at ~4,800$ per year. But no single person or family's income when distributed among the population would change that much.

[pyromine]

Either way, mean (as in per capita GDP) is probably not the best measure of central tendency for showing how the typical person lives.

[Retric]

GDP is less about what the average person has than it is the capabilities of a given society. Liechtenstein may have a very high standard of living, but it can't exactly fund a space program with a ~6 billion dollar GDP.

Also, median also has issues dealing with things like the US's vast undocumented workforce. So, you really want to slice things up by income percentile, family type, PPP and non etc.

[ComputerGuru]

Median is a mathematical concept that doesn't know or care about a person's immigration status.

The dataset plugged in and the mathematical operation performed on it are two distinct concepts and shouldn't be confused. It's the same reason the IRS lets undocumented citizens and documented citizens performing unsavory work (including drug dealing and prostitution) to file taxes :)

[Retric]

My point is if 50.01% of the population makes 50+k then that's where the median is. You completely miss out on if the bottom 10% making 10k or 30k which has huge social implications.

For an extreme version southern slaves made ~0 income but because they made up less than 50% of the population they disappeared from that statistic.

[ComputerGuru]

The dollar amount of the earnings that are under 50% of the population disappears in the statistic, but they are not unrepresented.

Their presence in the tally means that the median skews their way. For each undocumented person earning under minimum wage, the median shifts one person over to the left.

I agree that there should be a better way of displaying that info (at least quartiles) but the median is a surprisingly effective measure.

[wruza]

I'm pretty sure statistics people know good analytical formats to publish these values. Why everyone doesn't use it for GDP/etc is unclear to me, because it seems to me that any flawed method is still better than `arr.sum() / arr.count()`.