Interestingly, your other argument does apply here. It's inappropriate to use the mean for world average income because it's inflated by very high earners. Ver

Interestingly, your other argument does apply here. It's inappropriate to use the mean for world average income because it's inflated by very high earners. Very high earners (outliers) have a disproportionate effect on the mean that makes it unrepresentative. Imagine if salaries were ${1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1000000} Then the mean average would be $200000 - but you could not claim this represents most people. The median is $1, which is more fairly representative. As with any skewed distribution, the standard way to measure average income is by using the median. There is broad agreement in official figures to use the median. The BBC article is wrong to use the mean: the journalist appears to be confused in comparing the mean (which she calculates) to the median (standard published figure) and then claiming the difference results from patchy stats.