Average/Percentage/Absolute

A few weeks ago the announcement was made that deaths from Covid-19 in Queensland had exceeded those recorded during the Spanish Flu in 1919. As a percentage of the population I suspect the “score” is different.

Our entire population when entering school has lessons in both English and Arithmetic but kids aren’t taught (because it isn’t correct) that if you have one foot in a bucket of ice and the other in a bucket of boiling water then on the average you are “comfortable”.

The real estate market is dominated by numbers (of dollars that is) but the gold medal for misleading the public is a tussle between “average price” and “median price”. In the real estate world neither of these is very useful.

If we need to report on the sale of five houses in a particular street with sale prices of $1,000,000, $800,000, $400,000, $350,000 and $300,000, the average price is $570,000 and the median price is $400,000. (Good luck these days finding a house in a major city for under $800,000!).

Good luck too if you rely on either of those figures when planning to buy, or sell in that particular street.