For average age and average income what measures are more commonly used?
Thanks in advance.
It's a pretty open-ended question, and there are whole classes on the subject, but in short, there are two answers. "Average" is usually synonymous with mean. However, particularly with income, median…
Well said Bernie. All I would add is that sometimes it makes sense to use income per capita, a sort of average, if you want to know how much money is floating around compared to population. it an be a shorthand…
OK, it looks like there are zero? tables that have mean age, only median age. Is this true? If not give me a table name. Or a link to a good conspiracy website about why this is the case. Is Julia Roberts safe? What should we do?
Dear Tom,
You can get the mean age using B01001 Sex x Age. To get an approximation of the mean age (you should do males and females separately). Multiply the number of people by the middle of the B01001 age category and add them up across age categories. The only issue is the "85 and over" age category. For that you need to know the life expectancy for an 85 year old male (in the case of males) For Massachusetts that is 5.3. So for the 85+ category use 90.3 to multiply by the number of 85+ year old males and add that in. After you add everything up divide by the total number of males (for the male calculation) For 85 year old females in Massachusetts the life expectancy is 6.3 years So use 91.3 as the "midpoint" for the 85+ year old females. As you can see you need a computer package to do the calculation. The state life tables where you look up the life expectancy of 85 year olds (by state and sex) is located here: https://ftp.cdc.gov/pub/Health_Statistics/NCHS/Publications/NVSR/71-02/ If you want to skip doing everything by state, use the overall US life table for males and females. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr71/nvsr71-01.pdf page 2. The mean age is relevant for insurance payout calculations, for example the expected total social security payments for the current population.
Thanks for the info.
So truthfully (practically) you can't get the mean age. I think the same can be said about Life Expectancy and mean age at death etc. There is absolutely no valid reason for the Census not to include it and for the various websites that have it listed and are sometimes different, and some of them use a package they don't fully understand and are "not sure it's 100% correct" (I've had some interesting phone calls).
Long story short, just stick with the median age, lesson learned. Other windmills to fight.
The calculation that I gave you assumes "static" population dynamics for the tail of the age distribution and that the 85+ population for the local area "looks the same" i.e. has the same distribution as the country (or state) overall. The reason that the census tables for smaller areas "cut off" at 85 years is disclosure avoidance.