pooka said:
Yup - hence the use of the median (although for any stable distribution there will be a characteristic relationship between the mean and the median)
Useful link though, thanks for that.
Sorry but the median also doesn't (IMO) represent the "typical" resident either. The typical resident is represented far better by the "mode".
The bell curve of the UK population can be seen here:
Institute of Fiscal Studies, "Poverty and Inequality in Britain, 2004"
http://www.ifs.org.uk/inequality/comm96.pdf
Look at page 17, figure 2.1
You can clearly see that the bell curve is skewed to the left (more poor than rich), which means that:
mean = £396pw (20,592 pa)
median = £323pw (16,796 pa)
mode = £230pw (11,960 pa)
I would argue that the mode is the highest point on the bell curve and is therefore the most "typical".
Using this graph I would propose four categories:
"Dirt Poor" (bottom 10%) = less than £110 pw (£5,720 pa)
"Poor" (below median) = £110 pw up to £16,796
"OK" (above median) = £16,796 to £33,800
"Rich" (top 10%) = £33,800 plus
It's worth noting that a single young person on JSA (c.£50) and HB (c.£60) would just be on £110 pw, although they would be having to survive on £7 per day after rent. An older person on Disability Benefits or with dependents might be getting c.£80 plus c.£70 (HB) so would be on £150 pw. It is worth noting however that there are plenty of people who don't get the benefits owed to them for many reasons and a lot of people who are barely scraping by. It often doesn't help much if you get part-time or low paid work since you will often lose benefits and free services and often you get hit with emergency tax codes or an agency or company will screw around with hours and pay. Many people are self-employed and so don't have regular income, and they may well be paying off large debts on basic items such as furniture etc. The bottom line is that there are a vast number of people who are nowhere near a financial comfort zone - in fact I'd say the bulk of the population. If £20,000 is really a 'comfort level' then only 33% of people live in households like this, in Inner London the figure is lower, and in Lambeth this figure will probably be even lower. £20k therefore probably puts you into the top 20% of the Brixton population, although this is complicated massively by the whole issue of housing and propery ownership. It probably isn't any wonder that poor people who have exercised a RTB or have otherwise obtained/got a mortgage on/inherited a property in Brixton are cashing in the value and moving out to a less trendy area.
NB: This is actually an "equivalent household income" figure so it will be different depending on how many adults and children are in the household. The Institute of Fiscal Studies has also got a link for people to calculate "Where Do I Fit In?":
www.ifs.org.uk/wheredoyoufitin
I would therefore say that in a UK context £20,000 is middle class and halfway on its way to 'rich', and in the context of Lambeth, where the population is much poorer than the UK average, £20,000 puts you firmly in a "rich" category, whichever way you look at it. I can only assume that people tend to only notice people who are richer than them, normally because that is what they aspire to, or are envious of. Having said that, with average house prices being super-ridiculous, you really need to be firmly in the top few percent of the population to be able to afford to buy a house in Lambeth, and with all the tax, bills, loss of benefits, long working hours and congestion on the public transport, I doubt that the extra money actually translates into that much higher quality of life. Time to ask some serious questions about the current economic model, and the "conventional wisdom" of the big three political parties maybe?
