Call You and Yours: Curbing pensioner benefits

Frank it's not about a figure being correct - and yes the mean ( correct word ) is calculated by adding up all the individual values and dividing it by the number of cases - but it's about whether the figure is meaningful. So the median gives a better idea - as Greatnan says, means can be really misleading.Deliberately do in some cases. One measure of how representative a mean is, is to look at the range between the lowest and highest values- the larger that gap, the less helpful the mean.

Hi Absent.....remember when Brown raided the pensions and stole millions off the workers,and I was one of them then,well you lot ,lest you ever forget,it was the Labour government and the Labour party that stole all that from you all....and now you are all in the crap,including myself...hooray for the Labour party ..I don`t think.

greatnan I've just seen your maths thing. In your example the median and the mean seem to be the same, £270,000.

Is that usually the case?

No, petallus, the median would be the actual figure that was in the middle, so it would only work for odd numbers of items. The mean is what we usually call the average, ie. add up all the numbers then divide that total by the number of items. Here is an example

2, 3, 7, 8, 9,9, 11.

Median = 8, the figure in the middle.
Mode = 9 as it occurs most frequently
Mean/average: 49 divided by 7 = 7.

Because I used figures that are close together, the three are quite similar, but if I had thrown in a couple of large numbers it would have skewed the results so much they would be meaningless.

Petallus - here is a visual image - imagine all the people in the list standing in a line, in the order of their amount, richest at one end, poorest at the other. The median amount is what the the middle person in the line has.

Now collect all the money from them all , add it together and share it out equally so that they all get the same amount. that is the average.

If you have three people with a lot of money, and two with hardly any, the median will be quite high. If you average it all out, the average is clearly higher than the median.

(Before anyone tells me that my explanation is simplistic and patronising, I must add that many people can see a concrete example faster than they do a mathematical one)

I now understand. Whether I will say the same tomorrow, I'm not sure!

I did teach pupils with learning difficulties.

Thank you everyone - very useful.

Frank, yes, there are quite a lot of people with occupational pensions in excess of their state pensions, but nowhere near enough to bring average pensioner incomes up to 23,000 a year. Many state pensioners, particularly women, have a pension well below the basic state pension rate and even if their occupational pension is more than that, it is still not very much.

FlicketyB

What the person said was income from all sources.
This could include interest on savings, share dividends and in some cases equity release which has been used to buy annuities.
Of course there are many widows around receiving half of their late spouses occupational pensions. My father got half of my late mother's occupational pension and I get half of my late wife's occupational pension.
I think it may be a moot point to regard equity release as income but it may have been included.

Frank

So does that mean Hunter that my spending of DH's pension would be included in my income?

Hi Movedalot

I am assuming your husband is still alive so any money he gets will be his for statistical purposes and any money you get is yours.
In my case my wife has passed away and I am paid half of her pension so her pension and my pensions will all belong to me and would count as the income of 1 person.

Frank

But I have always considered his income to be mine to spend! In our, successful, marriage we each do what we are best at. In this case he has been better at earning it and I have been better at spending it.

Movedalot

All women are like that. In all fairness they do earn money but they do like me to spend money on my 4 granddaughters in particular.
I keep on telling them I am a poor pensioner but they will not have that.

Frank

Hunterf , wonder why on earth they think that .

Hope you do not go around saying "me, poor man "

'All women are like that'.......now, Frank, you are going to spoil the whole joke if you go too far!

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