Average V Median wage Ireland?

The number of FT workers can be based on aggregated data e.g. Company A reports that they have 57 FT workers and 13 PT workers. Do this for every employer and you would then be able to get a FT figure with no, or virtually no link to the individual.

As I have told you above, the number of full time workers is estimated from a household sample survey. Therefore the idea that each of them is an identifiable person is nonsense.

It took me about a minute of googling to find where the figure of 1.8 million FT workers came from. The CSO show their methodology here:

As you can see it is based on a quarterly survey of a sample of private households.

“Survey Size: 

The original quarterly sample 26,000 households has been increased incrementally by 1,300 households from Q3 2017 to account for the additional attrition as a result of the introduction of mixed mode data collection. This has resulted in a total sample of 32,500 from Q3 2018 onwards.”

Eurostat publish median annual earnings data for FT workers.

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/labour-market/earnings/database

In 2018, the figure is 40,074.

EARN_SES_ANNUAL

So we know what median annual earnings are in 2018.

Back in February, I said:

In 2018 for all workers, the median was 36k when the mean was 44k. Based on that, I would think the median for full time workers must be in the region of 38 to 41K. I don't think its possible for CSO to calculate a median as they base their data on aggregate data from employers. They van do it for all employees by using Revenue data.

Do you ever give up? Nobody ever said most Irish workers earn the mean salary.

Just to point out again that the median figure reported above is based on survey data collected by the CSO. The methodology used has been explained previously and will be the best that we have available.

It is also difficult to know what effect the pandemic will have on the median wage. If people lost their jobs or moved to part time they would be removed from the FT survey.

Would it be reasonable to think that a higher percentage of lower paid workers would have been affected? E.g. restaurant staff, hairdressers etc. The effect that PUP and other payments could make it even more difficult to work out. In reality though I would think that more people are worse off.

My point is that it is not the complete answer that you have claimed to be seeking all this time. It is based on the survey data obtained by the CSO, with all of the caveats that have been highlighted previously. This is not a different set of data, but is as good an answer as we will get.

I now see some more information on the SES in Ireland:

The survey size is 50,000 workers.

Here is a chart of earnings distribution in 2018:

It's not a particularly enlightening comment = the median is one kind of average, the others being the mean and the mode. I'm not sure what it means to say that that the median "is reflective of the average earnings" but, whatever it means, it must be equally true to say that the mean is reflective of the average earnings, and that the mode is reflective of the average earnings. Which is not a lot of help.

Probably he would have done better not to have used the word "average" at all in this context. I suspect he meant something like "median earnings may be a more reflective figure of the typical/usual earnings of employees in the economy or sector".

Whether you go with the mean, the median or the mode, most workers do not earn that figure - they earn either more or less than that figure. But if the individual worker wants to know how he is faring, relative to others in the economy or to others in his his sector, then the median for the economy or the sector is the most meaningful average figure for him.

The mean, the median and the mode all exist, and are used, because they are all useful in different ways. As I said, if you want to judge how you yourself are doing relative to other workers, the median is useful. But if you are looking at labour costs in the economy overall, the mean is much more relevant. Politicians tend to be looking at the bigger picture - the health of the overall economy, more than the welfare of the individual household - and so the mean will cross their desk/turn up in their briefings far more often. But voters listening to politicians tend to be focussed on their own situation. Hence the frequent misunderstandings.

The solution, as identified about a zillion posts ago, is not to compel politicians to quote median figures, since to do their jobs properly they should in fact be focussed mostly on mean figures. It's to educate people about what the mean does and doesn't represent.

Pretty much from the get-go you've been banging on about how politicians use the mean figure - I think you first raise the point in post 3. The whole reason you've been looking for a median figure is because you think quoting the mean suggests that most workers earn close to the mean.

I'm basically quoting you, from the fifth post in this thread:

"What I meant was that by using the average instead of the median, politicians give the impression most people are doing better than they are because people believe that average means most and politicians know that . . . .

The politicians proudly trot out statements suggesting that most workers earn nearly 50k pa - in truth, the vast majority of workers earn nothing like that figure"

Are you saying now that what you said then was actually gobbledygook?

I don't see that the statement is gobbledygook - it seems to me a fairly accurate summation of your position (but feel free to correct me, of course). Your quest for the median figure was prompted by your annoyance at the widespread quotation by politicians of the mean figure, which - you thought - either intentionally or unintentionally created a false impression of what most people earn. Am I wrong?

I quoted what you said, and I'll quote it again:

"What I meant was that by using the average instead of the median, politicians give the impression most people are doing better than they are because people believe that average means most and politicians know that . . . .

The politicians proudly trot out statements suggesting that most workers earn nearly 50k pa - in truth, the vast majority of workers earn nothing like that figure"

So, you said that the politicians statements quoting the mean suggest that most workers earn nearly the mean. What you wrote seems fairly clear to me; if there's another way to understand it I'm not seeing what it is.

I quoted two sentences of yours. Two sentences is a "long passage" now? It's no wonder you're having difficulty keeping up with your own arguments.

"Nearly the mean" is my paraphrase of your language, "nearly 50k pa". It seemed fairly obvious in the context that you chose the figure of nearly 50k because that's the mean. Maybe you chose it for some other, more obscure, reason. If so, you have so far stoutly resisted the temptation to say what the figure signifies or, despite explicit invitation, to explain what it was you were trying to say in that post.

All you've said so far is that I have misunderstood your position in that post, but the claim would be a bit more plausible if you were to offer what you consider to be the correct understanding of your position in that post.

I've given up. Maybe you'd be as well doing the same.