alt Hacker News> GDP per capita is an average. This means it does not align with the _median_ person, but with the average. I believe this is factual and undeniable.
That’s why I used the word “align” instead of the word “is.” If the ratio of mean to median is 1.3, if the mean doubles, the median also will double—the movement of the two values will be “aligned” even if one is offset from the other.
That means when you’re talking about the economic growth of a country, Poland in this case, the mean is a reasonable proxy for the median unless there has been a massive change in the ratio of the median to the mean.
From Cambridge dictionary:
> align: to be the same or similar, or to agree with each other; to make two things do this
But I get it, you are using it as correlation.
Still, if gdp per capita average is 130 and median is 100 (ratio is 1.3) there is a 30% difference. This is exactly why, even if they correlate they are not very similar aka they "do not agree with each other" as per the definition above. With your definition they "align".good enough for me. It aligns even better (more closely) to the median.