It depends on the distribution. The reason it is often used is when there are extremes in the distribution like a handful of people paying $1B per year on a property pulls the mean upwards.

Also depends whether you can about the middle more than the 10-20% of the people most struggling who can earn much less than the mean or median

The median alone doesn't paint the whole picture. We need to compare the spread as well. The median doesn't care if you make just under the median, or $1 a month.

Certainly better then the mean....

When it comes to income and wealth, I don't think so. There aren't enough people in the middle ground between rich and poor for that to be a meaningful stat for most things.

That's the thing or at least one thing. These discussions aren't about most small towns and cities in the Midwest. They're about prime areas on the coasts for the most part. Heck where I live about an hour west of Boston/Cambridge is a lot cheaper than the metro itself for the most part.

Well, it doesn't help but that's where the money is and as a society we should want people to move where they are most productive. Geoffrey West shows in Scale that social outcomes like GDP, patents, etc. but also crime grow with a factor of 1.15 while infrastructure needs like pipes, wires, heating cost, gas stations, etc only shake with a factor of 0.85. So it should be highly desirable to have larger, denser cities. Unfortunately, it seems that once the boomers had stepped into adult hood and bought there first homes, we decided that cities are complete now and existing neighborhoods shall not change anymore.

so many projects got nerfed by NIMBYs during good economic times and now are infeasible. there's more political will for change now but i'm still skeptical things will change much given the cost of construction in major metros.

Thank you for linking what I was too lazy to link.

To add, politics usually responds to Baumol by subsidizing demand and/or more regulation. Needles to say both make it worse. Article: https://www.niskanencenter.org/cost-disease-socialism-how-su...