Radford Neal wrote:
> As another poster has said, one reason is technical convenience. A
> more fundamental reason, though, is that the median is probably not
> the best thing to look at, whatever you might have been taught. What
> to look at depends not just on the shape of the distribution, but also
> on what your purpose is. Ask yourself whether there are very many
> purposes for which it would make no difference if the upper 49% of the
> incomes were doubled, leaving the median unchanged.
If one assumes that that *could* happen, then no single summary
statistic will be of much use - one is implicitly assuming a very
general family of models.
-Robert Dawson
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