Word: medians
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Michael Kinsley hypothesizes that the typical American family will be handing down Social Security entitlements to their children as an inheritance [Feb. 9]. Using the same Federal Reserve data Kinsley cites, the median net worth of couples ages 65 to 74 in 2004 was $190,000, including housing assets. By definition of the term median, this value is far more representative of the typical American family than the average net worth of $691,000 he quotes--which is skewed higher by the wealthiest 10% of families. That recalculation, combined with the large decline in net worth for most Americans...
Home prices were down nearly 20% at the end of last year, according to two new reports. But there is plenty of further room to fall, say economists who forecast where the housing market is headed. The median sales price of existing homes fell to $175,400 in December, down 15.3% from a year earlier, according to the National Association of Realtors (NAR). And the S&P/Case-Shiller index shows that home prices in 20 cities fell 18.2% in November compared with the year before. Both measures make houses about as expensive as they were...
...valued, but we overshot on the way up, and it's very likely we'll undershoot quite a bit on the way down," says Patrick Newport, an economist at the analytics shop IHS Global Insight. His firm's forecast is for another 10% to 15% drop in NAR's median sales price before things start turning around next year - and that's assuming the economy begins growing again in the second half...
...calculate the ratio, Economy.com starts with the median price of a single-family home sold in a particular metro area, using data from the National Association of Realtors. That number then gets divided by what the average apartment would rent for over the course of a year, a number generated by the real-estate-research outfit Property & Portfolio Research. Since each metro area has its own characteristics - there's a lot more land to build on in Oklahoma City than there is in Oakland, Calif., for example - certain pockets of the country have naturally higher price-rent ratios than...
...findings reported in the new paper, it's the life-span numbers that are the most shocking. Among African elephants, zoo-born females live a median of 16.9 years in zoos, while those in the wild make it to a wizened 56. Asian elephants, the more endangered of the two species, live 18.9 years in captivity and 41.7 in the wild. A few superannuated wild elephants have actually reached their 70s, and in Kenya, from 30% to 50% of the noncaptive population hits at least 50. "So far," says Mason, one of the authors of the new study, published...