TITLE: Why is median age a better statistic than mean age?
QUESTION [5 upvotes]: If you look at Wolfram Alpha

or this Wikipedia page List of countries by median age

Clearly median seems to be the statistic of choice when it comes to ages.
I am not able to explain to myself why arithmetic mean would be a worse statistic. Why is it so?

REPLY [2 votes]: The best statistic to summarize a distribution depends upon the distribution and what you want to use it for.  For distributions that are nicely bell-shaped, the mean, median, and mode are close together and it doesn't matter.  For skew distributions the mean is out on the skew side from the median, but it still represents the expected value of the average of a large number of samples.  The median is closer to more of the individuals than the mean.  For stranger distributions no one number can provide a useful summary.