Adding apples and pears at the table can be legitimate if you cut them into pieces because you are preparing a fruit salad. It will be a bit bland, but go ahead. In journalism, on the other hand, it is a fast track to intentional indigestion. The stomach ache of the day was provided by El Economista with this headline: “The current average pension exceeds the most frequent salary in Spain by 40%”. Take that, it’s from Reus. Comparing two heterogeneous statistical magnitudes like an average and a modal value is a criminal necessity. The most common salary in Spain is 15,574 euros per year, as we are told, but it should be compared with the average salary, which is 27,558 euros, according to the latest available data. Therefore, the headline that would shed light on the darkness would be the one that says that average pensions (21,935 euros) are 20.4 below the average salary. Wanting to make people believe that retirees earn 40% more than active workers can only be due to bad faith, besides it doesn't say much good about the consideration that the media has for its readers.
The modal salary – that is, the most frequent one – plummeted suddenly in 2021 when thousands upon thousands of jobs destroyed during the pandemic related to hospitality and other precarious sectors were recovered. At the same time, the average pension is rising as baby boomers, with long contribution periods, reach retirement age. But the article in El Economista wants to install the idea that pensioners are rolling in it when the reality is that more than half earn below the interprofessional minimum wage. There is no published modal data, but knowing this, it is not rash to infer that it must be around 1,000 euros per month. The pension system has well-known sustainability problems, but there is no need to use mathematical tricks to explain it, nor to mix apples, pears, and oranges.
