Why the published average wage always feels too high — the distribution is stretched to the right

Every year when average-wage stats come out, comment sections fill with the same reaction: "Nobody I know earns that much." That isn't a misperception; it comes from the very shape of salary data. Income distributions aren't normal (a symmetric bell). They are stretched long toward the right: people are packed densely at the bottom, while a thin tail of high earners stretches upward, fewer in number but with ever-larger amounts.

You can see that tail just by lining up this game's cards. A cafe barista at 26M KRW, an entry Grade-9 civil servant at 28M, a fried-chicken shop owner averaging 35M net — the crowd clusters at the bottom, while above them a top law-firm attorney at 200M, a corporate VP at 500M, and a top Korean actor at 1B per drama drag a long tail. The plain average of these twelve exceeds 140M KRW each. But line the twelve up by amount and the value sitting in the middle — the median — stays in the 50M range. The mean is nearly three times the median. One single person, the actor at 1B, hauled the whole average up.

That is the decisive difference between the mean and the median. The mean is swayed by extremes; the median, being "the person in the middle when you line everyone up," is blind to the tail. So the more a field contains a few ultra-earners, the more its average inflates upward and drifts away from what an ordinary person experiences. Putting the data into the cards, I saw this distortion reproduce clearly with just twelve jobs. It made me resolve to check, whenever I see an average-wage headline, whether a median is printed alongside it. The reason the National Tax Service's tax statistics and the Ministry of Employment and Labor's Survey on Labor Conditions by Employment Type publish percentiles (top 10%, median, etc.) next to the average is precisely so you read past this distortion.

Gross ≠ take-home — the contract number and the bank-account number differ

Second: the salaries on the cards are almost all gross figures. That's the nominal amount contracted with the employer, not the money that lands in your account. A Korean worker's take-home is what remains after the employee's share of national pension, health insurance, and employment insurance, plus income tax and local income tax, are deducted. It varies by bracket, but you won't be far off treating roughly 80–88% of gross as the cash you actually hold.

For instance, the card's Samsung junior developer at 55M KRW is gross; after deductions, monthly take-home commonly drops to around 3.8–4.0M KRW. The higher the salary, the wider this gap grows because of progressive tax. For bonus-heavy roles like a first-year Goldman Sachs analyst at $110K, the "base vs. total compensation (incl. bonus)" distinction stacks on top, so the same person's pay can nearly double depending on which basis you quote. That's exactly what the card's funFact means by "over $200K even in year one including bonuses."

Take-home also has a different texture by job type. A hospital nurse at 48M KRW can, as the card notes, see take-home rise above nominal thanks to night and overtime premiums; meanwhile a delivery rider at 36M or a US Uber driver at $40K personally bear insurance, equipment, fuel, and vehicle-maintenance costs, so real income falls sharply below nominal. That's why the Uber card's funFact pins the effective hourly rate at $10–15 after costs. The self-employed (a chicken-shop owner) figure is net income after rent, ingredients, and labor are stripped from revenue, so the gap between nominal revenue and real income is far wider than for an employee.

In short, four numbers hide inside the single word 'salary'

• Mean vs. median: within the same group, a mean far above the median signals a thin tail of high earners up top.
• Gross vs. take-home: subtract social insurance and tax from the contract figure to get the account figure — roughly 80–88%.
• Base vs. total comp: for roles heavy in bonuses, incentives, or stock options, the number splits by which basis you use.
• Revenue vs. net income: for the self-employed, freelancers, and platform workers, before- and after-cost are entirely different numbers.

If your guesses keep missing in this game, nine times out of ten you're mixing these four in your head. The impression that "this job pays a lot" is usually built from the upper tail (top tier) or a gross/total-comp basis, while the card often asks for the "average/median, gross nominal" figure. Just asking yourself once before guessing — "is the number I pictured a top-of-the-pile case, or an ordinary person?" — changes your hit rate.

Note: This game is an educational, interpretive tool for practicing how to read price and income data; it is not investment advice and does not promise guaranteed income for any job. The figures on the cards are representative values compiled from public statistics and sources — not statistics about the game's users.