My wife has moved into head hunting lately and is getting a view of what people are earning in a range of jobs and I would suggest that the median is higher than what you have posted here. She has been very surprised at what some people earn in what she would have thought would have been much, much lower. It has opened her eyes to the reality of it and her own position.
I would also predict that when it comes to wealth, above the salary also comes in things like share options, which wouldn't appear in the salary calculation, nor would capital gains.
That in itself does not say much about the entire country. Is she in the HR department in some tech company? Surely, hers is a biased sample.
The median wage earner need not bother with such things. Very few nurses, supermarket managers or people like that are offered share options or anything like that.
The median is the middle position, not the average.
Here's the source:
https://www.stat.fi/meta/til/yskp_en.html
At the smaller agency she hired for all kinds of businesses, well-known tech too. In her current internal role it varies from the bottom to the top, and in headhunting, it is obviously at the higher end of the spectrum to warrant the time and effort involved.
Yes, you are right, the median wage earner need not bother, which is my point. Above the salary, there are host of other earning factors that come into play, which is why salary alone is not a good indicator. I would say that while average wealth has increased, it probably hasn't much at all for the lower 50%. The gap between just keeps increasing. People below the line worry about how much they get paid to be able to pay the bills, people above about how much their investments are worth and the ROI. I know people earning 6 figures in Finland and their investment returns are worth more.
Yet, if you look at the public tax data, there do not seem to be to many of these high earners.
The taxable incomes of everyone with a total income including earned income and capital gains exceeding €100k is published in the papers. I think it's a terrible practice exposing some of these people to envy or worse like making them preferred targets of scammers or worse. But it gives us a nice data set to draw upon.
Check this out, for example:
https://verokone.hs.fi/
The national median income was €24,766 in 2018. That includes all income earners, not only wage earners.
If you made €150,000 or six times the national median, you're in the top 1,31%.
That's an awfully flat distribution!
For example, in my region you'd be in the top 927 by earning a paltry combined €130,000 in earned income and capital gains. The population is 200,000 of out whom about 80% are presumably legal adults as in the entire country. So, out of roughly 160,000 people only 927 earned a little more than €10,000 a month.
https://www.iltalehti.fi/verokone