It's possible that median is a better measure of central tendency for those things. It also sounds like you're interpreting their use of 'average' as meaning median when you think that would make more sense, rather than asking them (and in fairness, I don't usually grill people on which measure they're thinking of when they say 'average' either). In my experience, people who actually understand the different measures of central tendency usually (on average, heheh) specify one explicitly. The rest of the population is probably only aware of arithmetic mean.
Largely agree, but it's hardly OP's fault. In my opinion this is one of the things we get by using 30 year old Operating System and there having been almost no innovation in that field for so long.
Much higher productivity demands for luxury products. If we want back to produce a variety of direct human edible vegetables the productivity would not be necessary at all. When you're raising corn, soybean and wheat for cattle then it's obviously a much bigger higher order problem.
we don't grow "for the sake of growing", there's plenty of poor people in the world that need that growth. Whether that growth reaches them is another story..
