Lies, damned lies, and statistics. Well, what about damned statistics that are meant to mislead people into incorrect conclusions?
I happened upon a passage in this weekend’s Parade Magazine that made me nearly foam at the mouth. The piece was challenging the notion that the United States was the “World’s Richest Nation,” as though everyone really believed it was anyway. There are countries with a higher median household income, and even a higher per-capita GDP! (Gasp. Let’s all give up and eat cheese.)
This is the paragraph that got me boiling:
Income inequality also is greater in the U.S. than in other developed nations, and some economists believe that makes us more vulnerable to hitting the skids than the rest of the world. “Low-wealth children are unlikely to become high-wealth adults, while high-wealth children are very likely to become high-wealth adults,” says Dalton Conley of the Center for American Progress, a Washington think tank. “That should sound alarms for policymakers.”
Alarms? I’ll tell you what alarms me…
- Why is it assumed that income inequality is a bad thing? Incomes are equal in undeveloped socialist states. “The trees were all kept equal with hatchet, axe and saw.” Income inequality can be a sign that varying levels of input (sweat and brains) will give you varying levels of results.
- “Some” economists. Really? Who? Let’s get more stringent with that attribution. I’ll bet there are “some” economists who think the earth is flat, or who think we faked the moon landing.
- Poverty is relative. A child born into a family on the U.S. poverty line has a standard of living (nutrition, air conditioning, square footage of abode, etc.) that is equal to the average European.
- “Low-wealth children are unlikely to become high-wealth adults.” This, on its face is true. Nowhere on the planet are low-wealth children likely to become high-wealth adults. That is not unique to the United States, nor to capitalist democracies.
- The Center for American Progress is a think tank – and “think tanks” are usually in the tank for whichever ideology is footing the bill.
#4 is the piece that really turned me red. As it happens, a child born “poor” in the U.S. has a greater chance of moving into the top income levels than in any other country. Conversely, a child born “rich” in the U.S. has a better chance of dropping down in status – not because of risk, but because if you just sit on your money and don’t work, others will take advantage of opportunities to surpass you.
It’s like saying that a baseball player “is unlikely to reach base on the next attempt.” Well, duh. If you consistently hit .300, you can be an All-Star. If we had a bet where every time Albert Pujols had a base hit I gave you a dollar, and every time he made an out you gave me a dollar, I’d win! The issue here isn’t raw outcome, it’s comparative. And compared to the rest of the world, there is more fluidity in our wealth. Our rich are more likely to get poor than Luxembourg’s rich, and our poor are more likely to get rich than Denmark’s poor.
Content without context is a spinmeister’s best friend. We’d be better served if more people were trained in critical thinking – the internal alarms that go off when information is offered with big gaping holes.
[tags]Ike Pigott, Occam’s RazR, Economics, income, Parade, spin[/tags]
Patrick McGoohan created what may have been television’s first and only classic piece of art, The Prisoner. His enigmatic protagonist – a spy who knew too much – was never given a name. In an effort to strip down his psyche and find out why he quit, his tormentors tried to bust him down to just a number. In his case, Number Six.
McGoohan’s Number Six fell into a situation he could not escape. Trace the numeral from top to bottom and you end up in a loop. There’s something about that interpretation that seems to resonate with most “Prisoner” fans I’ve shared that with. McGoohan himself might not even be aware. The point here is that symbols and shapes do carry powerful meaning (and I highly recommend a parallel track with Joseph Campbell, author of “The Power of Myth” among other works.)
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The local paper seems chock-full of real estate ads. But according to her teachers down at the MLS university, those listings are simply vestigial, like little toes we all have but probably don’t need for balance or, indeed, for anything at all. Real estate brokers put ads in local newspapers because their customers expect them to do so, not because they actually help sell houses.