alpharaposa: (Default)
alpharaposa ([personal profile] alpharaposa) wrote2009-02-09 05:52 pm
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political foo: lies, damned lies...

And statistics

Statistics can say nearly anything you want them to. It all depends on who's arranging the numbers, and what you've decided to measure.

[identity profile] silussa.livejournal.com 2009-02-10 02:06 am (UTC)(link)
And how clearly you define the terms...or not.

My personal favorite is "average"....there's THREE common types of averages, and they all may or may not give the same number. (mean, medium, and mode, for those interested)

[identity profile] xaq.livejournal.com 2009-02-10 04:59 am (UTC)(link)
Yeah, that first chart is definitely deceptive, especially if you don't take into account things like the fact that, since the population has gone up a fair amount, the number of people having jobs (and thus, having jobs to lose) has also gone up.


This is, ironically, one of the major life lessons I took from the Bible (Mark 12:38-44)...all in all, it's a game of percentages.