[CLUE-Talk] Bowling for Columbine

[Timothy C. Klein]

* David Anselmi (anselmi at americanisp.net) wrote:
> Sean LeBlanc wrote:
> [...]
> >
> >"There are 30 million Americans living without enough food."
> >
> >Huh? How many Americans are there? 350 million? So, according to this
> >statement (without a cite, I noticed), there are just under 1 out of 12
> >people without enough food? I don't mean to whitewash the issue, but that
> >sounds just a *tad* inflated. And I thought conservatives were resorting to
> >hyperbole when they said that the media always seems to "discover" the
> >homeless and hungry in this country whenever there is a sitting Republican
> >president...
> >
> 
> 2000 census: 281.4 million Americans
> 
> I'm not sure how to read the poverty level numbers.  It seems to say 
> 33.9M (12%) of individuals are below the poverty level.  Poverty level 
> is an income on the order of $20k/year.  Does that mean those people 
> don't have enough food?

Remember, that $20k/year is for a family of four, if I remember
correctly.  It is *not* for a single person, at least it wasn't for the
era I have researched (the 1950s).  There also used to be an extreme
poverty level, which was something like half of the poverty level.  At
any level, though, one must be careful about assuming a correlation of
1 between hunger and poverty (although I would guess that the
correlation is *not* zero, there is some link).

The number should be adjusted for regional price differences, but an
interesting study would be to see how much difference it makes at the
low end.  For those of us on this list, who are probably mostly middle
class, regional cost of living really matters.  How much does
it hurt the bottom income classes of the US, though?  More?  Less?  I
don't know: perhaps tenement slum housing is cheap everywhere, perhaps
not.  Some parts of the Appalachians (sp?) have a very low cost of living,
but that doesn't seem to make the very poor any better off.

> Lies, damn lies, and statistics.

I hate this saying.  As a budding mathematician, I must say:  statistics
*never* lie.  People do, and sometimes people intentionally use
misleading statistics.  More often, people use the wrong statistical
measure for the task at hand.  The biggest problem, though, is a general
lack of understanding on the public's part of what the hell statistics
are for.  Often, a given statistic, if researched, is completely true.
The trouble is, the said research was total bullsh*t.  But most people
don't even ask the question:  how did you gather your data?  Rather,
they just take the numbers as 'truth.'

A lot of people at both ends (far left, far right) seem to miss the
fact that a statistical measure is only as valid as the research data
that gathered it.  They blindly follow whatever flawed study supported
their viewpoint.

Sigh.

Tim
--
==============================================
== Timothy Klein || teece at silverklein.net   ==
== ---------------------------------------- ==
== "Hello, World" 17 Errors, 31 Warnings... ==
==============================================