{"id":22960,"date":"2014-06-07T06:54:26","date_gmt":"2014-06-07T10:54:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/?p=22960"},"modified":"2014-06-07T08:41:50","modified_gmt":"2014-06-07T12:41:50","slug":"lying-with-graphs-and-statistics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/?p=22960","title":{"rendered":"Lying With Statistics"},"content":{"rendered":"

Investor’s Business Daily<\/a> posted an article about the recent discussion on wealth inequality in America. French economist<\/a> Thomas Piketty<\/a> has written a book called Class Warfare<\/span> in which he decries the unequal distribution of wealth<\/a> in America and calls for extreme taxing of the ‘rich.’<\/p>\n

The article includes the following chart and explanation:<\/p>\n

“There are transcription errors<\/a> from the original sources and incorrect formulas,” the FT noticed. “It also appears that some of the data are cherry-picked or constructed without an original source.”<\/strong><\/p>\n

But the bigger problem is that just looking at the actual data on U.S. inequality \u2014 using what is called the Gini<\/a> ratio, a measure of how incomes are dispersed across society \u2014 you can see Piketty’s thesis is wrong.<\/strong><\/p>\n

As the chart below shows, contrary to claims by left-leaning<\/a> economists such as Piketty, individual inequality hasn’t changed at all since 1960. But there has been an increase in household inequality.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Why? As economist Don Boudreaux and the website Political Calculations have noted, the changing composition and size of households<\/a> are the reason.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Households have shrunk markedly. Since 1960, the average size has plunged from more than 3.4 persons to about 2.55, Census data show. One-person households have nearly quintupled since 1960 and today make up nearly 30% of all households.<\/strong><\/p>\n

When charted, the household Gini ratio looks as if there is growing inequality. But in fact it shows that households are smaller, with fewer earners.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Our point is that using tendentious data to bolster a case for taking even more private-sector output for government use is dishonest at best.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

It is possible to make statistics say pretty much anything you want them to say. Mr. Piketty’s book is a current example of that fact.<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n
\"Enhanced<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Investor’s Business Daily posted an article about the recent discussion on wealth inequality in America. French economist Thomas Piketty has written a book called Class Warfare in which he decries the unequal distribution of wealth in America and calls for … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[50,1022,7660,7659,7661,7662,2561,285],"class_list":["post-22960","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-economic-inequality","tag-facebook","tag-gini-coefficient","tag-household","tag-piketty","tag-thomas-piketty","tag-twitter","tag-united-states"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22960","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=22960"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22960\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22964,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22960\/revisions\/22964"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=22960"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=22960"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightwinggranny.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=22960"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}