Silly Statistics!

“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”

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Mark Twain is famous for having said, “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics.”

Well, just to prove you can have a bit of fun with statistics have a look at this set of nonsense that came to me in an email a while ago.

They are a complete reversal of the usual figures which continually highlight the increasing world population and the problems that will cause in the future.

These numbers look at the world if it was scaled down to just one hundred people.

It might make you think or it might not.

But it is a new way of looking at population statistics, so I hope you enjoy them anyway.

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 If The World

Was Scaled Down

To Only 100 People

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SEVEN

would have a college degree

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TWENTY-TWO

would own a computer

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TWENTY-SIX

would be children

 

THIRTEEN

of those children would live in poverty

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SEVENTY-FOUR

would be adults

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EIGHT

of those adults would be 65 years or older

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FIFTY FIFTY

There would be an equal

number of males and females

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There would be

SIXTY

Asians,

FIFTEEN

Africans,

FOURTEEN

people from the Americas,

and

ELEVEN

Europeans

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SEVENTEEN

wouldn’t be able to read or write

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TWENTY-THREE

wouldn’t have any shelter

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ONE

would be dying of starvation

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FIFTEEN

would be undernourished

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TWENTY-ONE

would be overweight

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THIRTEEN

wouldn’t have access to clean water

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FIFTY-ONE

would live in cities

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TWENTY-TWO

wouldn’t have electricity

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Of those that do have electricity,

most would only use it for light at night

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SIXTEEN

wouldn’t have toilets

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SEVENTY-FIVE

would be cell phone users

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THIRTY

would be active internet users

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FORTY-EIGHT

would live on less than $2 per day

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SEVEN

people would own an automobile

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THIRTY

would be employed in Agriculture

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FIVE

would own 32% of the wealth

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The poorest

THIRTY-THREE

people would only receive 3% of the income

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By the end of the year

ONE

person would die and

TWO

new people would be born.

 

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Playing With Statistics

“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”

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It’s Sunday so time for another Sunday Sermon.

There’s a famous quote from US President Abraham Lincoln that goes something like, “you can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but not all of the people all of the time”.

On the face of it Lincoln’s words seem rather clever and profound – and true. And so they are.

Up to a point.

But what Lincoln didn’t say (and he was a politician after all) is that you don’t have to fool ALL of the people ALL of the time.

What you have to do is fool them long enough to do what you need to do – for example, in the case of a politician, to get yourself elected.  

 

Which brings me to statistics.

Because the best people in the world at playing with statistics are politicians and governments.

Some people believe everything they are told. Others call the figures governments produce ‘disingenuous’ which is being very kind. And some don’t believe a word or a number that they produce. (Take a wild guess at which camp I am in.)

Government statistical results are in effect lies. You can’t call them that – although I just did – because they can find figures to back up what they say, it’s just that they choose the figures that tell the story they want to promote and ignore all the rest that tell a different story.

For example, to get on to one of my favorite rant subjects, there is a thing which I am sure most of you have never heard of called the ‘Special Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program’ or ‘SIGTARP’ for short.

When the government is challenged about what is has been doing to bring to justice the banksters, who stole and recklessly gambled away our money, they can quote you a statistic or two saying that over the last few years, SIGTARP has put over 100 senior bank executives in jail, each of whom was convicted of stealing from taxpayers.

Although that fact is ‘technically’ or ‘statistically’ true, what they don’t tell you is that the people they have gone after and convicted are all small time crooks, guilty of small time frauds that are seldom above $1m or $1.5 million in value.

All the super crooks who embezzled hundreds of $ billions and almost brought down the entire financial system aren’t even being seriously pursued. More than six years into the SIGTARP investigations there are literally still hundreds of billions of outstanding ‘loans’, from banks including Citi, JP Morgan, Wells Fargo, and Bank of America.

They can quote figures all day long to try to mislead the people and make themselves look good, but a few small time crooks thrown in jail for stealing a million or two dollars here and there isn’t ever going to make much of a dent in the $ billions that were stolen. The politicians know that as well as anyone.

Perhaps Mark Twain’s “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics,” might have been a better quote!

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