| Tuesday, March 22, 2005 |
13:20 - Everybody knows that
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18524904.300
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This New Scientist article (via Brian D) makes the following claim:
THE rich are getting richer while the poor remain poor. If you doubt it, ponder these numbers from the US, a country widely considered meritocratic, where talent and hard work are thought to be enough to propel anyone through the ranks of the rich. In 1979, the top 1 per cent of the US population earned, on average, 33.1 times as much as the lowest 20 per cent. In 2000, this multiplier had grown to 88.5. If inequality is growing in the US, what does this mean for other countries?
Almost certainly more of the same, if you believe physicists who are using new models based on simple physical laws to understand the distribution of wealth. Their studies indicate that inequality in market economies may be very hard to get rid of...
And from there it springboards off into funky applications of gaseous particle physics to determine how the wealthiest gas particles keep the poor gas particles crushed under their jack-booted neutrons. But I have to wonder where the underlying assumption comes from, or how right it is.
As Dean Esmay quizzed a few weeks ago:
1) In the last ten years, has the rate of violent crime gone up or down in the United States?
2) How about the rate of auto fatalities over the last ten years?
3) How about teen pregnancy and STD rates?
4) How about drug and alcohol use and abuse rates?
5) As a percentage of the average American's annual income, or net wealth, has the national debt gone up or down over the last 50 years?
6) Are casualties in Iraq higher than Vietnam, lower than Vietnam, or about the same as Vietnam?
7) Has the air been growing more polluted or less polluted over the last 10 years? How about over the last 50 years? Or the last 100?
8) How about the quality of water in rivers and lakes over the last 10 years, or the last 30 years?
9) Have standards of living for the poor gone up or down over the last 10 years? The last 30 years? The last 50 years? The last 100 years?
10) Compared to, say, 40 years ago, do more people have health insurance today, or less people?
Go see the original post for the answers, but you can probably guess from the tone, huh?
Seems to me that someone, on some side or other, is cherry-picking data to look as heinous (or as rosy) as possible. Which one do you suppose it might be? Which one is it more likely to be?
Of course, whenever something makes the news and is presented to the public as an extant problem, the gut reaction that's all but engineered into the very presentation is "There oughtta be a law". Whether intentional or not, that's surely at the heart of so much perceived media bias, right?
After all, they're just watching out for our best interests.
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Brian Tiemann
