this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2023
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Not addressing your claim but I think we should avoid using Statista as a direct source. They require you to pay to get access to their full reports and often obfuscate the original sources of their data. They are up there with numbeo on "worst shit recommended by google." I am not sure if I agree with the claim, but I'm not acquainted enough with that to actually discuss that part properly.
Usually for things like that Statista gets it straight from the Bureau of Labour Statistics, so that could be an easier to audit source. I guess this specific one might be easier to find in the Bureau of Economic Analysis. I'm not very acquainted with economy metrics in particular for the USA, but I guess that and other websites like ourworldindata and even the world bank have some public info on their methodology and sources, even if their conclusions are heavily skewed. Often just going to wikipedia's "Economics of " can give you a pretty good initial source. Though it doesn't really matter that much in this case because like the other user my disagreement is more over whether salespeople generate surplus value rather than the data itself, but I thought it was more important to warn about that specific source there for the future.
My bad experiences with them mostly come from looking into demographics because they'll just outright rip off local government statistics institutes and force you to at least make an account just to get the source beyond their pretty graph. It gets weirder with ethnography because they just bludgeon the data until it fits their USA-based frameworks. Shit like calling skin colour in Brazil "ethnicity".