this post was submitted on 20 Dec 2023
1284 points (96.1% liked)

Political Memes

5232 readers
2214 users here now

Welcome to politcal memes!

These are our rules:

Be civilJokes are okay, but don’t intentionally harass or disturb any member of our community. Sexism, racism and bigotry are not allowed. Good faith argumentation only. No posts discouraging people to vote or shaming people for voting.

No misinformationDon’t post any intentional misinformation. When asked by mods, provide sources for any claims you make.

Posts should be memesRandom pictures do not qualify as memes. Relevance to politics is required.

No bots, spam or self-promotionFollow instance rules, ask for your bot to be allowed on this community.

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] Aceticon@lemmy.world 12 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

It's not by chance that in big countries official economic numbers are listed for the country as whole (independently of the number of people) or at best using the arithmetic average for per-capita numbers rather than the mode.

Countrywide numbers sound great until you merelly divide it by the number of people (i.e. the average, which still has problems) were for example the US falls from #1 in wealth to #15 in wealth per person.

Further, it's way too common for governing politicians in countries with strong population growth to only talk about total economic numbers, because total country GDP will grow simply from adding more working adults (due to immigration or higher birth rates) even if it's actually falling per-capita (if, for example, the working adults added have lower productivity) hence the economic position of most people is getting worse.

As for arithmetic averages, they suffer from not really representing the experience of most people when there is high inequality. For example, if there are 10 people, 1 with 10 chickens and 9 with zero chickens, that average tells us each has 1 chicken whilst in reality most people's chicken-ownership experience is of having non chickens. The mode would tell it's zero chickens because that what most individuals have.

And don't get me started on the actual ways to rig official economic figures (such as understating Official Inflation, which because of how it's produced results in a higher Official GDP number)

For at least 2 decades now, Official Economic Figures have been complete total bollocks, and you should be especially suspicious of the figures quoted by government politicians as (as I explained above) they're generally cherry-picking and presenting figures which bare little resemblance to what's happenning for most people.