Tricky Statistics

You may have heard about the statistician who drowned in a lake with the mean depth of 3 feet.  Statistics don’t always give you the data you need.  The statistician found that part of the lake that was a lot more than 3 feet deep. 

I always preferred weighted averages to determine the “market rate” of a job, but I also knew that I should look at the high and low salaries in a survey to determine if they are not really accurate.

Healthcare statistics are tricky because they don’t explain the difference between causation and correlation, when they don’t know the causation. They simply state the correlation as if it was the causation. Cancer is the poster-disease for this dilemma.  Nobody know what cancer is, so they claim that lots of things cause cancer, because there is a correlation. This is like declaring that Evolution is a fact, when it is really just a Theory that only works with viruses that mutate.

Polls with limited numbers are not worth doing.  Polls that are clearly worded, well-advertised and stay up for months are better indicators of how voters really feel.

The unemployment rate is at 4.4%, but was watered down by the federal government to hide the number of “discouraged workers”.  We see immigrants filling jobs our high school students used to have.  We see college grads unable to find salaried jobs after they graduate. The workforce participation rate indicates that 37% of working-age US citizens don’t have jobs.

The inflation rate is manipulated to support the government’s need for a low interest rate, because of their $20 trillion debt. Our excessive immigration policies have kept wages down.

Norb Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader