Suspicious Data Thread - Exposing Numerical Buggery

Doctor Love

kiwifarms.net
Joined
Nov 12, 2023
Almost all statistical data is fucked up in one way or another. This is a thread dedicated to exposing the errors, and offering alternative interpretations for existing data. Post any patterns that you've found, or want to find out more about.
 
You don't even have to analyze anything to know that there's fuckery afoot. I know someone who's published academic papers and what they've described to me in dealing with that system isn't some hallowed bastion of truth or intellectualism but a complete racket no more honorable or objective than the mafia.
 
Economic Disparity in Relatable Terms:

Having ventured down the rabbit hole, I found that most economical data is obscured to the point that it's oftentimes useless.

While you can, conventionally, attempt to use GDP to establish an average income or development level, this develops a false image.

For European countries, while the average wage itself is given as a gross value - the take-home pay is far more important, and the average cost of living is even more important.

The UK, I have found, is the biggest offender. While ostensibly, the median average wage stands at £38,200 - this number is bent to the point of fabrication. Firstly - they include both single and household in the average wage.

The figure which most are interested in - the amount of money you will get from your employer, is actually

10th£9800
50th£19700
90th£38400
97th£59700


And of course, this is before taxes.

For the UK, the percentiles for income, adjusted for tax:


10th£9800
50th£17561
90th£30651
97th£44429

Statistically speaking, if you earn £44,429 in the UK as a singular income - you are in the top 3% of earners.

But that's not all!

For costs of living, these are often adjusted to mask certain realities. Oftentimes we can use approximations to get around this fact - while the UK's average property values are high, their true "value" is masked by hiding the devil among the details.

Ostensibly, the average cost of rent in the UK stands at £1268. This is incredibly high - but this is the total value for all homes, including those with multiple occupants. But that's good, right?

No.

In the UK, the average living space for an individual can be seen multiple ways.

The lowest average for the UK as a whole is £597 per month.

This is a single room.

Taken together, with the 50th percentile mark - you find that the average monthly income is £1463.42 - this is the middle ground for the UK as a whole.

Subtracting the average single room price in rented accommodation, the average Briton can actually expect a to have £866.42 after paying their rent.

That's $1104.42
 
That's $1104.42
Due to the enormously misleading statistics involved, this alternative shows a much more realistic scenario for an average adult. While the GDP metrics are relevant for economic evaluation or some shit, this is a very relevant way to judge what life would be like if you lived in another country.


$1104.42 after the essential rent is taken into account. Without factoring in other related costs, we can judge this value compared to other countries by the same metric.

For example, the Netherlands, a neighbouring country and one which is, ostensibly, similar to the UK.

The same 50th percentile mark in the Netherlands is a gross $3,572.93

That's $2976. Which is the real median Dutch income compared to the real British Income of £1463.42, or $1865.27

So, without even including the aforementioned rental price difference, due to the horrific way that the UK actually displays its individual income, publicly, there is already something suspicious about this.

First of all, the UK is a lot larger than the Netherlands, by population.

Second of all - doesn't that imply, using the data table above, that the median 50th percentile Dutchman earns something far closer to the 90th percentile for the United Kingdom?

Yes. That is exactly what it says.

Infact, if you were to compare by population, there are actually more people in the Netherlands who earn more than $3000 a month, than in the UK.

Yet, the OECD will usually put their own table front-and-center when showing their data.
1705187001751.png

The UK is one of the few countries where their publicly available average wage is, somehow, above their 90th percentile.
 
While I am most familiar with the practices of the UK, and I can only really compare the UK directly, I have found that average wages are actually incredibly hard to find.

For actual housing costs, as mentioned above, the UK has an extremely high bottom.

The average in the UK for a room in a shared house is £600 per month, and the average rent for a property is £1268 per month.

But, for individual renters, the average floor space is actually 36m^2.

For comparison, here is the minimum area requirement for an average farm pig:

1705187558065.png

Another value, for private renters as a whole, which is the amount the average renter is a whopping £795!

That's $1013.31!
 
Now that we have a value of two figures which more realistically represents the important question, we can calculate what the average Briton actually earns - minus what they actually pay.

£1463.42 - £795 = £673

That's right. Once you have settled in your pigpen, for the 50th percentile worker, most of your income has already gone!

Despite the median average for living space being so absurdly low, it still holds one of the highest percentages of income in the world!


The 50th percentile Briton pays 54.1% of his actual income to live in an area of 36m^2

If you were to extrapolate and increase that to the European standard, 45m^2, you would need to increase the rent by 25% to £993

So that's £1463.42-£993, for a total of £470 of free income, after the costs of living.

Once that average outgoing is taken into account, the difference explodes! The average rent of a larger single-occupant flat in Bulgaria is £260, while their single adult net income is £572. This is a total of £312.

So, due to the difference in taxation, absurdly misleading statistics about average income - and the massive difference in housing costs, once the obvious, unavoidable price of living has been taken care of, the average, 50th percentile Briton - if compared directly to an equivalent living standard, without taking into account other costs, has only £158 more than the equivalent Bulgarian.

It gets even more horrific than that, though! Due to additional taxation, the cost of goods and services is also higher in Britain.

Excluding the difference in housing costs, the post-rent living costs, such as food, clothing and transport are 32.8% lower in Bulgaria!

So, in order to give a fair comparison between the two, you must display the Bulgarian's post-rent free income in a way which reflects this. £312*(1.328)=£414




Thus, the average Briton actually earns £56 more than the average Bulgarian.
 
In physics and chemistry, the concept is so simple. You see a phenomena, make a model and see if it can predict said phenomena. You don't make up a random model/explaination that is doesn't predict shit. It's completely useless and a waste of time to keep going with something that doesn't work.

Academia is full of people that either have an agenda, and just lie to use ©science to sell their ideology (research papers = holy texts), or you got the midwits. The midwits will make up a model, and make cope arguments that it's reality that is wrong, and they will do anything to make the numbers "fit" said model. This is 99% of academics, do you think that the 1% can complete being honest? No, they leave and work for private companies that want to get stuff done. Leaving university and other public institutions with only mentally ill social piranha's. Only reason it's not 100% yet is because of naive honest (often young) people cycling through these places. Public numbers/data is for this reason most likely bullshit.

Numbers don't mean shit today, unless you can measure them yourself. Numbers are still at the end of the day, symbols that a stranger (you don't know) just wrote/generated on a computer.

If the y-axle don't start at 0 it's propaganda.
Also this, those blood pressure and IQ charts are bullshit.
 
You see a phenomena, make a model and see if it can predict said phenomena.
if you can do both, you can quite easily reinterpret statistics and use them to a higher degree. Engineering, or Physics, or Mathematics can be easily extended to Economics - all you need is the formulae and a basic understanding of concepts.


Demographics:

While most demographic calculations will typically involve the use of percentages, it's very hard to judge an actual breakdown due to the variance in age demographics.

For the UK, the median age is actually 41!

Of the working-age population, 70.8% identified as White British in England.

1705192568149.png




Let's talk population density. While the UK, ostensibly, has an average population-density, this is because it's a Union of countries. Practically all of the overpopulation, immigration and pigpen housing occurs in England.

England alone has a population of around 56,000,000 - but its size is actually only 130,000km^2

This gives England a population density of 429km^-2 - overtaking the Netherlands for population density.
 
Since this thread is a continuation of the calculations I made about Russia's economy in the war thread:

1705249732512.png


The big man himself agrees.

In brief - Russia's economy has been growing rapidly during the war due to the massive wages of Russian soldiers. This has led to a construction boom, which, alongside the abandonment of Western factories, has led to a similar overall output - in absolute, real terms - to Germany.

It seems like Putin agrees - so by his maths, he seems to believe that the Ruble is undervalued by atleast 81%.

So the USD-Rub will need to go down from 88Rb/USD to 48Rb/USD.
 
Academia is full of people that either have an agenda, and just lie to use ©science to sell their ideology (research papers = holy texts), or you got the midwits. The midwits will make up a model, and make cope arguments that it's reality that is wrong, and they will do anything to make the numbers "fit" said model. This is 99% of academics, do you think that the 1% can complete being honest? No, they leave and work for private companies that want to get stuff done. Leaving university and other public institutions with only mentally ill social piranha's. Only reason it's not 100% yet is because of naive honest (often young) people cycling through these places. Public numbers/data is for this reason most likely bullshit.

It's not just midwits that operate that way. A lot of highly capable people remain in academia and will squeeze and distort data far past the point of their research proving anything useful, but it's not cope and they know full well how full of shit they are. They just don't care because their job as far as they're concerned is essentially concocting credible "evidence" that supports whatever the fuck the people funding their research want "science" to "prove" and naturally kickbacks and favors are quietly exchanged as well. It's autistic hair splitting, I guess, but the academics themselves aren't necessarily the ones with an agenda, a lot are just garden variety corrupt sell-outs.
 
It really depends on what you'd call the Sciences™. Your average run of the mill professor is just after the next grant, bonus points if he can eventually found a startup/consultancy and rake in the big money. The politics is mostly on the funding manager's end. There are naturally professors who openly lie to your face about their results but that's normally because their data is shit, they know it's shit, but they still have to publish it to get the next grant. There's an entire culture around chasing "high impact" journals that leads to scientists overselling their claims beyond reality; this combined with the absolute atrocious state of attention spans leads to peer reviewed journals ending up as little more than infotainment. Ironically, the solution to this problem is dump more money on the groups that fail but can adequately describe their reasons for failing. There's no journal editor that's actually going to rock the boat for fear that the "high impact" researchers stop submitting papers to them.

The most fake realms of science are the ones furthest from objective reality. Psychology is almost nothing but fraudulent data derived from surveys of dubious quality taken on classrooms of white female students in their early 20's.
 
The most fake realms of science are the ones furthest from objective reality. Psychology is almost nothing but fraudulent data derived from surveys of dubious quality taken on classrooms of white female students in their early 20's.
Oh that is a rabbit-hole I've been down.

Psychologists fuck everything up. Look at anything to do with PANDAS - the neuroimmune disorder which has no symptoms associated with it.

It is a combination of several, known, post-strep disorders with a few added psychological tags to it! It's like:
"Child with post-strep kidney failure, also hums a lot. Must be that PANDAS. Gets everywhere, these days."
 
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