Statistics That Should Change the World But Don't

No surprise, your government is lying to you. What is interesting is how they are doing it.

So the U.S. is lurching into recession. And you might be saying, well, you know, Nine the Swordsman, that sort of sucks. And you'd be right. But it's actually worse than that. Because our economy is a basket case and has been so for some time.

But wait, you might be saying, we've had full employment since 2003 and the economy was doing really well in the 1990's.

Yeah, Bill Clinton and the government would like you to believe that.

Well, what are you going to do? I mean, other countries have worse economies than we do.
Do they? Really. Sure about that, audience?

Here's an article describing the different ways our United States Bureau of Ignorance Labor Statistics calculates unemployment: http://bigpicture.typepad.com/comments/2007/09/a-closer-look-a.html

You'll notice that the government reports U3 as the unemployment rate. Back in 2007, it was 4.6% and has since risen to about 5.4%, which still sounds pretty good. Hell, it's 6.5% now and that doesn't seem completely catastrophic.

Except that the internationally recognized standard is to report U6 as the unemployment rate. Yes, when you compare the U.S. unemployment rate to the rest of the planet, the U.S. government reports U3 and the rest of the planet (mostly) reports U6. Apples and oranges anyone?

Note this awesome disclaimer from the BLS: "The indexes provided by BLS are from the national consumer price indexes as published by each country. They are not adjusted for comparability, except to convert the indexes to a common base year. " Well, isn't that special.

As of October 2008, U6 was not 6.5% but 11.1%.

Well, but poverty rates are still low here, right?

The US government (actually the CIA factbook, if you want source data) reports poverty as around 12%. Ah, but wait. What if they juggle the figures for poverty just as they do for unemployment? If you're thinking this way now, you'd be correct.

Eurostat, the European official statistical warehouse, defines poverty as only having 60% of the median income. I couldn't find those figures for the US, but I did find figures for those only having 50% of the median income.

US poverty rate: 17%. Anyone feeling the love yet? And these figures are from 2007-2008, before the economy cratered.

But you might say our incomes are far and above that of most of those countries. If you look at GDP per capita as per the awesome CIA World Factbook, the US comes out at a robust $45,660 per capita, for seventh place, behind Luxembourg, Norway, Switzerland, Ireland, Denmark, and Iceland. Go us.

Well, except GDP per capita really doesn't tell the entire story, since it includes the hyper-rich. Bear with me here. If there are 10 guys in a bar, and 9 of the 10 make minimum wage and the 10th guy is Bill Gates, it looks like on paper, everyone in the bar is rich since the average wage is very high. But that obviously isn't accurate. What we really need to do is compare median incomes across the board.

US median income per person is $26,000, significantly less than the GDP figure (see what I mean?). So let's check this out per person, shall we? US incomes are actually 11th.

And this pisses me off.

I want the US to be the best place on the planet to live. Not 11th.

Now someone will undoubtedly say that we are better off than Yemen or Zimbabwe. So? That's your standard? Really want to go there?

These figures should change people's perspective.

But they won't.