Friday, May 28, 2010

Another example of why looking at statistical data is important

Someone tells us that an index says something. But what goes into the index and how is it put together?

Good Government vs. Less Government « The Baseline Scenario
Posted by at

4 comments:

  1. Noah OesterleMay 28, 2010 at 8:20 AM

    This Heritage index is a big mess of a lot of abstract data to come up with an abstract index. It does point out a theme of this course.

    "When one splits out the factors, the case for Less/Weaker Government weakens substantially, and the case for Clean/Non-Corrupt/Efficient government strengthens considerably."

    Despite how confusing this whole thing was to me, this somehow got to a reasonable conclusion.

    ReplyDelete
  2. KelseyMay 29, 2010 at 9:31 PM

    I agree with Noah. It was super confusing, but the conclusion made sense - so maybe the data was okay?

    ReplyDelete
  3. Chloe ReevesMay 29, 2010 at 11:00 PM

    The Heritage Index is a shining example of manipulating data to draw conclusions that tend to be completely pretty meaningless. A lot of the data is purely subjective and those ten items probably should not be weighted equally. Unfortuately, people put a lot of faith in statistics such as these as having significant value.

    ReplyDelete
  4. MattRJune 1, 2010 at 1:30 PM

    This is what happens when you have think tanks with lots of money. Instead of trying to objectively look at a topic, it seems like they are trying to support a conclusion they've held for years with new research. Pretty hard to trust the work of think tanks, even if you agree with their viewpoints.

    ReplyDelete

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)