Math fail

[lederhosen]

Can't see the original to figure out whether this is the fault of News or BBC, but...

In the latest issue of BBC Focus magazine, British researchers number-crunched the global differences in the seven deadly sins... Greed was determined by the percentage of the population with annual earnings less than 50 per cent of the median value

*le sigh*

Comments

[quatranoctal.livejournal.com]

Not so much a math fail than a definition fail. Why would people who earn less than half the median annual earnings necessarily be greedy? I'd use something like average personal debt.

[lederhosen.livejournal.com]

I wonder if it's a very confused attempt to describe the Gini coefficient? But, yeah, still a mediocre definition.

[amberdine.livejournal.com]

I assume it's actually the low-paying employers that the definition is targeting as greedy. Weird way to phrase it, though.

[panacea1.livejournal.com]

*headdesk*

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

It seems really arbitrary, but I'm not sure why it's head-to-desk awful. Is there some obvious measure they should have used instead?

Edit: Oh, the gini coefficient. Duh.

[lederhosen.livejournal.com]

It's awful because, by definition, the proportion of the population earning less than the median is 50%.

[mothwentbad.livejournal.com]

But the proportion of the population earning less than half of the median? That's a different number... But it seems like a pretty odd stat, and sort of hard to interpret as anything. It could be 0%, for example, which would mean that there's a very large middle class and no poor... or a very large collection of poor people.

[lederhosen.livejournal.com]

Oops, I didn't read it carefully enough - I think my brain just interpreted the 'half' as saying 'median' again.

Like you say, it's still a very peculiar stat. It also doesn't distinguish between a society where everybody is greedy, and where everybody is generous.

[nefaria.livejournal.com]

Also creepy that the ideal is a society where everyone makes exactly the same amount of money, regardless of talent or effort. You'd have to have an extremely greedy government to pull that off.

[lederhosen.livejournal.com]

the ideal is a society where everyone makes exactly the same amount of money

I think you're right in guessing that that's what they envisioned as their 'non-greedy' society. But the stupid thing is, there are plenty of grossly unequal distributions that would also satisfy it.

If 51%+ of the population are earning $1/day, and the remainder are making a fortune sweating the majority, median is $1 and nobody's below that median. You can push the Gini coefficient out to 1 and still get a 'non-greedy' society in this metric.