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

[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.