richardhutnik said:
1. You are now venting like the only form of the way people are adversely affected by poverty is starvation, which the video didn't go into. Starvation wasn't mentioned, yet you bring it up. 2. The video doesn't discuss the why of income inequality growing at all, just says that income inequality has bad effects. What I made mention of there, in response to the other post was that the answers to issues in society are more than merely individuals showing gumption, and risking it all, and looking to get rich. 3. You accusations of me turning a blind eye, is interesting in that you by pass what I wrote, which wasn't to you, to jump in and get down my throat over something. The initial post didn't get into it at all, and just listed something. You jump all over and then accuse me of having a blind eye here. We can play Stooges have their eyes poked out, but your comment of accusing me of willfulling ignoring things is not productive. What I do get from you here is your desire to shut your mind to things here, claim to be right, and they end up slamming me because I don't agree. I can come back and say, "no YOU turn a blind eye", but I really don't have times for such childishness. I will say in regards to this, just ignore what I have to say, because apparently you don't have an interest in discussing things at all, but would rather play who is really blind here. |
1. You were talking about people struggling to make ends meet, it had nothing to do with the vide.
2. Except those bad effects are largely bad science, I mean, look at the video again and note that he isn't controlling for ANYTHING on that list, including culture, population size, population density, age of population and any number of other important factors and largely ignoring the fact that most of the stuff listed has totally different reporting methods based on country. Like Infant mortaility rate.
Infant mortality rate is so high in the US because we consider every live birth an infant, while most other countries put a weight or length requirement on it. When adjusting to other countries standards are infant mortality rate is better then others.
I mean, ask yourself why he put like 8 different things averaged together on that Y axis. The only reason to do so is because you know they won't hold up individually and you need to bolster your points with data that does make your point (like infant mortality, which is, as stated above, flawed due to different reporting methods.)
Or just in general, flawed due to completley different factors. I mean, note the highest countries in the "Trust each other" method are also the smallest both in population and land and almost entirely homogenous culture wise. Outside of like, Israel who has the whole Palestine thing to deal with.
Or just the social mobility study... which seems to be just outright made up, since pretty much all the studies i've seen hasn't shown much a difference in social mobility.
The whole thing is pretty fairly off just by looking at the graphs individually and breaking them down.
I mean, as another example the "UNICEF Study of child wellbeing" counts one of the main factors as "Number of children below the 50% national median."
Meaning that children who are richer in countries that make more money, are counted as poor when other kids aren't despite having less money since it's using relative povery of each nation individually!
So two nations where everything costs the same and one nation... where someone makes an average $100,000 someone who makes 25,000 would be considered poor.
While if the nation next door has an average of $200,000... $50,000 is consdiered poor for them, even though everything costs the same.
This is well before the causation methods you mentioned.
Like whether poverty creates single parent families, or being a single parent makes you poor.
3. Look at his actual charts and methodology and you should see the problems with his methods... or just read the number of this one. That's what I mean when I'm saying your blind.
I've pointed out factual methodological errors (in earlier posts) in his study which you haven't even tried to rebut, yet still present the video as if it were true... all while pretending you actually want to have a conversation about something.
By in large the studies he sites are studies that would get you flunked out of a statistical methods class in college for using non-normalized, non-standardized data.
Also, he sorta leaves out the most important factor. Actual income of families in income inequality.
He uses the Per Capita numbers, but then doesn't actually adjust for what the people actually make.
Even if he had used reputable data,(which you can tell because he completly skirts the question by presenting it and saying "That's our sources problem!" claiming that actually looking at if a source is valid would put bias in their study... seriously? Would you argue that by asking if a Fox News report is reptuable it shows bias?) you wouldn't actually know if he was proving that
1) Income inequality causes these problems
or
2) Low income causes these problems.
Since he doesn't really seem to show what a "Poor" person in one country makes compaired to a "poor" person in another.
Essentially, he doesn't actually care if gini coefficent is the actual cause of this... because he didn't even bother to try and sort out the biggest confounding variable and has decided that if he actually tried to analize the valdity of his datasource... that would be showing bias.
Which is just... I don't even know. In short, I think he uncritically found some studies with charts that supported his point of view, didn't bother to actually read them, or did and intentionally and dishonestly used plenty of factors he knew were just wrong and then built his study/analsis/presentation around it.
He's completely booted the question of valdity when valdity is what he's trying to argue.
Anyone could make a presentation like his, saying anything, by quoting whatever half assed study that should of never been released they want, and claiming that questioning validity would show bias.
The fact that someone who had to pass a college class in research methods would create a study like that should really piss off anybody who's passed a college class like that.
It's studies like that which give statistics a bad name... blatntantly transparent, stupid studies that almost nobody pays attention to because its easier to look at a graph then consider the methods.
For a description of a better... (yet harder) study with no forgone conclusions i'd suggest.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/longterm/books/chap1/outliers.htm
Not even one with pure data, but one that actually tries to control for validity, and is taken skepticly.
