From the fantastic folks at venezuelaanalysis.com:
“All statistics, including economic statistics, can be manipulated, or only partially revealed, so that they demonstrate a foregone ideological conclusion rather than reality.
[…]
“By 2006 and 2007, it was impossible to hide the evidence that the Venezuelan economy had been growing at a tremendous rate for four years running, and that income was being redistributed to the poorer classes in an unprecedented fashion. Some of the relevant economic numbers appeared in a 2007 report generated by two private consulting firms, AC Nielson and Datos, for VenAmCham (The Venezuelan American Chamber of Commerce and Industry). They showed that the poorest economic class, Level E, had more than doubled its income in three years, but their interpretation was still tinged with an anti-government bias.
“For example, the title over the table of figures provided in the AC Nielsen/Datos report sounded discouraging, “In the last three years, only the income of Level E has grown in real terms.” Since there are 6 household income levels customarily used in Venezuela — A,B,C+, C-, D, and E — this doesn’t sound like much of an achievement. That is, until the reader learns that level E consisted of a solid majority, or 58% of the population in 2003. Level E’s income grew by a whopping 130%, after being corrected for inflation. [emphasis added]” (source)
Of course, distorting economic data is by no means a phenomenon of only the developing world.
The manner in which even agreed upon economic data is presented in the West is highly ideological and, one could charge, intentionally misleading.
First off, the standard practice economists use to measure per capita economic wealth is to use average GDP per capita. It is important to dwell for a second on the fact that this isn’t just something that a lot of economists do by coincidence, this is considered the standard measure with, by extension, all other measures being heterodox or in some other way subaltern.
When you don’t want to give all three measures of mean (average), median and mode in mathematics and statistics, it is widely acknowledged that if you’re going to use only the measure of ‘average’, it is by far the most informative on linear trends such as this:

This is hugely important due to the fact that all economic wealth distributions under global capitalism, by definition, do not look like the graph above. Rather, all existing patters of economic wealth distribution under global capitalism are more or less exponential (in fact, this is the very predictable result of capitalism).
Whenever you have exponential data and you intentionally and conscientiously only give the average indicator, you are likely skewing your analysis dramatically.
Here’s an example of a fictional global distribution of wealth which nevertheless more accurately approximates reality. As you can see, if readers were to be given only the average income for this graph, the reader would likely develop a highly skewed view of the economic realities.

Note that the orthodox approach of giving only the average measure gives a more than 10 times more favourable view than if one were to give only the median measure.
Now this isn’t to say that economists themselves don’t recognize these limitations. Indeed highly technical economic documents often contain data using medians instead of means. Moreover, in defense of economists, it is often more difficult to calculate the median income than it is to calculate the mean income due to the fact that less data is required to calculate the mean (average) income.
But even if the ‘median’ indicator finds its way into some technical documents, it is almost impossible to find it anywhere in any news report, or think tank research paper — the two sources that are most predominantly fed to the public.
For an especially bad example of utter and sheer ideological and propagandistic distortion of this median/mean practice, see this ABC news report on “Tax Freedom Day”.
Given this, is it really still tenable to continue to ignore the possibility that the very language we use to express economics to the populace is itself so hopelessly entrenched in a capitalist ideology?
Propaganda in Action: Ontario’s election “priorities”?
Published 2 October, 2007 Canadian Politics , Canadian Politics (domestic) , capitalism , conservative , current events , economics , education , Elections , environmentalism , health care , healthcare , mainstream media , Media , News, Commentary & Op/Ed , Ontario , Ontario 2007 election , politics , Polls , Progressive , Propaganda , Socialism 11 CommentsA new poll just released by Environics, shows something more revealing than it bargained for. What it shows can be considered even more proof that the media does not have a left-wing bias.
The Environics poll asked Ontarians what they thought the most important factor/issue determing their vote in the upcoming election would be.
The results are interesting.
Now, some of these factors can be broadly categorized into socialist/social democratic issues (namely heath care and social programs/poverty/minimum wage) and conservative/capitalist issues (namely the economy and taxes). Recompiling the list with these ideological concerns grouped together results in this list of what Ontarians care about:
So what do Ontarians care about? Notice that by far, the answer, according to Environics, is overwhelmingly coherently socialist/social democratic issues, followed by two ideologically neutral issues, then followed by coherently conservative or capitalist issues.
But now let’s take a look at what the mainstream media coverage of the Ontario election considers to be the important issues.
We can see that the media has little interest in the issues that Ontarians actually cares about:
I compiled the data for this table using targeted advanced Google news searches and can be verified, if you’re interested, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.
We progressives can easily convince ourselves that society is hopelessly biased and political culture hopelessly corrupted by the mainstream media, but I see these results as reason for optimism rather than forlornness.
Voters aren’t clamoring for tax cuts despite the hugely disproportional media coverage of the issue and voters continue to support socialist issues as their #1 election issues. If that, in and of itself, does not give progressives great faith in the prospects for the kind of changes we seek, then I don’t know what will.
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