Sunday, August 14, 2011

Rodger Malcolm Mitchell — “Figures don’t lie, but liars figure.”



A comparison of the same data displayed in a variety of ways reveals startling differences in import.

5 comments:

NeilW said...

And of course the classic one of all is the 'assume a horizontal demand curve' used in neo-classical economics to help show that competitive firms are better than monopolies.

Debunked beautifully by Steve Keen in his latest lecture:

http://youtu.be/jiJMzDtGOlE

Shaun Hingston said...

Nice article.

googleheim said...

George Will is a liar. He says that we owe China $2 trillion but does understand that the Chinese have already been paid.

It's done deal, the money is in their treasury accounts.

How can such a "conservative" journalist be taken for real ?

For every dollar spent on Chinese imports by American consumers, most of it goes into the Chinese account at the US Treasury.

googleheim said...

So as for manipulating graphs, how about actually swapping graphs out entirely ?

Can Chinese "debt" be figured in since the Chinese have already been paid ?

Isn't that completely illogical ?

Tom Hickey said...

@ googleheim

Right, all they have done is switched funds from sale of their exports from their reserve account at the Fed to their savings account at the Fed, which is what tsys effectively are. When the tsys mature, the funds will be switched back to their reserve account and they can roll them over into new tsys if they wish.