Tuesday, February 12, 2008

You are what you spend????

or more fun with statistics.

I do not know if you - like me - treat statistics - or more exactly their various uses - as entertainment?

No? Well, I think you miss a lot of fun.

I recently found a new example of amusing uses of statistics. This time in a New York Times' article with a provocative? explanatory? challenging? (pick your own interpretation) title" You are what you spend".

Two economist from the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas claim that they found a better measurement of financial wellbeing of Americans.

According to them we should not focus our attention on incomes and the raising ( to the level of being outrageous! - that's my opinion, not theirs) income gap between have and have nots.
We need to focus on actual spending plus the size of household .... and the picture immediately becomes a lot brighter. Or does it? Really? Without lying with statistics?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi! I just read your blog and enjoyed it. We also moved to the West side of PR from the states in October and have experianced a lot of what you have.

Our bill last months was for 270KWH's and cost about $65. We dont use AC and our hot water is from gas. We have flourecent lights in all our fixtures.

I look forward to reading more of your posts. If you want to read ours its http://thekrusechronicles.blogspot.com/

Minerva said...

It is always so nice to know someone not only has read your musings ... but actually enjoyed it :-)), so thanks a lot for letting me know. I am looking forward to reading your blog.