Statistics Can Prove Anything. ...Pardon?

Some studies have been done recently which give delightful insights into the Average American mind, and how he (because the Average American is naturally a man—or, if you’re from where I’m from, women’s opinions don’t matter) measures up against his community. Thought you might like to hear some of the results.

 

Science: Participants from 34 countries (32 European, the U.S. and Japan) were asked whether they believed in evolution. The percentage of U.S. citizens who responded “Yes”? 40%. That is less than every other single country—save Turkey (25%). Iceland, Denmark, Sweden and France came in at 80% or more; Japan at 78%.

http://www.livescience.com/humanbiology/060810_evo_rank.html

 

Democracy: A study was done on the voting participation in all elections between 1945-1998 for 140 countries. Although there are many variables (e.g., suffrage for Argentinean women had to wait until 1947; there are 31 more countries for which there is only 1 election to study, etc.), the study confines itself to national parliamentary/congressional and presidential elections (i.e., they don’t consider things like judges or ballot initiatives). They compare the number of actual votes against the number of eligible voters in the country. The U.S. ranked 114, with 48.3% of eligible voters participating in our democracy. The overall average was 65.6%.

http://www.idea.int/vt/index.cfm

 

Human Rights: The BBC World Service just completed a study of 25 countries from around the world, asking them what they thought of torture. They were given the following options, and asked to state which came closer to their own views:

(1)     Clear rules against torture should be maintained because any use of torture is immoral and will weaken international human rights standards against torture.

(2)     Terrorists pose such an extreme threat that governments should now be allowed to use some degree of torture if it may gain information that saves innocent lives.

(I wonder how many people even noticed the “if” in #2. But I digress…)

Against all torture: 58% (11^th  highest)

Some degree permissible: 36% (8^th highest)

Neither/Don’t know: 12%

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_depth/6063386.stm#table

 

There you have it, folks! Who cares about those studies that tell you who’s the fattest nation (us) or who can’t find their own country on a map (us) or who consumes the most while producing the most pollution (you guessed it)? Here are some real numbers with actual import regarding the Average American. Makes ya’ proud, don’t it?

 

-W.

 

(Incidentally, the Average American also doesn’t understand statistics and has less than basic reading comprehension: http://nces.ed.gov/whatsnew/commissioner/remarks2005/12_15_2005.asp. And for those of you who might want to blame the blacks and Mexicans—for all other brown people are obviously Mexican—when they tallied the results by race, our Average White American still fared quite poorly. Apparently only 10% of us can perform “complex and challenging literacy activities such as comparing viewpoints in two different editorials.” …What? Editorials are our benchmark for “complex and challenging” texts?)

 

Fuck it. I’m moving to Switzerland.