7840: Re: 7815: Archer replies to Morse (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: steven white <stevelong@spyral.net>

What is "true"?  The 'poorest country' nickname is a statistic.  It means
neither that everyone in Haiti is poor, nor that the poorest in Haiti are
poorer than the poorest in other countries.  It does not even mean that
there are a greater percentage of poor people in Haiti.  It is a statistic
that says, if you took all the wealth produced in Haiti in a year, and
divided it up evenly for every man, woman and child, each person would have
less money than a person living within other national boundaries, if you
distibuted the wealth similarly.  Given that wealth is not so distributed
in the real world, and that national boundaries are in many ways
arbitrrary, the usefulness of this kind of artificial statistic is
limited.  One could easily create a whole new set of statistics just by
redrawing boundaries.