Comparing Statistics

In South vs North, Nilakantan RS starts off by pointing out that:

“At the time of independence, the southern states were indistinguishable from the rest of India in terms of their development metrices.”

That is surprising. How come the two have diverged so sharply in a such a short period of around 70-75 years? (The book goes into that at length, and I’ll write about that later, but that’s not the topic of this blog).

 

Vaclav Slim makes an interesting point about how to compare numbers and statistics in Numbers Don’t Lie. One way is what we did above – look at the time frame (70 odd years) over which the divergence has happened. But that’s not the only way. This example from Slim’s book will help understand the point.

 

Slim points out that the per capita energy consumption of Nigeria is five times less than that of Japan or France. The obvious fact leaps out – the factor of 5 difference. Slim asks us to next look at how long back Japan and France consumed the same amount of energy per capita as Nigeria today? Japan used that much energy in 1958, and France in 1880. Put that way, one could say Nigeria is a lifetime behind Japan and two lifetimes behind France. Also, one can see that Japan’s energy usage rose very sharply in the period of the last lifetime compared to France. This perspective gives very different info.

 

If we apply Slim’s point, then the divergence between the south and north of India hits one even more sharply – it has happened in just one lifetime.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Student of the Year

Image
As a toddler, my daughter loved Alia Bhatt’s songs, esp. the ones from Student of the Year . (That movie did have many good songs and well-choreographed dances). Fast forward to present day, when she is 12 yo. She rarely watches Hindi movies now, but one of the few ones she likes of late, Raja aur Rani ki Prem Kahani has, yes, Alia Bhatt.   If I had any hopes that there was anything to be read in the name of her toddler-time favorite ( Student of the Year ), they have been dashed. Our conversations come exam time are perfectly captured by this photo and its caption: In fact, the pic below captures how she and I look at her answer sheets – me intently, she with an expression of “It’s over, so why are you even looking at it?”   Of late, we pull her leg and tell her that she isn’t showing any signs of academic prowess, she’d better find a rich guy to marry. Some time later, she showed us this meme on the Internet: “Me No Study, Me No Care Me Go Marry Millionaire If He Die
Read more

The Retort of the "Luxury Person"

Image
Coming up with biting and witty retorts. It’s something we dream of, but rarely manage to pull off. Worse, the more we stew over the offending remark, the more likely we are to come up with that dream retort, as Calvin ruefully points out: During our last holiday at the Taj Resort, seeing my wife carrying towels to our poolside chairs, one of the kids there mistook her for a member of the staff and asked for a towel. When my wife narrated this to us, I did not imagine that my 8 yo daughter would come up with her own retort. But a day later, my daughter recapped the incident, an incident that didn’t even involve her in the first place , and said, “You know what I’d have told that kid who asked for the towel?”. And without waiting for an answer, she told us anyway: “I don’t work here. I too am a luxury person who is living at this resort. Go get your own towel.” We were highly amused by the phrase she had coined: “luxury person”. It certainly captures the kind of holid
Read more

Animal Senses #7: Touch and Remote Touch

Instinctively, we think touch is based on contact. Not entirely true, explains Ed Yong in Immense World – there’s a more important aspect than contact: “These incredible feats are possible through movement. If you rest a fingertip upon a surface, you can get only a limited idea of its features. But as soon you’re allowed to move, everything changes. Hardness becomes apparent with a press. Textures resolve at a stroke.” As you run your fingers over a surface, they hit the tiny peaks and troughs and set off vibrations in the mechanoreceptors at their tips.   At the tip of its snout, the star-nosed mole has many pairs of hairless appendages. It uses them to touch things around itself. Alive or dead? Food or ignore? It does these movements at an insane speed. In the time it takes to blink our eyes, the star-nosed mole can probe, identify and swallow its food. “Light may be the fastest thing in the universe, but light sensors have their limits, and the star-nosed mole’s sense of
Read more