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 ...