According to Politico: In obscure data tables buried deep in its 2016 budget proposal, the Obama administration revealed this week that its student loan program had a $21.8 billion shortfall last year, apparently the largest ever recorded for any government credit program. The main cause of the shortfall was President Barack Obama’s recent efforts to provide relief for borrowers drowning in...
Why simple statistics can be so very misleading
Anscombe’s quartet was mentioned in a discussion on the Political Methodology listserv, as to what journalists need to know to stop looking like idiots when they report on social science research: Counter to your intuition, all four sets of data have the exact same descriptive and bivariate statistics: Property Value Mean of x in each case 9 (exact) Sample variance of x in each case 11...