Re:Poverty is not a personal choice, but a reflection of soc...
by haberman on Saturday July 01, 2017 @03:05AM
(#14675811)
I don't especially doubt the 80% statistic. I do think it's far overstating the evidence to say that it proves the author's thesis. I think it is far harder to prove the causes of poverty than it is to prove the incidence of poverty. I probably could have been more clear about this. The fault I find with the HuffPo prediction is overconfidence and under-skepticism about the ability of their data to say what they claimed it did.
But the types of statistics here are fundamentally different. If you look at the huffington post numbers as how many people will vote for a candidate, then even their prediction is pretty close to correct. A few million votes make the difference between 50% and 99%, but a few million votes is a reasonably tight accuracy range for "how many". Similarly I would expect something like the 80% number to be pretty close to correct, at least based on the definitions chosen.