Skewed Statistics

It's well known that statistics can be used to prove that which isn't true. The common phrase is 'statistics lie'. However, much like the old computer acronym 'GIGO' (garbage in, garbage out), it's not the statistics that lie so much as it is the people using those statistics to prove what they wish.

It seems sometimes that the world is down on the United States. Even some of those who live here think that we are the great 'evil empire'. The current fashion is to blame the United States for some of the world's ills such as energy use.

The most bandied about statistic is that 'The United States uses 20% of the world's resources (read: energy) with only 5% of the world's population'. On the surface that does indeed seem to make us look like we're energy hogs, using well more than what would be considered a 'fair share', whatever that means, than the rest of the world.

The flaw in that logic is that energy/resource use means nothing if you tie it in relation to population. It's not as if the population of the United States is just sitting around with the lights on while our cars idle in the garage. It would make much more sense to tie energy use to production, since that's mostly for what the energy is being used.

Production is typically measured by what's called GDP, or gross domestic product. For the year 2008, the world's GDP, that is the value of every product or service that the world produced (in so far as it's possible to measure such things) was just under $60.7 Trillion dollars. The GDP of the United States for the same year was just under $14.3 Trillion dollars. (Numbers provided by the International Monetary Fund)

This means that, with 5% of the world's population and using 20% of the world's resources, the United States produced approximately 24% of the world's goods and services. These numbers would indicate that far from using more resources than we should, we're actually more efficient than the rest of the world at producing goods and services.

Of course, this shouldn't come as any big surprise. We've been doing it for more time, and far better than most of the rest of the world. One of the other things these statistics doesn't show is the value of the technological advances the United States provides.

Almost all of the advances in technology in the past 30 years have come from the free market economy of the U.S. and for good reason. We're the ones who don't count the pennies when it comes to making things better. At least, we didn't in the past.