Thomas Sowell nails it....
Empirical studies that follow income brackets over time repeatedly reach opposite conclusions from studies that follow individuals. But people in the media, in politics and even in academia, cite statistics about income brackets as if they are discussing what happens to actual human beings over time.
All too often when liberals cite statistics, they forget the statisticians' warning that correlation is not causation.
For example the New York Times crusaded for government-provided prenatal care, citing the fact that black mothers had prenatal care less often than white mothers -- and that there were higher rates of infant mortality among blacks.
But was correlation causation? American women of Chinese, Japanese and Filipino ancestry also had less prenatal care than whites -- and lower rates of infant mortality than either blacks or whites.
When statistics showed that black applicants for conventional mortgage loans were turned down at twice the rate for white applicants, the media went ballistic crying racial discrimination. But whites were turned down almost twice as often as Asian Americans -- and no one thinks that is racial discrimination.
Facts are not liberals' strong suit. Rhetoric is.
""It is staggering that in the 21st century, half of the world's population own no more than a tiny elite whose numbers could all sit comfortably in a single train carriage," said Winnie Byanyima, Oxfam's executive director.
"'Widening inequality is creating a vicious circle where wealth and power are increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few, leaving the rest of us to fight over crumbs from the top table,' Byanyima said.
"The bottom half of the population — about 3.5 billion people — account for about $1.7 trillion, or about 0.7% of the world's wealth, according to the Oxfam report, titled 'Working for the Few.'"
Oxfam report highlights widening income gap between rich, poor - latimes.com
Seven-tenths of one percent of this world's wealth is owned by half of humanity.
Correlation or causation or cosmic greed?