Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics

"As dear as Pittsburgh is to me, dearer still is the Truth," as Aristotle would have said, had he been born in Bloomfield.

That, in itself, raises an interesting scenario in which All men, by nature, desire to know becomes All yinz, by nature, desire to know, n'at." The Philosopher opines on Man qua Pittsburgher, stating that Man is a Football, Beer drinking Animal. Poetics need not conform to the three unities of time, place, and action, but do need to reference at least one Donny Iris song.

Of course there are still three types of ideal government, all of which run by the Democratic Machine.

But that's not what I wanted to write about... although it fills me with a perverse nerdish joy. Perhaps in the future.

Back to more salient points:

Saw an article in the Pittsburgh Business Times entitled "Pittsburgh region's per capita income growth beats national average". Apparently, in the first three years of this decade, Pittsburgh's per capita income rose at a rate of 2.55 percent per year.

OK, so per capita income has gone up... key words being "per capita," meaning "per person"... while population has gone down. So, basically, there's a gross regional income, and fewer and fewer people to spread it out against.

Now, if I had $1 and three friends, I'd have $.25 per capita; if one of my friends was a total whore and I was like, "get out of here before I punch you in your dirty whorish mouth," we'd have $.33 per capita, and a lot of hurt feelings. How is this different from the Pittsburgh income statistics?

Um... Am I missing something? Doesn't this seem like a duuuuuuuuuuuh! point?

I can only assume that either (a) they are adjusting for net loss of jobs that go with the loss of population, (b) there has been an change of number of jobs not commensurate with the loss of population, or (c) this is a meaningless statistic.

I think this is just a statistic qua crap... but that's because I'm irritable this morning, and have lost all ability to type correctly.