The trouble here (aside from dragging politics in—you could have started at paragraph 4, for example) is that you took a route that wasn’t very helpful to the reader. Halfway through, after some quotes, you basically went “and ignoring that, here’s what some other people came up with,” and then presented the straight numbers without talking about their methodology for quantifying “liberty,” your original topic.
And of course correlation/causation mixups are bad, more in-depth statistical analysis is good, but that has to be solved by reading a book or two, while giving us the details of peoples’ methodology can be solved by just reading a few papers.
you basically went “and ignoring that, here’s what some other people came up with,”
Freely admitted—though I tried to explain why; simply, that I wasn’t able to find the numbers I went looking for.
but that has to be solved by reading a book or two
At the time of writing, I was mostly still at the ‘sniff test’ stage, to try and do a simple test to figure out if it was worth spending more effort on this line, or if I should look for some other approach. The initial response seems relatively promising—the next stage would seem to be finding /which/ “book or two” to read, or at least find some in-depth data source to get better numbers.
Does anyone have a good ‘in’ with, say, a university sociology department, who might know where to find “median discretionary income” stats, or even have them already handy in a spreadsheet?
The trouble here (aside from dragging politics in—you could have started at paragraph 4, for example) is that you took a route that wasn’t very helpful to the reader. Halfway through, after some quotes, you basically went “and ignoring that, here’s what some other people came up with,” and then presented the straight numbers without talking about their methodology for quantifying “liberty,” your original topic.
And of course correlation/causation mixups are bad, more in-depth statistical analysis is good, but that has to be solved by reading a book or two, while giving us the details of peoples’ methodology can be solved by just reading a few papers.
Freely admitted—though I tried to explain why; simply, that I wasn’t able to find the numbers I went looking for.
At the time of writing, I was mostly still at the ‘sniff test’ stage, to try and do a simple test to figure out if it was worth spending more effort on this line, or if I should look for some other approach. The initial response seems relatively promising—the next stage would seem to be finding /which/ “book or two” to read, or at least find some in-depth data source to get better numbers.
Does anyone have a good ‘in’ with, say, a university sociology department, who might know where to find “median discretionary income” stats, or even have them already handy in a spreadsheet?