Meaningless Metrics.

Why did I put a picture of a Ugandan coffee shop here? You'll just have to keep reading to find out. See how good I am at clickbait?

Intro

Considering I’m a younger millennial yuppie with no prospect of owning a home or having kids, the only happiness in my life is derived from consuming inordinate amounts of caffeine and listening to podcasts on 1.75 speed.

I managed to trick a corporation into thinking I’m qualified to analyze data, so a lot of the content I consume through my ear holes tend to be data and statistics related.

I find it disappointing when I hear certain metrics quoted — especially by people who should presumably know better.

Some examples below:

“The average lifespan used to be [laughably small number]”

This is usually parroted by scholars of the Steven Pinker “everything is awesome” variety.

Mathematically, it’s not technically false, but it disregards infant mortality. It’s not like people were dropping dead at 30 due to old age. Rather, people would have a high chance of dying in the first couple of years because basic sanitation wasn’t a thing. But if they made it out of these initial years, they would likely make it to their 60s.

So in reality, modernity has probably added about 10 or 15 years to our lifespan, depending on the time periods and geographic location we are comparing. Still not a bad improvement, but far less sensational than the Pinker crowd would have you believe.

“50% of marriages end in divorce.”

The raw file name for this picture is “confused-couple-portrait-middle-aged-woman-shrugging-her-shoulders-white-studio-background-38328167.jpg”

So my extensive research of five minutes of googling has led to a number of contradictory answers as to the origin of this 50% statistic. Some articles claim this 50% number is a completely exaggerated false hood, while Forbes mentions it’s actually greater than 50%.

My intuition is that this 50% overweights those who have been divorced multiple times. Author Morgan Housel recently vomited all over my podcast feed one, two, three, four, five, six times; and in several of the interviews he mentions that the top 10 richest people in the world have 14 divorces among them.

So, by doing some faulty math, we might conclude that the divorce rate among these rich people is 140%.

Interestingly enough, the same Forbes article which claims that a given marriage has over a 50% probability of ending in divorce also claims that the actual divorce rate is 6 out of 1000 marriages.

That’s probably closer to the truth, but this calculation takes the number of divorces in a given year and dividing it by the number of marriages in that same year, disregarding the fact that this is two different populations of people. The people who might be in the numerator in one year might be in the denominator in another year, and vice versa.

Here is the real question most people are actually trying to answer: Given that you are going to get married, what is the probability that you are going to get divorced?

In which case, the numerator should be number of people who died married but not divorced, and the denominator should be number of people who died with one or more divorces. This statistic is actually pretty hard to find — that is to say, I tried to Google it and gave up after like five minutes.

“The unemployment rate is lower than ever!”

The unemployment rate by itself is a detached statistic.

When the unemployment rate goes down, it can mean one of two things:

1. People are finding jobs, OR

2. People gave up, and are no longer included in the calculation

Without the labor force participation rate, you don't know which scenario it is. And bad news, LPFR is the lowest it's been since the turn of the century.

Economists who boast of low unemployment rates should presumably know better. It is almost condescending to value a low rate for its own sake.

Boasting about low unemployment rates when labour force participation is dropping is like an oncologist boasting that nobody dies of cancer in her hospital because she shoots them before they get to stage four.

There’s also the added context of the gig economy where a lot of workers are underemployed — but that's a separate discussion.

“XYZ is in New York Times best seller.”

I’m actually surprised this is still a mark of prestige at all. There are so many New York Times best sellers that it’s basically meaningless.

Moreover, it’s manipulated. A lot of these books are best sellers in obscure categories, for a small period of time, in a specific array of geographic locations. It would be like if I boasted about having the most popular Substack in Ugandan coffee shops between 12:03 and 12:06 PM yesterday.

Moreover, one doesn't even have to be at the top of that list. As long as they sell like 5,000 books, they can still technically qualify as a best seller. It additionally helps when the New York Times removes perennial sellers like Harry Potter and the Bible from those lists.

Conclusion

Please like and subscribe, especially if you are in Uganda.