In Damned Lies and Statistics, Joel Best argues that consumers of statistics need to especially scrutinize international comparisons because there are so many opportunities to mix up apples and oranges (I have discussed this with regard to the conceptual definitions used to quantify police-related deaths in different countries). One of Best’s examples was international comparisons …
Tag Archives: international comparisons
Does the US have too stringent a lockdown policy?
On Wednesday, the economist Phil Magness posted this tweet with a graph from OurWorldInData (which I reproduce because his graph is hard to read in his tweet). I have looked at different take-downs of the U.S. policy response to COVID, and a supposed late start of lock-downs has not been a prominent theme. Mostly writers …
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Quantifying police killings part 2
Last month the Police Policy Initiative disseminated a blog post putting police killings in the United States in international context: To its credit, the PPI included a list of sources for its numbers. One thing that caught my eye was that the number of police killings for the United States comes from the …