Ian On The Red Dot

The only thing I remember from my Econs S Paper lessons is this sentence about statistics:

“If you torture them, they will confess”

And I thought about this sentence when reading about the discussion on the Gini coefficient for income and Singapore’s ranking with respect to other countries.

Just to clarify something, did Yaw Shin Leong made a mistake in this post? He said:

“Generally a higher Gini coefficient tends to indicate a lower level of social and economic inequality. “

I thought a higher Gini coefficient means a higher level of income inequality. Better check some econs text to confirm.

Another blogger over here asked if you would rather be in Singapore with a higher level of income disparity than Azerbaijan where everyone is equally poor. Hmm… Why can’t I want to be in a country which has both a low level of income inequality and everyone is well off. Of course I don’t believe that the blogger is saying that only such a choice exist. He probably is saying that we shouldnt get our knickers in a tangle just over Singapore’s ranking based on the Gini coefficient.

In any case, back to the first point about torturing statistics. On tomorrow.sg where I got the link to Shin Leong’s post on this issue, the Anonymous Coward who recommended the post said:

“This is what our local papers will never publish. Singapore is ranked alongside African nations in terms of income disparity”

I am not sure if it is indeed true or not whether our mainstream media will ever not talk about this issue. We have to wait and see. But what is interesting is that a member of our opposition brings the attention of the blogosphere to this interesting statistic but does not really discuss the issue.

What he did do was say this:

“Shockingly, Singapore is ranked at a joint 80 out of 126 countries, alongside Kenya.”

Why is it a shock that Singapore has a high level of income disparity? Were we expecting otherwise? Why were we expecting otherwise? Is it because we weren’t meant to think otherwise? And why should we have thought otherwise? I am probably being presumptuous, but I cannot help but have the feeling that with this post, Shin Leong (as a member of the Workers’ Party) is trying to tell us that maybe all the PAP’s talk about how well Singapore and Singaporeans are doing may not be that truthful.

The thing is, while I am not disputing that things are probably not as rosy as the government would like us to believe, it doesnt help if a member of the opposition just throws this statistic up without discussing and analyzing it. What he did do, in my opinion was use this statistic the same way the government would use statistics which is to try to convince us of their own world view.

It would have been really affirming for my belief in our opposition if Shin Leong had wrote something like what Alex did in the comments section for the post or what this blogger did over here.  They weren’t super meaty but they were trying to give some flesh to the topic.

I know I’m probably nitpicking, but I can’t help but be naive in my hope that our opposition party will be different. By all means, use statistics, use them to answer difficult questions but use them without wanting them to tell you the answer you already have.