Tom, But you know, when I saw that headline, it rolled off me like the announcement of an Elvis sighting in a tabloid at the checkout counter. Those who know about the issues aren't going to be fooled by a phony headline and those who don't know aren't going to pay any attention to the story.
Arthur C. But those who don't know will see the headline and somewhere in their thinking accept it as true. The propaganda barrage continues unabated and the other side is never in headline form unless its blaring out a report on one protest or another. The well-oiled propaganda machine paid for by business interests (tax deductible therefor paid by us) goes on and on shaping public values with manipulated outcomes, outcomes that suit the business agenda. -----Original Message----- From: Tom Walker [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Tuesday, July 09, 2002 9:48 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; Keith Hudson Subject: Re: Creative fiction/Delusion ( was RE: Global Capitalism and the Death of Democracy) I agree that this kind of shell game with non-comparable statistics is annoying. On the way home from the swimming pool today I noticed a banner headline on the National Post, "Globalization cures poverty: study". For starters, there's no way that a study could prove such an assertion. It's an argument and a study could present evidence to support that argument. But there are too many intervening variables for any study to be decisive. Secondly, though, the measurements and assumptions upon which this particular study is based raise serious questions about its definitions of poverty. One of the great debates is whether poverty is absolute or relative. The study in question relies on an absolute measure. Another issue is whether people are necessarily better off with more market income if they have to pay for it in reduced direct or communal subsistence activity. The measurements referred to in the study do not adjust for the losses inherent in the transition from non-market to market activity. So all the study seems to say is, "according to how WE define poverty, there was no more of it in 1992 than there was in 1950, even though the population grew immensely." Hold on a minute, then. Why is relative the meaningful comparison for population, but absolute the meaningful one for income? Because they produce the results the study's sponsors wanted. If you looked at relative incomes and relative populations or absolute incomes and absolute populations, you wouldn't be able to say that things improved, let alone insinuate that globalization was the source of the improvement. But you know, when I saw that headline, it rolled off me like the announcement of an Elvis sighting in a tabloid at the checkout counter. Those who know about the issues aren't going to be fooled by a phony headline and those who don't know aren't going to pay any attention to the story. Keith Hudson wrote, > The flawed argument rests on computing the size of multinational > corporations (MNCs) by sales, but that of nations by gross domestic product > (GDP). Yet GDP is a measure of value added of a country, not of sales. If > one were to tot up the total sales in a country then the relative economic > size of MNCs falls several-fold.
