Well, yeah, the reporter should have used median income, not average income. But at least CNN got the main point right—there’s high income inequality in Brazil, and the fact that it’s even much worse than the reporter indicates doesn’t change that basic conclusion. Also, the main point of the article—that Brazil has large racial disparities in income, and the state is taking measures to address them—is not only accurate but is a generally progressive take on the situation, although I suspect there may be more than a touch of US apologetics buried in it (“See? Those guys over there are even worse!”).
I compare this story to the innumerable economic “facts” doled out by the capitalist press over the years in a totally offhand manner—“our children” will have to pay for government deficits (which are always bad) “out of their pockets,” or rising profits and a rising Dow Jones average show how “strong” “the economy” is—and I really can’t find much to complain about with this particular report. OK, call me an enemy of intellectual standards, I have low expectations for these guys... BTW, I thought I would find the median income of Brazil in a few seconds of googling (search terms: “median income brazil”), and I couldn’t, which may have been what happened to the journalist, for all I know. FWIW, the easiest I could find was an article that said median income was 30% of average income http://www.carnegieendowment.org/publications/index.cfm?fa=view&id=17694 Which is then an easy calculation, even if writing a story based on this would require a bit of hand waving with “around”s or “about”s, and who really knows where this particular commentator got his 30% figure, anyway--it would probably take even more phone calls, and hey, now I'm beginning to feel a tad sorry for that CNN reporter. Alternatively, printing a GINI Index in a mainstream news story causes problems similar to publishing the Richter scale following earthquakes (it’s hard as hell to understand intuitively what the number means—you need to understand the concept to get a real sense of the scale). But FWIW Brazil’s GINI Index is extreme (56.7 per 2005 CIA data, only nine countries are worse) which surprised me—I knew it would be bad, but not that bad. https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2172rank.html?countryName=Brazil&countryCode=br®ionCode=sa&rank=10#br On Sun, Jul 25, 2010 at 9:07 AM, Robert Naiman <[email protected]> wrote: > "The country's Gross Domestic Product -- the value of goods and > services it produces -- was $2 trillion in 2009, the 10th largest in > the world, according to the CIA World Factbook. But per capita income .... _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
