A politicians percentage

 
There are lies, damn lies and then there are statistics.

Statistics can be true but lies.. how is that you ask...  When you are doing statistics involving calculating percentages where you have subtractions involved then you have to be extremely careful when either compiling the numbers or when listening to the numbers, especially politicians.

Lets take an example.  Lets say a government comes into power during a down turn of an economy where jobs are being lost.

Lets say at the start of the terms there were 10 million jobs and lets say 3 years later the number of jobs has declined to 90 million.

To you and I that is a decrease of 10% in the job market, and we would say that is a fair representation.
Lets say that the original job market consisted of 60 million men and 40 million women, and the new job market was men 58 million and women 32 million.

Now imagine the opposition making the following statement.  Hard times on women under this government, women account for 80% of job losses.   On paper this sounds correct, it implies that women are being targeted.

Now lets say that in that period men lost 10 million jobs but 8 million were created, and for women 20 million were lost and 12 million were created.  

Lets say the total jobs lost were 5 million instead and 10 million and this was brought by men only loosing 5 million jobs but still creating 8 million.  Now we have 5 million jobs lost in total and women have lost 8 millions,
using the same methodology, you can 160% of the net jobs lost were women ?????

This is the same sort of percentages that confuse or mislead you when they talk about income levels growing for the top 1% and the rest, so you may hear that the top 1% increased their income levels by 11% but the other 99% increased by 3%.

However if you did the split of the top 5% you may get that the average income level increase for the top 5% was 7% and the rest was 0.5% or even negative.

Ref:1. How not to be wrong.  The power of Mathematical Thinking.  Jordon Ellenberg