Did you know that: only Russia , the Ukraine and Lebanon have as much inequality of income and wealth as the USA? If you even want to give democracy a chance, this should suggest how hard the road will be to recover even a modicum of greater equality! Between CEOs and minimum wage workers the difference is 5,000 per hour vs $7.25 per hour, and every day it’s getting worse.

Why do I find myself going through these exercises over ad over–to keep me angry? And maybe it’s just that I find statistics fascinating–and wish that my education had included more of that and less of the caculus-driven stuff I managed to do well at but never understood and never use.

It’s what made me love the book called, “the signal and the noise, why so many predictions fail–but some don’t.” Author, Nate Silver who is famous for his election polling–FIVEHIRTYEIGHT.COM and a system for forecasting baseball performance called PECOTA, He is amazed at the number of important people who regularly make false predictions but who are completely unfazed by it. He goes from one field to another–like the financial forecasting leading up to 2008, election polls, and more. But he also describes some successes–like, believe it or not, weather forecasting has gotten more and more accurate. That is, the data collected by the Feds. Local TV and radio newscasters, he notes, have a regular pattern of predicting rain more often than the actual data suggests. He conjectures that people get mad when you predict good weather and it rains, but forgive you when it’s reversed.

It fits my general predilection not to believe th data–but also reminds me that the reason for being skeptical is first and foremost because I DO NOT understand it. He is not an enemy of Big Data, but he reminds us, to beware.

And above all to beware of some people’s USE of data to defend their partisan agendas. And educaztion friends–it’ll help us in our education wars too.

Don’t miss reading this book and it’s no even expensive!