AGGREGATING DATA
Just as the devil often quotes scripture for his (or her) own purposes, politicians and government agencies are fond of using statistics to mislead. One of the most common techniques is to combine data from disparate sources. Four of the six errors reported by Wise [2005] in the presentation of farm statistics arise in this fashion. (The other two come from employing arithmetic means rather than medians in characterizing highly skewed income distributions.) These errors are:
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