Lies, damn lies, and facts

“The facts speak for themselves”, they say. But do they really, or are we just hearing what we think they’re saying? Maybe conclusions and decisions “supported by facts” are not necessarily as robust as we like to think.

The other day, a couple of interesting tweets zoomed through my timeline. The first one contained several images of newspaper headlines to the effect that millennials (people born between 1981 and 1996) are having so few children because they cannot afford to. The second one simply listed some apparently related data: the average earnings per year, and the birth rate (per couple) for two neighbouring countries, South Korea and North Korea. Average annual earnings for South Korea were $31,489, and its birth rate was 0.92; for North Korea, average earnings per annum were $1,288 and the birth rate was 1.90. My immediate and unguarded reaction was predictable: can an average South Korean couple on that kind of income really not afford, on average, to have even a full child between them, if their North Korean counterparts can have twice as many on roughly 4% of their income?