Math

[K-Dog]

One day in the fall of 1906, the British scientist Francis Galton headed for the country fair.

As he walked through the exhibition that day, Galton came across a weight-judging competition. A fat ox had been selected and members of a gathering crowd were lining up to place wagers on the (slaughtered and dressed) weight of the ox.

Eight hundred people tried their luck. They were a diverse lot. Many of them were butchers and farmers, but there were also quite a few who had no insider knowledge of cattle. 'Many non-experts competed,' Galton wrote later in the scientific journal Nature, 'like those clerks and others who have no expert knowledge of horse, but who bet on races, guided by newspapers, friends, and their own fancies.' The analogy to a democracy, in which people of radically different abilities and interests each get one vote, had suggested itself to Galton immediately. 'The average competitor was probably as well fitted for making a just estimate of the dressed weight of the ox, as an average voter is of judging the merits of most political issues on which he votes,' he wrote.

Galton was interested in figuring out what the 'average voter' was capable of because he wanted to prove that the average voter was capable of very little. So he turned the competition into an impromptu experiment. When the contest was over and the prizes had been awarded, Galton borrowed the tickets from the organizers and ran a series of statistical tests on them, including the mean of the group's guesses.

Galton undoubtedly thought that the average guess of the group would be way off the mark. After all, mix a few very smart people with some mediocre people and a lot of dumb people, and it seems like you'd end up with a dumb answer. But Galton was wrong — the crowd guessed 1,197 pounds; after it had been slaughtered and dressed the ox weighed 1,198 pounds. In other words, the crowd's judgment was essentially perfect.... Galton wrote later: 'The result seems more creditable to the trustworthiness of a democratic judgment than might have been expected.' That was, to say the least, an understatement.

Seven percent unemployment in six months.  Consumer confidence is equivalent to guessing the weight of an ox.

Here you see where a coke can full of virus (if that) crashed the consumer cargo cult.  You can see the subsequent recovery. The end of the recovery shows this years falling confidence.  Gas prices will be kept low until the election passes.  What then?

Did I pick and choose, yes.  Do I think this is dishonest?  No, not in this case.  In general the American economic spin is always positive.  Truth is hard to find.  We are lied to every day.  Did I find some truth?

I do not know.

Is the precariat tapped out?