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How Free-Market Ideologues Lie Using Statistics
The way social democracies get misrepresented by conservative think tanks.
As a Nordic social democrat with an interest in economics and statistics, it is hard not to notice the abundance of reports produced by various conservative and pro-market right-wing think tanks that abuse statistics to make social democracies look bad while glorifying more libertarian-minded states such as the US.
The political left is unfortunately very bad at countering this as there are very few left-wing think tanks. Not surprising given that the right has the support of large corporations which donate to think tanks promoting a very capitalism friendly ideologies. Secondly, most leftists don’t enter politics because they are interested in economics and statistics. Now there are plenty of academic economists who are left-wing but they work in academia, not in think tanks lavishly funded to promote a particular ideology.
Anyway, here I want to cover some of various think tanks’ and right-wing pundits’ abuse statistics on economical matters. These are the topics:
- “The Rich Pay an Increasing Share of Taxes!” — That the rich pay a larger or larger share of taxes is not an indication of fair tax policies. We’ll look at why.
