Saturday, February 05, 2005

 

The Miracle Of Relativity

A favorite trick of the propagandist is to compare apples to oranges, simply by calling the apple an orange. Case in point:

the poverty line set by the Chinese government is approximately one-thirteenth the standard set by the World Bank. China’s poverty line of 0.2 U.S. dollars per person daily should be reevaluated.
That's US 20 cents a day. If you make 21 cents a day, then according to the Chinese government, you're doing just fine.

It's something to keep in mind next time the "rates" of whatever are compared between two countries. It's also useful as a gauge of the true relative success of the Chinese "economic miracle." It is indeed a miracle to them, but that only shows us how far they had sunk under socialism to begin with.