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It’s easy to quote someone out of context to impart a false impression. A movie critic
might write a review saying, “This film is a delight compared to a colonoscopy” only to
be quoted as saying, “This film is a delight.” Likewise, data presented without context
may be misleading if they are related to other factors important to an analysis.
In analyzing data, some quantities are absolute in the sense that
they mean the same thing under most conditions while others are
relative to other influencing factors. Take a person’s age. If you
are analyzing healthy six-year-old subjects, you would expect
certain characteristics and behaviors that might vary within some
typical range, but would be quite different from, say, sixty-year-
old subjects. However, if your six-year-old subjects came from
different cultures and geographies, you might find that their
characteristics and behaviors are substantially different. In some
societies, six-year-olds are protected innocents while in others
they are hunters-in-training.
Ratio of
Government
Employees No. of
to 1,000 Government
Country Population Employees Population
Canada 7.9 2,700,000 34,388,000
U.S. 6.8 21,292,000 310,997,000
Italy 5.6 3,400,000 60,574,609
Greece 4.4 500,000 11,306,183
Namibia 3.5 76,373 2,212,000
France 3.5 2,285,507 65,821,885
Bhutan 3.0 20,698 695,822
Germany 2.4 2,000,000 81,802,000
Indonesia 1.6 3,740,000 237,556,363
India 1.6 18,700,000 1,195,360,000
UK 0.8 520,000 61,792,000
Japan 0.8 1,000,000 127,370,000
Ukraine 0.6 283,408 45,778,500
Russia 0.6 846,307 141,927,297
China 0.4 5,410,000 1,341,000,000
This table shows that the U.S. has a relatively large number of federal employees for its
population and would top the list if the USPS employees were included. About a third of
the countries have one government employee or less per 1,000 population. China with
its huge population has the lowest ratio. The U.S. government may be getting smaller
but it’s still way bigger than any other government in the world. Right? Maybe, but
before you go all libertarian, consider this.
The data used in the table are frankendata—data collected by different people at
different times and locations, analyzed with different procedures and equipment, and
reported in different ways (http://statswithcats.wordpress.com/2010/10/31/resurrecting-
the-unplanned/). The Employment data were collected between 2002 and 2010, each
by a different source. Some are rounded to thousands and some are rounded to
millions. Some represent FTEs and some are all employees. And perhaps most
importantly, each country has a different government structure and defines civil service
in different ways. Maybe there’s a grain of truth in it and maybe it’s just an illusion
produced by a messy data set.
http://statswithcats.wordpress.com/2011/03/20/it’s-all-relative/