blogging – Jeff recounts the dead miner statistics

Yesterday I ended up in an informal webloggers meeting as both Andres and Jeff showed up at the same party and took the opportunity to review the world. One of many issues: the lack of trustworthy statistics in China. After I got set straight by others on a few of the statistics I used, I decided to be a bit more careful, since almost everything seems a fabrication.
When the ministry of culture says it has closed down 1,600 internet cafes, why should we believe that? When the government sets a GDP-figure, why should be believe that since all the provincial figures are already for years well ahead of the national average.
We ended up accusing Jeff of taking those official figures far too serious, but only today I saw his more serious analysis of the number of miners that get killed on the job in China.
A nice illustration of “sheer statistical cluelessness”.