lies via /r/badeconomics

An ask reddit thread popped up about lies that most people believe and since I am desperate to shitpost in the silver thread I elected to rake some muck and see what kind of Bad economics I could dig up. Oh boy. I know most of these are low hanging fruits however I am but a lowly undergrad so bear with me.

R1-1: The Wage Gap don't real http://ift.tt/2a10DnK http://ift.tt/29xNOCI http://ift.tt/2a10Vee (jesus christ three different people with this bullshit)

Now the claim that the gender wage cap doesn't exists is wrong on two accounts I will bring up. Firstly that women on the whole earn .75:1 as compared to men. Now the clear problem with this statistic is that women generally choose lower paying careers or have career path's interrupted more greatly parenthood then men do. I would argue that this is a problem but what I suspect the poster's point is that when you control for other variables that the wage gap disappears. However this is also wrong as is pointed out here with an "adjusted gender wage gap that is between 4.8 and 7.1 percent". Now obviously 4.8-7.1% is a far cry from 25% as is sometimes claimed this is clearly NOT "equal pay for equal work" so it would be ludicrous to say that the gender wage gap doesn't exists, just that it isn't a strong as the media would sometimes have implied.

R1-2: Education don't matter http://ift.tt/29xNVhn

Okay this is a really simple R1. Now he would be right if what he is talking about is the noise involved in such a statistic because clearly on a case by case basis a high school dropout could easily out earn a Ph D. with straight A's. However, as we can see for degrees we clearly see large differences in the aggregate. Now we also need to look at the oppritunity cost of going to college but even accounting for that http://ift.tt/1YF4vxf granted this only looks at a bachelors degree but I would be unwilling to say that getting an advanced degree that isn't a professional degree is likely to be the best finical decision. Finally grades do not generally have a casual relationship to income but they defiantly correlate.

R1-3: Obamacare more like NObamacare amiright? http://ift.tt/29xNOCL

For the purpose of this R1 I am going to interpreter this comment as being generally anti-Obama care and not, as is the literal interpretation, that Obama-care doesn't exists. Largely there are two way you could judge the effectiveness of a given health care policy (so far as I can tell. I would not be surprised to learn I am wrong). Those are the relative levels of enrollment (i.e. what enrollment was before and after the policy) and the relative costs of health care i.e. what the cost of health care was before and after the policy). As Krugman points out here post Obama-care enrollment is up and insurance premiums are down. At the very Obama-care at least seems like less of a lie then the commenter seems to imply.

Honorable mention nonsense statement

http://ift.tt/29xOOqc

I don't even know what the fuck this is supposed to mean.

Can I shitpost now?