I was on the treadmill yesterday. Larry King Live was on. At first, I did not know what Larry King and the guests were arguing about. Soon I was appalled at what Larry said. He was apparently challenging a Bush sympathetic. He said, "how many soldiers died under the Bush administration and how many died under the Clinton administration?"
If that was a proof of Bush's being a terrible president, FDR would have been the worst president ever. Close to half a million soldiers died in World War II. I never like the war in Iraq, but you need to come up with better arguments to convince people that Bush did a terrible job as a president.
In economics, we called Larry's misfire an identification problem. The fact that you observe two things happen together does not necessarily tell you they are caused by each other or even correlated. Unfortunately, talking heads on TV or in the radio make the mistake all the time.
(Picture: wikipedia)
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