MarkRoulo wrote: ↑Sun Oct 02, 2022 3:46 pm
McQ wrote: ↑Sat Oct 01, 2022 5:08 pm
petulant wrote: ↑Sat Oct 01, 2022 12:17 pm
... I am disappointed that user McQ is now apparently trying to match marketwatch headlines for clickbait ...
I note for the record that you are the third Boglehead to accuse me of clickbait (I keep a running tally, I doubt you will be the last).
Two inferences occur:
1. Where there’s smoke, there must be fire;
Or
2. Time to dust off my copy of Plato’s
Republic and find the passage where he bans poets because of their fatal predilection for clickbait and other violations of logic and probity.
More than a whiff of that Plato here at Bogleheads, in my experience thus far.
Conversely,
your point about whether SWR analyses should include wars does raise a key question. I don't see that the answer is a foregone conclusion, and hope we can debate the question here in this thread.
I don't think we will reach a conclusion.
I will ILLUSTRATE (not prove) why with a few examples that begin as questions.
Question #1: What was the homicide rate in New York City from 2000 - 2010?
Homicide rate is commonly reported as homicides per 100,000 and the US as a whole was a bit over 9.0 in 2000. This dropped to about 4.5 in 2014 and has since risen to 6.5. For reference, Baltimore runs over 50. And upper middle class suburbs often see a rate of around 1.0.
So ... New York City saw around 6,000 homicides over those ten year (so 600 per year) and had a population of around 8 million. This works out to about 7.5 per 100,000. Quite good for a large city compared to the US as a whole.
But there is a catch and it is a big one. The 6,000 count does NOT include the 3,000 people killed on 9/11. I would have a difficult time arguing that flying airplanes into a building full of people didn't count as homicide, but the official stats for NYC *exclude* those deaths for 2001 (the official number of homicides as 649).
If one is trying to ascertain the chances of getting killed in NYC over the next 30-50 years should those deaths be excluded from the backward looking sample because this is unlikely to happen again? Or because it is rare? Or should they be included because every so often this sort of thing DOES happen even if we probably won't get an exact repeat?
Rare events are tough to model, partially because they are rare so we don't have a good idea of the true underlying probability.
I'm not going to offer an answer, but I think this question illustrates well the stats problem to solve.
Question #2 (This is a variation on #1): What is the average homicide rate in Europe compared to the US?
If one looks up the basic statistics one finds something like, "European countries tend to have homicide rates 1/3 - 1/4 that of the US."
Which is a pretty reasonable answer and addresses the question most people care about if they are going to Europe on holiday or trying to make some sort of point about gun control.
But it excludes the 12,000,000 people murdered in the Holocaust (1933 - 1945).
Another way to view the homicide rate is that in any given year the European rate has been quite a bit lower than that of the US, but there have been a few years that were INSANELY HIGH compared to the US.
Note that we can play this game even today because when Russian missiles are aimed at Ukrainian hospitals that almost certainly doesn't show up in the basic homicide statistics for Ukraine though the folks are just as dead as if they had been murdered.
So ... retain the data with World Wars and Great Depressions (and Argentina and Japan post-WW2) or remove it because these events are: (a) rare and, (b) unlikely to be repeated?
I don't think "we" are going to converge on an answer.