Governor Klink and other state officials are fond of trumpeting “studies” that seem to come out weekly, telling us Minnesota is doing just great.
Klink’s enforcer, Keith Ellison, did it the other day:
Figuring that this observation contradicts everything our lying eyes are gelling us about realiity around us, I figured I’d click through to read the actual study.
CNBC scored all 50 states on 128 metrics in 10 broad categories of competitiveness. Each category is weighted based on how frequently states use them as a selling point in economic development marketing materials. That way, our study ranks the states based on the attributes they use to sell themselves.
So, it weights the quality of states’ sales pitches?
And apparently subjective weighting counts for a lot, since Minnesota came in fourth place for “quality of life” (measured how?) but 35th for “cost of doing business” and 24th for “economy”.
It appears to be a measure of a state’s commitment to happy talk.
I operate under the assumption that every “study” and “ranking” you see is clickbait. You could gather five dudes in a booth at the Roseville Denny’s and they could come up with a study that has more credible methodology. The only “study” I see that seems credible is the one that ranks over a dozen Wisconsin towns among the drunkest in America..
But Mitch, the article states [o]ur study is not an opinion survey. So there.
Apropos Wally’s relationship with the truth, people outside of MN are noticing, at this point the question is: is there anything he doesn’t lie about?
Mr D,
Only a dozen?
The scariest thing to me is that in any number of areas with theoretically “right answers”, even in medicine, there are a lot of studies where you really need to read the fine print to see what kind of games they’re playing with the data. Even in engineering, it’s starting to rear its ugly head, in great part because government is funding so much of the work.