BoRev.Net

Lots of email responses to the Foreign Policy article about the Terrible Economic Price™ paid by the Venezuelan opposition. You may remember that we all had a good laugh the other day when FP published a story about some study that supposedly found that Venezuelans who opposed Chavez saw their incomes decline by roughly the price of a rum and coke a month. And then we made fun of them for acting like this was evidence of hardcore political retaliation. It now turns out that they were exaggerating.

BoRev readers, who are obviously more diligent than BoRev itself, took the time to look up the original study and noted a few important points:

>>> Context, as always, is important here. The signature drive for the recall referendum took place immediately following an attempted coup d’etat and an illegal oil strike, so presumably there was a lot of overlap in the participants of each. Even if there were some state “discrimination” going on at the time, it would be impossible to say that it was for merely signing a petition.

>>> But there probably wasn’t even any discrimination going on at all. The original study ran a number of regressions. While one indeed indicated the minor income loss for opposition supporters, another found an even larger loss of income for pro-government supporters during the same period. A third regression found similar losses for both sides. Confused? I think you’re supposed to be. Now check this out:

>>> A “loss of income” doesn’t mean that anyone’s income actually went down. When FP cited a 3.8 percent loss of income for opposition supporters, they mean a 3.8 percent loss relative to government supporters. Since national income has risen steeply since 2003, we’re talking about one group seeing income gains of, say, 50 percent while the other increased by “merely” 48.1 percent.

So while we once laughed that Foreign Policy cited lame and irrelevant data, we now know they cherry picked, misrepresented and exaggerated the data to make the story in the first place. So kudos to Moises Naim and team for possibly making this the special-est issue of your increasingly mockable magazine to date!