Ever wonder why it is that the CIA says that the US has a 99% literacy rate, despite the fact that this is vastly higher than the Department of Education estimates?
To quote from Jonathan Kozol's book Illiterate in America, "For one hundred years, starting in 1840, the census posed the question of the population's literacy level in its ten-year compilations. The government removed this question from its survey in the 1940 census. The reason, according to a U.S. Census Bureau publication, was a general conviction that 'most people [by this time] could read and write ...'
In 1970, pressured by the military, the Bureau of the Census agreed to reinstate the literacy question. Even then, instead of posing questions about actual skills, the census simply asked adults how many years of school they had attended. More than 5 percent of those the census reached replied that they had had less than a fifth grade education. For no known reason, the government assumed that four fifths of these people probably could read and, on this dangerous assumption, it was publicly announced that 99 percent of all American adults could read and write. These are the figures which the U.S. government passed on to the United Nations for the purposes of worldwide compilations and comparisons."[1]
In short the CIA world factbook is basically propaganda in order to make the US look like the best country on earth in order to justify a foreign policy based on subjugating people of 'inferior races'. I'm not saying that every single person who cites it is either a government shill or a white supremacist, but where there's smoke there's often a fire.
I have no dispute with the idea that statistics have biases.
However, the fact is that most of the time the parts of the CIA World Fact book quoted on HN are GDP, GDP/capita, life expectancy etc. There are often biases in these figures as well, but the CIA World Fact Book is really just acting as a convenient aggregator of these numbers.
Again, with emphasis added:
Citing economic data from the CIA World Fact Book isn't exactly propaganda
