Full of Woe

For Christmas, Rourke got me a subscription to The Economist, and I've been loving it. What really amuses me is the writing style, a kind of mix of journalism and editorial with a sharp bite to it.

Take, for example, this short piece titled "Full of woe" about how Britain ranked low on a survey of children's well-being among wealthy nations:

SEX, booze and horrid friends: those three evils dragged Britain's youngsters to the bottom of a “child well-being” index published this week by UNICEF. The UN agency ranked 21 rich countries on everything from babies' birth-weight to how often children chat to their parents. The Netherlands came top, followed by those infernal Scandinavians, who always seem to do well in such contests, and a raft of Catholics. Britain brought up the rear, standing shoulder to shoulder with America.

Just 43% of British children were willing to describe their peers as “kind and helpful”—the lowest of any country (the nicest kids are in Switzerland, where 81% agreed with this). It gets worse: despite finding their peers so vile, British teens were all too willing to jump into bed with them. By the age of 15, 38% had had sex—the highest of the sample. This may be because they were also much the drunkest, and the third-biggest cannabis smokers (just behind the cheery Swiss).

Such colorful presentation of relatively dry statistics makes the large quantity of data-driven articles almost qualify as entertainment.