During my list making I stumbled on this article
It's about historical calorie intake and workouts. People were eating way more calories, and doing less, and still had a lower body weight. We are constantly being told to lower our calories, exercise, and fight the obesity epidemic. Nothing fits by the historical records. Every suggestion is wrong.
I knew something was weird when I was told by a lower rich class guy that the poor couldn't afford real food. He meant the super expensive but not as good food at those special grocery stores.
It appears that the way this is done is
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Choose something no one knows that well.
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Have an obvious fake news that is prompted by all media.
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Make one side look stupid and lazy.
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Promote the bad side as rebellions
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Have tons of business to deal with the non existent problem both for and against
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Change the word use if people start to catch on.
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Promote laws stopping the Lazy Stupid people from being tricked by Evil. Said laws remove rights from everyone.
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Have demonstrations and big promotions against said thing for people to make money to 'battle' the problem. This is all a scam of some kind.
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The Lazy Stupid people are told they are special and beautiful. This niche is used for money laundering. No one is told it's not an actual problem.
I've seen this in obesity, Covid, videogames, global warming, hawks in England, sparrows in China, and several others. What others can you think of? Why is obesity promoted so hard, and what is the truth?
One that I found is the "leaded gas causes violent crime".
You've probably seen graphs of leaded gas sales and violent crime overlaid and wow it's a perfect fit delayed by like one generation. Amazing, right!
Well, the graphs start at like 1950 or sometime recent like that. Was looking for crime rates from other eras and noticed violent crime rate in the early 1900s (before leaded gas) was at least as high as "peak lead" violence. From memory, pretty sure the violence predated prohibition. What was causing all that crime back then?
I suspect that the lead-violence correlation is just a proxy for how the overall economy was doing.
This was when I found out that rate of lynchings by race in OK back in the 1800s was almost exactly today's murder rate by race. It seems a certain demographic has always been driving the violent crime rate, and I'm quite sure Freakonomics didn't consider that as an alternative to leaded gas.
I know that if they want to show crime rising, they start at 1945 or 1946. That was a very low crime rate with no explanation. If they want to show crime going down, they go from somewhere in the 70's because that was a high crime rate.
Might’ve been because it was at the tail end of WW2 most people were either involved in the war or worked to support families until the men came back.
Kinda hard to rob a guy that fought the Japs for your safety.
Any graph starting from the tail end of World War 2 is very clearly trying to lie with statistics.