Let's see Bieber get 75% approval.
Otto writes: Every few months, reliable Mexican polling company Mitofsky puts together its Poll of Polls on the popularity of Heads of State in The Americas, then publishes its findings. That’s what they did scant hours ago and here’s how things look for the continental bigwigs at the moment, colour-coded chart and all. We even do a table if that big graphic is too messy and big for you.
In which your correspondent is informed that he was more right that he knew. (Image by Christian Haugen, CC-BY-2.0, www.creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons)
(Another guest post from our friend Otto.)
After yesterday’s post on the rapid rise in real estate prices in residential ‘hoods of Lima, Peru, your author had an interesting exchange with a friend who lives there and is immersed in the issue (his ID will be reserved, however). Here’s what he said:
…those are average, not real prices, so don’t try to go shopping for apartments relying on them. As my stats teacher said: ‘beware of statistical data because if I eat a chicken and you eat none, statistics will say we ate half each, which is not true.”
So number-nerd is as number-nerd does, I poked him with a stick by shooting this back:
(Special guest post from Otto Rock.)
The good news is that newly available personal credit and expansion of low-to-no downpayment mortgage market hasn’t caused a dangerous looking real estate price bubble in the country as yet.
Oh, hold on a moment….
Fear the Hand: Chileans are the least trusting people in the OECD. Photo: Steven Bodzin
I arrived at the Santiago Municipal Theater with great anticipation. The grand French neoclassical wedding cake — complete with gaudy white icing — had just recently been repaired after suffering more than its share of cracks and crumbles in the 2010 earthquake. I had also never seen the ballet version of Romeo and Juliet. Sure, we had cheap seats, but no big deal — I’m shameless about walking down and squatting unclaimed real estate in the orchestra level during intermission. I’ve done it at Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco, at Carnegie Hall in New York, and at smaller venues around the world. It’s one of those petty crimes that actually works well for everyone — theater owners don’t like empty seats up front.
When we arrived at the grand entrance, a harried security guard pointed us off to the right, to the door at the box office, where a separate queue was entering the building. Odd, I thought, but no big deal. At that door, though, they sent us further to the right — around the corner, out of view of the lovely plaza, to a busy downtown street. From there, entered a scuffed metal door and climbed a dingy staircase to a lobby with a threadbare carpet.
Since I started paying close attention to Venezuela in 2007, I have relied on the annual population figures* from the Instituto Nacional de Estadística, or National Statistics Agency.
As you can see on the estimates page, the 2011 population figure was supposed to be 29,277,736. As it happens, the INE did a census in 2011. It was supposed to last from August to November, but was extended to ensure that they counted everyone. The results won’t come out for another year, but the INE page gives the current progress of the “empadronamiento,” or roll-taking. As of Jan. 3 2012, they were up to 26,840,935.
In other words there were 2,436,801 people who were in Venezuela, according to the estimates, but weren’t there, according to the census. That is a very big difference. The estimate as of 2011 was 9.1 percent higher than the number of people counted as of Jan. 3.