Extract from a review (in the New Statesman, no less) of Robert Peston’s book, ‘Who runs Britain? How the Super Rich are Changing our Lives’.
‘In an impenetrable sentence, he explains: “This [the Gini Coefficient] is a measure of income inequality that condenses the distribution of income inequality into a number between zero and one, where the zero corresponds to a world in which all households have identical income, and one would be a place where all the income goes to a single person.” Whew! All this to prove how the rich become richer and the poor poorer.’
Now, I’m no fan of Peston, and admittedly I’m the queen of geeks, but to me, that sentence is explaining a perfectly straightforward concept in a clear and informative way. So, my questions are these:
Am I alone in thinking this sentence is perfectly ‘penetrable’?
If the reviewer is so clueless about basic mathematical concepts, why did the NS ask him to review this book?
And why is it apparently acceptable for him to parade his ignorance in this way, when to make similar comments about, say, the value of Shakespeare or Jane Austen would (rightly) be considered beyond the pale in a serious journalist?