Mark Twain said there are lies, damned lies, and then there are statistics! He might have had some of Mr. @FareedZakaria's statistics in mind!
https://twitter.com/FareedZakaria/status/1091889215019933701
It is not how cavalierly Mr. Zakaria pitches his statistics around, it’s the number of independent narratives he unfurls with them.
Dismissive concepts such as “spirited elite bashing,” “trendy political posturing,” the combing of the “left” and “right” as two sides of the same “out-of-touch” narrative against the elite...
and always a crowd favorite, the recently re-popularized evocation of Joseph-Ignace Guillotin’s, tactically impactful, but strategically useless device.
Mr. Zakaria’s usually lucid singular narrative is absent and in its place is an aggressive Fox-like response with a quasi-religious, ideological, defensive posture on behalf of elites.
For the first time in the near four decades since the advent of Reagonomics, that latest manifestation of supply-side balderdash, we are talking about returning to sane taxation for the insanely rich and that evokes guillotines? Who said ANYTHING about guillotines?
This is what happens when you stop flying coach. 
“Since 1990, over 1 billion people have moved out of extreme poverty.” Nice stat! Meanwhile, back at the ranch: “Wealth — the value of a household’s property and financial assets, minus the value of its debts — has become much more highly concentrated than income.
The best survey data show that the share of wealth held by the top 1 percent rose from just under 30 percent in 1989 to nearly 39 percent in 2016, while the share held by the bottom 90 percent fell from just over 33 percent to less than 23 percent over the same period.”
Gives 1 billion people one dollar each; you will have spent a billion dollars! Have you made a billion dollars’ worth of difference in the world?
That’s the problem with stats. Yes, the “gap between black and white high school completion has nearly disappeared,” is a bit strong, but we’ll let it go. Take it on face value. What’s the meaning of that stat?
Has the standard of education remained equal across eras? Do black and white populations share curricula across eras, and across black and white populations? And even if all of that were statistically controlled, which they aren’t; it’s still an empty stat!
Are they getting more employment opportunities? Meaningful, lasting jobs with good benefits on which to build a life and family?
So you’re African American and got your high-school diploma. Where are you going to college? For how much? What kind of debt are you going to carry? What are your employment prospects afterwards?
Really? Graduating high school is an accomplishment now? Are you kidding me? So the Davos crowd is counting that as their accomplishment and not as a civil right of which no population should ever have been deprived in the first place?
The point is more about the emptiness of certain stats in proper context and not about education or lack thereof.
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