Statistical Study of the Children of Lake Wobegon

The dark side of grad school... I can't even listen to NPR without getting into hyper analytical mode.

Take Garrison Keillor's description of Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.  Teehee, you say, how can ALL the children be above average (snicker snicker).  I am apparently incapable of enjoying simple humor, and instead miss the point entirely.

Instead, I assume that this can be explained by the Central Limits Theorem, and decide that the null hypothesis should reflect that all the children score above average on some scale.  To do so, we assume that the scale is normally distributed, with the average score being 50. 

H(sub o): mu > 50
H (sub a): mu < or = 50

What I'm sure we'd find in a sample of the population is a confidence interval where the mean may be above 50, meaning that we fail to reject the null hypothesis at, say, 90% confidence.  I do not know if we could ever conclude that the mean of the population is above or below average with any degree of statistical significance, not being in possession of a data set.  It is troubling that the contention is about all children, and not the mean of the children, but I can't really apply statistics to that, just common sense, which is not part of the curriculum.

Synergies

Sometimes things just seem to fall into place.  I've been pretty fortunate in my college education that when world events have gone down, I have been enrolled in the perfect class at that very time.  For example, when Bill Clinton was impeached, I was in a class on the American Presidency.

Currently, I'm in a class where we take economic models and apply them to public policy.  We're also about to go over the fiscal cliff.  SYNERGY!

Or, oh yeah... this blog is about to get epic...