Comparatives

China, a nation of tea-drinkers, now has more branded coffee shops than the US

Beware of comparatives. In this case I have copied and pasted a headline from the CNN news web site. I did not read the article, nor do you need to. Your basic, even if outdated, knowledge of population figures allows you to ignore the click-bait.

The population of China is about 1.5 Billion people. The population of the USA is about 333 Million people – or one-third of a Billion if you prefer. That is, there are 4.5 times more people in China than there are in the USA.

If news about “how good coffee tastes”, or “it’s what all the best dressed people are drinking nowadays” spreads by mass media, we should expect there to be roughly 4.5 more coffee drinkers in China than there are in the USA.

And that translates, indirectly, into 4.5 times more coffee shops in China than there are in the USA.

That is, No Surprises Here.

That is, this is not news; nothing to see here; move along.

That is why I do not read articles such as the one referenced above.

In my youth I lived in Southern Cross in the Yilgarn of Western Australia. When I was 16 or 17 years old I worked in the summer vacation as telegraph boy (on a bicycle) at the post office. Two or three times a week I would pedal a mile or so to the wheat bon at the northern end of the town and deliver a coded telegram which said “extend the wheat bin a bit more”. We were having a good year for wheat.

Then came the announcement in the states newspaper “The West Australian” that Southern cross now boasted the longest wheat bin In the Southern Hemisphere.

I was impressed.

But I had arguably the state’s best geography teacher in Pierre deKurloi, and it dawned on me that whenever Australia had the ablest, biggest, cleanest, deepest, most effervescent, fastest (and do on through the alphabet) of anything, it meant really only that the city of Cape Town in South Africa had a smaller or slower version. Also that Brazilians didn’t go in for heavy industry (or pineapples or …).

That is, our local comparatives didn’t really have a target.

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