This week such a story was the one that said people in the Britain rank 15th in the world for yearly alcohol consumption. Yay! Go Team UK! The Old Country is still good at something after all.
So this ranking of 15th corresponds to a yearly intake of 13.4 litres of pure alcohol per person. Or over 445 pints of strong beer or large glasses of wine. In contrast, Britain's wimpy European neighbors can only pull a lowly 12.2 liters per person.
But then the story gets kind of surreal.
If you discount teetotalers and only put the drinking on the drinkers, the consumption rate in the UK jumps to 15.6 litres per person. Way to go Blighty! This number corresponds to 9.50 litres per woman and a staggering 21.5 litres per man. Surprisingly, a whole 14.4% of the population in Britain do not drink at all.
Now with these new revised and bigger numbers, you'd really think that Britain would move up from 15th to an even more respectable and higher place in this the World's Table of Serious Boozing Nations....
And guess what? If you think that, you are wronger than wrong.
13.4 litres gives to a ranking of 15th, but 15.6 litres puts you, to quote the article I read, as "out-drunk by about half the countries in the world". The report ranked 193 countries, so 15.6 litres corresponds to a ranking of BELOW 96th !!!
I think that is worth repeating. 13.4 is 15th, 15.6 is below 96th.
Huh? Huh? Huh? Whaaaaa?
The report even said that given these revised figures, Britain is overtaken by countries like Egypt and Iraq. Huh? What The F......?
I guess the action of "normalising for teetotalers" really skews the numbers. Say you have a big Muslim country where almost no one drinks. So 227 million people in Indonesia consume 40 litres of alcohol per year. When you put those 40 litres squarely on the 2 people actually doing the drinking, an initial alcohol consumption rate of of 0.00000018 litres per person becomes 20 litres per person.
Yowzer! Living amongst non-drinkers makes the imbibers go at it even more!
But you have to admit that initially reading 13.4 makes you 15th, you were not expecting that 15.6 litres makes you 97th.
