Nate Silver, who became famous for his use of polling data to accurately project US elections, launched a new blog, FiveThirtyEight.com, last month. It’s been off to a rough start — “something between a disappointment and a disaster,” as Paul Krugman wrote soon after its launch, because of some pieces that handled data rather badly. “[S]loppy and casual opining with a bit of data used, as the old saying goes, the way a drunkard uses a lamppost — for support, not illumination,” says Krugman.

I leave it to the reader to decide whether the FiveThirtyEight article on March 17 by Dorothy Kronick on Venezuela fits this description. While it has become acceptable to publish almost anything about Venezuela, so long as it makes the government look bad, I favor the approach of applying the same standards of analysis to all countries.

The thesis of the article is strange. Correctly noting that the political polarization in Venezuela is overwhelmingly along class lines, with the upper-income groups tending to support the protests and lower-income Venezuelans supporting the government, she asks rhetorically, “Why the divide?” and answers: