Different yardsticks show diverging trends.
Start with last week's Pisa educational yardsticks, which show British teenagers trailing their Vietnamese counterparts at science, and behind the Macanese at maths.
Fixated on the relative status of different social groups, "Inventing America" ignores basic yardsticks that show that, on average, American living standards have risen at least eightfold and that Americans now live one-third longer than in the mid-19th century.
The yardstick values are shown in Figure 10.
Data from the Office for National Statistics ONSshowedwed that joblessness on the internationally agreed yardstick was 468,000 lower in the three months to July than in the same quarter of 2013 – the biggest annual decline since the Lawson boom was raging in 1988.
The most widely used yardstick of equity performance around the globe, the Morgan Stanley Composite Index, showed that a recovery in developed economies coupled with boom conditions in emerging markets has created a new record for shares.
Michael Mulgrew, the president of the United Federation of Teachers, the city teachers' union, said the federal results showed that the state tests were not reliable yardsticks.
Using the government's own promises as a yardstick, today's findings show he's failed to stick to his plan," said Dr Elaine King, director of Wildlife and Countryside Link, which represents 41 groups including the WWF, the Wildlife Trusts, the RSPCA, the RSPB, the Campaign to Protect Rural England and the Marine Conservation Society.
The yardstick in Figure 2 shows that examiners are more variable than are stations, the standard deviation being 0.33 for examiners but only 0.10 for stations.
The yardstick of figure 2 shows that the extremes of examiner stringency are of a similar size to the difference between the Pass and Fail borderlines.
