Skepticism

Super Bowl Winner Predicts N. Korea’s GDP

It’s time once again for Bad Chart Thursday! This week, I was thinking a lot about the old joke that the Super Bowl winner determines whether the stock market will be bullish or bearish (is “bearish” a thing? OK) or that it predicts presidential elections. With that in mind, this week I took things to the next logical step by determining whether or not the Super Bowl winner correlated with the percentage of growth of North Korea’s gross domestic product (GDP). Gaze upon my startling discovery:

North Korea Super Bowl

 

As you can clearly see, when the AFC team wins the Super Bowl it tends to predict positive growth for the North Korean economy. With the exception of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers’ unjust win over the Oakland Raiders in 2003, an NFC win predicts negative growth.

What is the AFC hiding, exactly? Who makes all their “Super Bowl Champion” t-shirts? Where are they sending the millions of dollars they probably get (??) for winning the Big Game? I’m just asking questions.

Data comes from this list of Super Bowl winners, which Wikipedia insists on calling “Champions” as though they fought an actual bear or something, and this PDF report on the North Korean economy. Data from 2006 to present was available but inconvenient and so was left out.

Rebecca Watson

Rebecca is a writer, speaker, YouTube personality, and unrepentant science nerd. In addition to founding and continuing to run Skepchick, she hosts Quiz-o-Tron, a monthly science-themed quiz show and podcast that pits comedians against nerds. There is an asteroid named in her honor. Twitter @rebeccawatson Mastodon mstdn.social/@rebeccawatson Instagram @actuallyrebeccawatson TikTok @actuallyrebeccawatson YouTube @rebeccawatson BlueSky @rebeccawatson.bsky.social

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15 Comments

  1. By “inconvenient” I assume you mean it didn’t match the relationship you were hoping for. ;)

  2. Clearly, the AFC are secret Communists dedicated to harvesting psychic energy from the United States to aid their beleaguered comrades in Korea? And by putting a question mark at the end of this sentence, I can claim that I am Just Asking Questions?

  3. I laughed so hard. I’m picturing you have a large wheel/map with various newsy type items on it and you spin it/throw darts at it to determine which two items to correlate. Is your method a trade secret?

  4. “Data from 2006 to present was available but inconvenient and so was left out.”
    I am SO stealing this! Brilliant!

    1. The period 2006-2020 is under investigation.and is the subject of a future publication.
      Further funding is required.

  5. “With the exception of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers’ unjust win over the Oakland Raiders in 2003, an NFC win predicts negative growth.”

    Recent rumor is that the head coach of the Raiders deliberately came up with a bad game plan so that he would lose. I personally don’t buy it but you should totally go with that to explain your anomaly.

  6. Searched for an appropriate story to link this under — http://www.slate.com/articles/video/video/2014/02/north_and_south_korea_from_space_international_space_station_video_shows.html

    Shows the stark contrast between DPRK and ROK. Looking at power usage, though, we may be able to give the DPRK some DPRKudos for environmentalism. They use only like 739 kwhrs of power compared to ROK’s 10,000+ kwhrs per capita….. they’re taking their global warming responsibilities seriously!

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