Stat-Spotting
A Field Guide to Identifying Dubious Data
by Joel Best
California, 144 pp., $19.95
As the current economic apocalypse reminds us, the most valuable lifetime text on money--or almost anything else, particularly in Washington or Wall Street--was not authored by John Maynard Keynes or Friedrich von Hayek or Adam Smith or Niccolo Machiavelli. It's The Emperor's New Clothes by Hans Christian Andersen.
This merry fairy tale, in which two Bernie Madoff-type tailors convince a vain king that they've woven him a suit so elegant it's invisible to the stupid or incompetent, ends with the king parading, naked as Clintonian ambition, before a cheering populace unwilling to admit it isn't smart enough to recognize quality threads. Cheering, that is, until a small child points out that the emperor has no clothes.
That child obviously went on to become a properly skeptical reporter. He clearly escaped indoctrination in pre-K from the likes of Foucault, Derrida, and other current icons of academe who cross-stitch the notion of truth with the same needle and thread that clothed the emperor. Alas, today he's an endangered species.
Now comes one Joel Best, author of Damned Lies and Statistics, with another earnest little book to help us scissor through the lumpy statistical featherbed that pads every fabric of our public and private life. Want full employment? Want honest stockbrokers? Want health care? Who ya gonna call? Stat busters!
Best, a professor of sociology and criminal justice at the University of Delaware, is actually a bit of a political Pollyanna, useful as his slender volume is. He assures us that some statistical errors are accidental or inadvertent, which those who toil amid the spinning wheels of the nation's capital know to be largely hoo-ha.
Everybody's cooking the numbers. Causists do it to plead their passion. Candidates do it to justify their politics. Federal agencies do it to swell their budgets. Scientists do it to glean research money. Even journalists, who should know better but pretend they don't, do it to grab headlines and boost careers. Show me a Washington worker bee wedded to statistical integrity and I'll show you someone underappreciated, underpaid, and starving for truth. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
Nevertheless, Best's prescribed body armor for making one's way through these statistical shootouts is made of the very components Aesop or Socrates advised: skepticism, multiple perspectives, comparison, and common sense. For example, when confronted with fantasyland feminists shrieking that 4 million American women every year are battered to death by husbands or boyfriends, it helps to know that the number of deaths in 2004 of both sexes in the United States from all causes was only about 2.4 million. Just over half of those died from either cancer or heart disease. In comparison, such highly publicized causes of death as traffic accidents (43,000), suicide (32,000), homicide (17,000), and HIV/AIDS (16,000) each accounted for only about 1 or 2 percent of all deaths--a far smaller proportion than many headlines and fundraisers would have us believe.
Likewise, it helps to know that the U.S. population is something over 300 million, and that about 4 million babies are born in the nation each year, fairly evenly divided by sex. Thus, if 4 million women were being battered to death each year (never mind by whom), the nation's population would be undergoing a fairly precipitous decline.
Such benchmark statistics are available in the annual Statistical Abstract of the United States--one of the few government publications turned out by an agency (the Census Bureau) that has no political axe to grind. It's available online.
Best points out that the 4-million-battered-women figure is recirculated regularly on various websites, despite its obvious falsity: "We have no way of knowing what led the creator or the [first] website to make this error," he says charitably. But my own experience suggests we do.
In January 1993, while idly surfing through wire stories as a reporter for the Washington Post, I encountered a number of stories claiming that more men beat their wives and girlfriends on Super Bowl Sunday than on any other day of the year. The claim had a certain aura of plausibility. You know: beer, testosterone, gridiron violence. Among the many reporting this "fact" were the New York Times, the Associated Press, the Boston Globe, and NBC. I had no reason to doubt the reported claim that women's shelters reported a 40 percent increase in domestic violence each Super Bowl Sunday.
