How Politicians Easily Lie With Statistics
The devil is in the details
You may never want to live in New York City, but let’s pretend you do, and let’s pretend, much to my chagrin, that I am a real estate agent.
While showing you around the big apple I casually slip in that the average income here is only $34,386. Naturally, this excites you.
You pull the trigger.
Four months later while talking with our Brooklyn hipster friends — yes, you became friends with your realtor — in their loft, I mention that the city is so expensive, after all the average income is $107,000.
Back then, I lied. I must have.
Except I didn’t.
I used averages: the median to make the number lower, and the mean to go higher. If you torture the data long enough, it will confess to anything.
This is the nature of lying with statistics — and currently it is polluting our marketing, journalism, politics and business.
Lies, Damned lies, and Statistics
“The secret language of statistics, so appealing in a fact-minded culture, is employed to sensationalize, inflate, confuse, and oversimplify. Statistical methods and statistical terms are necessary in reporting the mass data of…
