“There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics” – Benjamin Disraeli
As the phoney election heats up and as we get closer to the real thing being called, we’re seeing the politicians start to work towards election pledges and election-based publicity.
The difficulty for the ordinary voter is simple – understanding the arguments being made can be difficult enough, but making sense of those arguments is made worse by the sometimes wilful use of statistics and arguments intended to impress or scare voters rather than illuminate them.
In all this, I consider that there are three main sources of misleading information to voters: from the politicians themselves, from the media and from pressure groups.
So – what do you, as a voter, need to look out for, and what can you do about it?
1) Extreme stories and examples
From the Battle of Jennifer’s Ear, to the recent healthcare debate in the US, extremes have been used to make political points. Lately I think politicians themselves have shied away from this, you are much more likely to find the media and pressure groups using extreme cases to make general points.
It’s a bit like using television programmes like “How Clean Is Your House” or “Police Camera Action” to make sense of the world. Or even using soap opera storylines to do so. They simply don’t reflect the real world – normality is much more boring!
What can you do?
Recognise that use of examples to make political points are more likely than not unrepresentative of the population as a whole. At very least, be sceptical.
2) Big Numbers!
There will be lots of big numbers used by politicians through the election campaign. My question is – what numbers can we as ordinary people understand? When you have an income of, say, £25,000 per annum and a mortgage on a house for, say, £150,000, can you really hope to make meaning of figures into the millions, billions, or even (as with the recent credit crunch and government bail-outs) trillions?
For example, if a politician were to announce an extra £100 million for the National Health Service, it’d be easy to think that it qualifies as a considerable increase. You would think, for example, that would pay for a lot of nurses, doctors, or equipment. However when you compare that to the annual expenditure on the NHS which is now over £100 billion – is it still that impressive, at a mere 0.1% of the annual total?
Similarly, when we are told that the Royal Family cost the public purse £41 million, it sounds like a lot of money which could be put to other use. But divided equally amongst UK taxpayers, that amount becomes 69p each. How does it seem now?
What can you do?
When politicians and the media produce big numbers, ask yourself: can I put this into context, either as a percentage of a bigger total, or by asking how it divides between the population as a whole? And – how is the money going to be used? For example, that £100 million extra on the NHS could be very effective if targeted at specific well defined uses, whereas spread throughout the service, it amounts to very little.
Also, watch out for the same amounts being announced in different ways.
An aside: Can you think of an example which involves both big numbers, and extremes? I can – every Saturday evening, when the National Lottery results are announced. I did a calculation where I asked: if I were to buy one ticket every week, how long would I have to play on average for my chances to be greater than evens of winning at some point. After working with some truly huge numbers, I came up with an answer. On average you’d have to wait for a quarter of a million years.
3) The Elvis Statistic!
In 1993, the San Francisco Chronicle published an article where it noted the following:
- When Elvis Presley died in 1977, there were 37 known Elvis impersonators in the world.
- By 1993, the number of Elvis impersonators had grown to 48,000, an exponential increase.
- Continuing the trend, the paper calculated that by this year (2010), the world’s population would have grown to 7.5 billion people, of whom 2.5 billion (or one in three) would be Elvis impersonators.
The message is simple – beware of headlines which use extrapolation to make political points, whether it is related to the environment, immigration, or any other issue with ’shock’ value. This goes for any headline, story or political speech which talks about something happening ‘by’ 2050 or some other future date.
The best recent example of this was a comment by a forecaster at the Met Office about ‘higher than normal temperatures’ during the summer which was turned into a comment about a ‘barbecue summer’ by someone in the press office.
What can you do?
Always treat attempts to forecast the future using current data with extreme caution. I would like to think that the recent recession, banking difficulties and problems in the housing market will go a long way to help people understand that relying too much on trends is dangerous, especially if looking a long way ahead.
Finally…
Here’s a headline from the Daily Mail:
Why 10m Britons will be from a Minority by 2027 (Daily Mail – 13th March 2007)
What do you think when seeing a headline like that? Shock? Fear? Concern? Or, perhaps, is it worth asking some serious questions about these sorts of stories? Do they inform, or are they designed to simply create fear?
Please let me know what you think! You can comment on the article below, or e-mail me at blog@euanbayliss.co.uk – if you wish to use this in your own blog or on your own web page, please do so, but please include a link back to my site. Thank you!
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