Slate, July 14, 2010 Slate Columns
A terrific new book of essays encourages us all to be skeptical about statistics.
If you're a journalist, a gluttonous consumer of news, or are easily swayed by the slapdash, stop what you're doing and go buy a copy of Sex, Drugs, and Body Counts: The Politics of Numbers in Global Crime and Conflict. Set aside a couple of hours tonight to read three or four of the essays that academics Peter Andreas and Kelly M. Greenhill collected in it. Then, sit down in front of your computer and send me an e-mail to thank me for helping to end your enslavement to the dodgy numbers that taint journalism and public policy. It's not just a good book. It's a great book. And it belongs forever on your bookshelf.
"The creation, selection, promotion, and proliferation of numbers are ... the stuff of politics," the editors write in their introduction. No debate lasts very long without a reference to data, and as the numbers boil their way into the argument, you must challenge them or be burned blind by them. The essays presented in Sex, Drugs, and Body Counts--about human trafficking, the Bosnian death count, the Darfur genocide, armed conflict, drugs, terrorism, and more--counsel exactly that sort of skepticism. Here are the questions the book's editors say readers should ask when confronted with numbers:
Where do the estimates come from, who produces them, what legitimating function do they serve, and how (if at all) are they explained in official reporting? What are the implications and consequences (intended and un-intended) of choosing one set of numbers over another? To what degree are the numbers accepted or challenged, and why? What purpose do they serve?
Later, they write:
Numbers should provoke especially tough questions when the activity being measured is secretive, hidden, and clandestine. "How could they know that? How could they measure that?"
Often, the editors write, even the most rigorous-seeming statistics conceal squishy measurements. Inflated numbers are designed to create the sense that something must be done now. Depressed counts are intended to convince the recipients that the problem is too small to worry about. Whether it's body counts in Iraq or kilos of Colombian drugs, the creators and disseminators of the numbers usually have greater interest in their size than their veracity.
In an essay about illicit drug numbers, Andreas notes how the U.S. drug enforcement bureaucracy routinely manipulates figures about drug seizures to "fend off political attacks" that would bruise their budgets. For instance, an increase (or decrease) in drugs interdicted at the border may have little relation to how well U.S. Customs is doing its job because most drugs still clear the barriers. But because the public doesn't understand what interdiction numbers mean, the drug bureaucracy spends extra billions to produce bigger numbers because the public associates "more" with "better."
(Continued on Slate.)
