The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics

by Tim Harford

The truly genuine problem . . . does not consist of proving something false but in proving that the authentic object is authentic. • Umberto Eco1

As Donald Trump’s former right-hand man Steve Bannon infamously told the writer Michael Lewis: “The Democrats don’t matter. The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”15

I worry about a world in which many people will believe anything, but I worry far more about one in which people believe nothing beyond their own preconceptions.

Onora O’Neill argues that if we want to demonstrate trustworthiness, we need the basis of our decisions to be “intelligently open.” She proposes a checklist of four properties that intelligently open decisions should have. Information should be accessible: that implies it’s not hiding deep in some secret data vault. Decisions should be understandable—capable of being explained clearly and in plain language. Information should be usable—which may mean something as simple as making data available in a standard digital format. And decisions should be assessable—meaning that anyone with the time and expertise has the detail required to rigorously test any claims or decisions if they wish to.

Simply inventing your own numbers is a tactic more often used by totalitarian dictators than by candidates for democratic election, but Trump evidently figured it was a tactic that would be effective. And perhaps he was right. His supporters believed him: just 13 percent of them trusted the economic data produced by the federal government, versus 86 percent of those who voted for Hillary Clinton.