How to Make the World Add Up : Ten Rules for Thinking Differently About Numbers

by Tim Harford

As a candidate for US President in 2016, Donald Trump faced a problem. His campaign wanted to claim that the American economy was broken, but official statistics showed that the unemployment rate was very low – below 5 per cent and falling. There could have been a thoughtful response to that – for example, that the unemployment rate doesn’t measure the quality, security or earning power of jobs. But Mr Trump took the simpler path of repeatedly dismissing unemployment figures as ‘phony’ and ‘total fiction’ and claiming that the true rate was 35 per cent. Simply inventing your own numbers is a tactic more often used by totalitarian dictators than by candidates for democratic election, but Mr Trump evidently figured it was a tactic that would be effective. And perhaps he was right. His supporters believed him: just 13 per cent of them trusted the economic data produced by the federal government, versus 86 per cent of those who voted for Hillary Clinton.11

Inventing numbers