How to Lie with Statistics

by Darrell Huff

One question was, ‘Would Black people be treated better or worse here if the Japanese conquered the U.S.A.?’ Black interviewers reported that nine per cent of those they asked said ‘better’. White interviewers found only two per cent of such responses. And while Black interviewers found only twenty-five per cent who thought Black people would be treated worse, white interviewers turned up forty-five per cent. When ‘Nazis’ was substituted for ‘Japanese’ in the question, the results were similar.

This bias is towards the person with more money, more education, more information and alertness, better appearance, more conventional behaviour, and more settled habits than the average of the population he is chosen to represent.

It is all too reminiscent of an old definition of the lecture method of classroom instruction: a process by which the contents of the textbook of the instructor are transferred to the notebook of the student without passing through the heads of either party.

The death rate in the Navy during the Spanish–American War was nine per thousand. For civilians in New York City during the same period it was sixteen per thousand.

Finally, there was an increased financial incentive, there being more polio insurance and more aid available from charitable organizations. All this threw considerable doubt on the notion that polio had reached a new high, and the total number of deaths confirmed the doubt.

It is an interesting fact that the death rate or number of deaths often is a better measure of the incidence of an ailment than direct incidence figures – simply because the quality of reporting and record-keeping is so much higher on fatalities.

Actually we don’t know but that these are the people who would have made more money even if they had not gone to college. There are a couple of things that indicate rather strongly that this is so. Colleges get a disproportionate number of two groups of kids: the bright and the rich. The bright might show good earning power without college knowledge. And as for the rich ones … well, money breeds money in several obvious ways. Few sons of rich men are found in low-income brackets whether they go to college or not.

It’s all a little like the tale of the roadside merchant who was asked to explain how he could sell rabbit sandwiches so cheap. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I have to put in some horse meat too. But I mix ’em fifty-fifty: one horse, one rabbit.’

A New York exhibitor of the motion picture Quo Vadis used huge type to quote the New York Times as calling it ‘historical pretentiousness’. And the makers of Crazy Water Crystals, a proprietary medicine, have been advertising their product as providing ‘quick, ephemeral relief’.

Census reports have shown more people at thirty-five years of age, for instance, than at either thirty-four or thirty-six. The false picture comes from one family member’s reporting the ages of the others and, not being sure of the exact ages, tending to round them off to a familiar multiple of five.

The ‘population’ of a large area in China was 28 million. Five years later it was 105 million. Very little of that increase was real; the great difference could be explained only by taking into account the purposes of the two enumerations and the way people would be inclined to feel about being counted in each instance. The first census was for tax and military purposes, the second for famine relief.

There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.