Statistics can easily be manipulated to yield a desired message, and they often are, concludes Matthew Robinson in Mobocracy: How the Media's Obsession with Polling Twists the News, Alters Elections, and Undermines Democracy. Though Robinson is mainly interested in politics and elections, his conclusions have especially dire implications for issues of public health. It's an important reminder that the conventional wisdom isn't so wise.
As Robinson explains, the public including people who answer poll questions are extremely (though understandably) ignorant on the technical details of law, regulation, history, science, and other highbrow matters. This, however, doesn't stop pollsters from asking them questions and doesn't stop the public from answering. Rather than reflecting the profound wisdom of the masses, polls often reveal nothing more than which response "sounded right" on what is in effect a multiple-choice pop quiz given to a nation of apathetic and ignorant citizens. Polls rarely include any questions designed to gauge the respondents' familiarity with or level of concern about an issue. While the data collected in a poll are being toted up to show, say, that "a majority of Americans want more money spent on solar panels," it is entirely possible that the majority of respondents have forgotten that they were even asked about that topic.
Smoke This and Answer a Few Questions for Me
This dangerous combination of public ignorance and polling leads to incidents like the announcement this week of a poll commissioned by the Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corporation showing that nearly "75% of all Indianapolis residents favor the introduction of a cigarette with less toxins to the market as quickly as possible," suggesting that there is a huge demand for Brown & Williamson's new Advance Light cigarettes. But don't think for a moment that the people answering the poll knew anything more about the relevant toxins and how much difference they make in cancer causation than you do. Obviously, most people hearing the words "less toxins" are going to think it sounds like an improvement of some sort (and probably didn't have time to consider the possibility that the improvement may be an unproven or trivial one, more likely to lull smokers into a false sense of confidence than to prevent lung cancer). Who, put on the spot by a pollster, is going to be against anything that sounds like an improvement? Fewer toxins? Sounds good. Safer swingsets? A must! More solar panels? Bring 'em on! Hey, there's no cost for me I'm just a poll-taker!
(This off-the-cuff approach to public policy isn't so different from the way most people vote, but there isn't much that can be done about that problem unless you're willing to make a case for monarchy, as philosopher Hans-Herman Hoppe does in his book Democracy: The God That Failed.)
48% of Populace Engaged in Struggle Against Evil
Keep in mind the near-meaninglessness of subjective, off-the-cuff responses the next time you see something like the February ABC News poll that announced that shockingly only 24% of Americans say they are "on the lookout for terrorists." Are you "on the lookout for terrorists"? Am I? Do I have to be staring out the window with binoculars to qualify? Is it enough that I promise to shout "Look, a terrorist!" if I see someone with a bomb? Am I really at risk because only 24% of my fellow citizens claim to be on the ball? Who knows?
Factor in the Booze
Measuring human actions rather than mere states of mind should put data collectors on firmer ground, but here, too, statistics are easily distorted. For example, the Center for Consumer Freedom criticizes recent alarmist reports that "44 percent of students on college campuses can be classified as binge drinkers." It's particularly easy to classify them as binge drinkers, of course, when "binge drinking" is vaguely defined in the study as "five or more drinks on one occasion for a man or four or more drinks on one occasion for a woman," which means any woman on campus who has four beers over the course of an all-day frat barbecue has just become a binge drinking statistic.
Michael Kinsley noted a similar abuse of statistics recently after a study was reported to show that teenagers are consuming a quarter of the nation's alcohol. It turned out that the sample used for the study contained a disproportionate number of teenagers. In the real world, as the stumblebums at the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse later admitted, teens drink something more like 11% of the nation's alcohol. That means, as Kinsley calculated (but major media did not), that teens are consuming on average only about half as much alcohol as the general population. Still too much, some might say, but hardly the shock-stat the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse was aiming for.
One Way To Settle This
Some readers may be left thinking we should just put dueling statistics-users in a room together and let them fight it out, preferably with boxing gloves like Paula Jones and Tonya Harding on Fox two weeks ago while the mob (see paragraphs 1-3, above) looks on and hopes for blood. I may never get to see that glorious day come to pass, but I will attend the next best thing at 6pm on April 9th at Manhattan's CUNY Graduate Center, when two people very fond of using statistics will verbally duke it out: Fred Krupp from the group Environmental Defense and Bjorn Lomborg, author of The Skeptical Environmentalist, a book that marshals numerous statistics to show that pessimistic environmentalists such as Krupp are, well, full of krupp.
Depending on how you jigger the numbers on soil erosion and the composition of the ozone layer, apparently, either we're all going to die very soon or the Earth is entering a Golden Age of unprecedented prosperity and tidiness. Maybe both. I don't pretend to know the truth about this, but I still hope that after the debate they poll me and my fellow audience members to find out who made the best scientific argument.