How to lie with statistics by Darrel Huff

Author:Darrel Huff [Huff, D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Inf.
ISBN: [2010.01.06]
Publisher: [Côte d’Azur]
Published: 1953-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

Equally gay fun is to be had with percentages. For a recent nine-month period General Motors was able to report a relatively modest profit (after taxes) of 12.6 per cent on sales. But for that same period GM’s profit on its investment came to 44.8 per cent, which sounds a good deal worse—or better, depending on what kind of argument you are trying to win.

Similarly, a reader of Harper’s magazine came to the defense of the A&P stores in that magazine’s letters column by pointing to low net earnings of only 1.1 per cent on sales. He asked, ‘Would any American citizen fear public condemnation as a profiteer…for realizing a little over $10 for every $1,000 invested during a year?’

Offhand this 1.1 per cent sounds almost distressingly small. Compare it with the four to six per cent or more interest that most of us are familiar with from FHA mortgages and bank loans and such. Wouldn’t the A&P be better off if it went out of the grocery business and put its capital into the bank and lived off interest?

The catch is that annual return on investment is not the same kettle of fish as earnings on total sales. As another reader replied in a later issue of Harper’s, ‘If I purchase an article every morning for 99 cents and sell it each afternoon for one dollar, I will make only 1 per cent on total sales, but 365 per cent on invested money during the year.’

There are often many ways of expressing any figure. You can, for instance, express exactly the same fact by calling it a one per cent return on sales, a fifteen per cent return on investment, a ten-million-dollar profit, an increase in profits of forty per cent (compared with 1935-39 average), or a decrease of sixty per cent from last year. The method is to choose the one that sounds best for the purpose at hand and trust that few who read it will recognize how imperfectly it reflects the situation.

Not all semi-attached figures are products of intentional deception. Many statistics, including medical ones that are pretty important to everybody, are distorted by inconsistent reporting at the source. There are startlingly contradictory figures on such delicate matters as abortions, illegitimate births, and syphilis. If you should look up the latest available figures on influenza and pneumonia, you might come to the strange conclusion that these ailments are practically confined to three southern states, which account for about eighty per cent of the reported cases, What actually explains this percentage is the fact that these three states required reporting of the ailments after other states had stopped doing so.

Some malaria figures mean as little. Where before 1940 there were hundreds of thousands of cases a year in the American South there are now only a handful, a salubrious and apparently important change that took place in just a few years. But all that has happened in actuality is that cases are now recorded only when proved

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