A Short History of Stupid by Helen Razer

Author:Helen Razer
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781743437230
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Published: 2014-01-11T16:00:00+00:00

8

Political arithmetic, or, Slack hacks lack facts when flacks stack the stats

You know that I have little faith in political arithmetic and this story does not contribute to mend my opinion of it.

—Adam Smith, 1785, after Alexander Webster revised his estimate of the population of Scotland by one-sixth.

Much of the Stupid we discuss in this book is easily spotted by anyone with a functioning brain, even if sometimes we’ve become so inured to it, even if it takes some effort to separate it from its surroundings. But some forms camouflage themselves successfully as the very opposite of Stupid, masquerading as scientific and mathematical evidence, hiding behind numbers, lurking within data, requiring more than just close attention to identify. Some forms of Stupid take some work to unmask and expose, making them all the more dangerous. One of them is the systematic misuse of numbers to mislead and misinform public debate.

Let’s start with a contemporary example, one torn from the headlines of Sydney newspapers. It deals, after all, with an alarming problem. Violence on the nocturnal streets of Sydney was growing worse, caused by an epidemic of alcohol abuse—binge-drinking teenagers and aggressive, alcohol-fuelled males travelling into the city’s entertainment areas and looking for trouble, lashing out, assaulting others, often at random. Young men died, struck down with a single punch. The city’s doctors, sick of treating the victims of this rising tide of damage caused by alcohol, demanded action. The media joined the campaign, calling for tougher laws, heavier sentences and tighter restrictions to curb the epidemic of violence. Eventually, after an intense debate in the city’s newspapers in early 2014, the state government agreed and brought in a set of hard-line laws and new restrictions on alcohol consumption in Sydney. Informed public debate had led to the successful resolution to a vexing public policy issue.

There was only one problem: it wasn’t true. There was no rising tide of violence in inner Sydney—quite the opposite: the actual number of assaults (not the incident rate, which accounts for population changes) in inner Sydney had last increased in 2010 and had fallen more than 20 per cent since 2008. In particular, alcohol-related violence, crime statistics showed, had fallen precipitately in the city. The deaths of young men as a result of ‘king hit’ attacks, tragic and painful as they were, as agonising for their families and friends as they must have been, were increasingly atypical in a city and a state where violence had become significantly less common over a number of years—except for domestic violence, which remained a too-common feature of crime statistics and a too-rare subject of media interest. Moreover, as we saw in an earlier chapter, Australians’ alcohol consumption has been generally declining for nearly thirty years, and data showed more young people weren’t drinking at all and fewer were binge drinking. Data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics showed alcohol consumption in Australia in 2013 was at its lowest since the mid-1990s.

Journalists engaged in the media campaign avoided mentioning

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