... and Statistics

There are three types of lies: lies, damn lies, and statistics.
-Benjamin Disraeli, former British Prime Minister

According to consulting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, March Madness will cost $3.8 billion in lost productivity this year. Up from last year's estimate of $889 million. CBS is broadcasting the games online, so most games will be available for viewing on the web, which will cause a chaotic ripple in our econonmy as workers hide from the boss and watch the games on their computer, or gather around the water-cooler to talk about the buzzer-beating shot. (For those of us who don't give a rip about sports and don't know what "March Madness" is - it is the championship tournament in college basketball.)

Using data from Internet tracking firm Hitwise, Challenger, Gray calculated that 58 million workers would spend 13.5 minutes online every day for 16 business days. The average American wage is $18 an hour, so every 13.5 minutes costs $4.05.

But not every college basketball fan has Internet access at work. That Gallup poll might be vastly overestimating the number of fans; other surveys have found that far fewer Americans follow men's college basketball. And many workers would have wasted those 13.5 minutes anyway, playing FreeCell or Googling their ex-girlfriends.

Who comes up with this stuff?

I know here in Detroit, we won't watch the game online at work... we are just glad to still have jobs. As the Detroit News reported on March 8, "Michigan lost another 29,000 jobs in January, a rate of one job every 90 seconds." Quite the stat. But all that is not as impressive as stat as as former heavyweight champ, Mike Tyson, brought us in 1988 when he knocked Michael Spinks out in 91 seconds in their heavyweight championship fight. At a purse of $20 million, he earned $219,780.22 for every second in the ring that night.

Remember Mitch Snyder, homeless advocate in the 1980's, and his shocking (albeith made up) statistics that millions of homeless people die each year because of Ronald Reagan? Rush Limbaugh pointed out that we wouldn't have a homeless problem very long at that rate: If 2,000,000 homeless people died every year, that comes out to 5,479 homeless people every day, or 228 every hour, or 3.8 every minute.

Who cares if statistics aren't true?

As Thomas Sowell points out,

False statistics are only part of the problem. Even accurate statistics can be given misleading emphasis. The U.S. Bureau of the Census seems dedicated to producing statistics that emphasize differences between groups -- black and white, men and women, etc. -- and far less interested in statistics which indicate how much all Americans have progressed over time...

Perhaps the greatest distortions of statistics involve comparisons between "the rich" and "the poor" -- who are mostly the same people at different stages of their lives. Most of those who were in the bottom 20 percent in 1975 were also in the top 20 percent at some point over the next 17 years. That too is not a "politically correct" message, so you seldom hear it.

The one thing that all these distortions and falsifications of statistics have in common is their thrust in the direction of creating artificial "problems" and "crises" to be dealt with by imposing government "solutions." That is apparently what makes them so attractive to the media that these shaky numbers are uncritically accepted and proclaimed to the public.

And I bet that 72.3% of you reading agree with Mr. Sowell. I hope the rest of you are not destroying our economy and your employer's bottom line by watching March Madness on your computer.

statistics , Politics