Lies, damned lies and the New York Times

Last month the New York Times ran a front page article with the grabber title, 51% of Women Are Now Living Without Spouse: “For what experts say is probably the first time, more American women are living without a husband than with one, according to a New York Times analysis of census results.” To its credit, the Public Editor at the New York Times last week ripped into the article as statistically flawed: Can a 15-Year-Old Be a ‘Woman Without a Spouse’?: “It was a statistic that put the story on a fast track to the front page, providing a noteworthy benchmark for a well-established trend. But the new majority materialized only because The Times chose to use survey data that counted, as spouseless women, teenagers 15 through 17 — almost 90 percent of whom were living with their parents.” Ouch!

As the quote (so commonly but erroneously attributed to Mark Twain) goes: “There are three kinds of lies: Lies, damned lies and statistics.” Of course, “statistics” isn’t the real problem. Statistics don’t kill people. People kill people. Right? (Now if I could only figure out how to calculate percentages correctly.)

In any event, this object lesson on the use and misuse of statistics by the New York Times (which remains the single greatest newspaper on the planet) prompts me to do two things today:

• First, I took a few minutes to update and refresh all the links at the LSNC Statistics | Data page. (Here’s a stat for you: Last month it was the seventh most viewed page at the LSNC main website! Go figure.) Among a few of the new goodies there are links to additional American FactFinder resources including tutorials and a 150-slide PowerPoint on American Finder and the 2000 Census.
• Second, I thought to post Doing the Math: Famous Quotes about Statistics, a warm-up I used a few years back for a program-wide training on GIS mapping. It’s intended as a looped PowerPoint presentation to warm up the room and get folks in the statistically correct frame of mind, so to speak. If you download it, be forewarned: It is a 67 MB behemoth due to an embedded sound file and embedded fonts. But your reward is 35 of the best quotes about statistics with an unbeatable backtrack.