Page 54 Daily Mail, Friday, August 16, 2019
POPULAR SCIENCE
MARCUS BERKMANN
STATISTICAL: TEN EASY WAYS
TO AVOID BEING MISLED
BY NUMBERS
by Anthony Reuben
(Constable £14.99, 240 pp)Number-crunching:
Stan Laurel and
Oliver Hardy in A
Chump At Oxford
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Av e r a ge number
of legs for Swedes?
Less than two!
O
h, it’s a funny old
thing, but whereas
it’s not socially
acceptable to
admit that youcan’t read or write, it’s
perfectly reasonable in most
sectors of British society to
admit that you are a duffer
with numbers.
‘Oh yes,’ says everyone with pride,
‘i was terrible at maths at school.
No idea about it at all!’
Why is this? it’s not as though
numbers don’t matter. For better
or for worse, this is now a numerical
world. Computer nerds rule the
internet. Football clubs are run by
accountants. it doesn’t matter how
good a film is, it matters how much
money it takes.
A book like Anthony Reuben’s is
therefore timely. i have read a
few like this before, trying to help
the innumerate through the
vast impenetrable thicket of
mathematics, and the problem
with most of them is that they are
written by mathematicians.
i yield nothing in my admiration
for professional mathematicians,
but for most of them, maths is
dead easy. they don’t understand
why you don’t understand it.
Reuben, by contrast, is a
journalist who, for reasons too
complicated to go into here, was
made the BBC’s first head of
statistics. he had some serious
catching up to do. Now he’s helping
the rest of us catch up, too.
R
euBeN can now spot a
duff statistic from 100
yards (or possibly 91.44
metres). One of his
favourites was the claim, published
in a leading newspaper, that ‘a
saturday night in costs hosts up to
£118.29 on average’.
‘Notice,’ says Reuben, ‘how the
writer has combined “up to” with
“on average” to give a completely
meaningless figure.’
the figure is based on the idea
that people are inviting four guests
over to watch strictly Come
Dancing or the X Factor, and
buying refreshments for them. the
spending per person is £11.24 on
alcohol, £10.92 on takeaways, £6.23
on snacks (seems high?) and £6.32
on soft drinks.
that takeaway figure turns out to
be based on ‘desk research’, which
involved finding out how much a set
menu for four cost at Chinese
restaurants in Cardiff, London and
Manchester, and indian restaurants
in Fife, Nottingham and Bourne-
mouth, and averaging them out.
he saves the best until last. the
survey established that 55 per cent
of women bought a new outfit to
wear in front of the television,
spending up to £100. in other
words, lots of spurious made-up
statistics are combined into one
huge, daft, made-up statistic. ‘it’s
a triumphantly terrible piece of
work,’ says Reuben.
surveys, he says, are
often inherently
dishonest and not to
be trusted. One
hilarious example he
gives is from a press
release which says
30 per cent of people
would consider taking
a holiday at a site
affected by radiation.
No description of who
these 30 per cent are, how the
firm reached that figure, who
conducted the research — nothing.
the press release was sent by a
company which makes equipment
that protects you from radiation.
holidays in Chernobyl, it seems,are flying off the shelves. Perfect
for the hyper-fast tan.
Big-number costings are another
of his targets. Newspapers are
constantly reporting them as
gospel. People not having
enough sleep costs the
economy £37 billion a year
— the same amount
poor customer service
is costing firms.
Lack of neighbourli-
ness costs the economy
£14 billion a year,
financial crime costs us
£52 billion (even though
hardly any of it is ever
reported), and absenteeism
costs us £100 billion a year (a
suspiciously round number).
Muscle and joint pain costs the
european economy €240 billion a
year, and careless Brits have lost
more than £3.2 billion worth of
wedding and engagement ringsover the past five years. Or maybe
they didn’t.
Journalists, it turns out, are as
useless with numbers as the rest of
us. Facts they check, but statistics
they often swallow whole.
Reuben is admirably sound on
more prosaic mathematical problem
areas, such as averages and
percentages, which surprisingly few
people seem to understand.
Clarity is his watchword: he
explains dozens of difficult concepts
and makes them seem straightfor-
ward. his chapter on opinion polls,
and why they’re often wrong, should
be a set text at journalism schools.
And there’s a lovely humorous
undercurrent to it all.
in October 2012, a French woman
received a phone bill for
€11,721,000,000,000,000. she phoned
her provider and suggested it
might have made a mistake. it said
it was definitely correct and offeredto let her pay in instalments. she
worked out that if she had paid in
instalments equal to the entire
output of the French economy, it
would have taken her 6,000 years
to pay the bill. the phone company
later admitted that the bill should
have been €117.21.
Reuben quotes approvingly a
swedish statistician, who was the
first person to point out that the
average number of legs for people
in sweden is fewer than two.
No one has more than two, and a
small number of people have fewer
than two, so the average is very
slightly below two. What this
means is that almost everybody in
sweden, and indeed almost
everyone in the world, has an
above-average number of legs.
As Disraeli once said: ‘there are
three kinds of lies: lies, damned
lies, and statistics.’ All statisticians,
says Reuben, hate this quote.Percentage of
internet searches
carried out via
Google92.81
Just one of the
eye-popping
facts in a
fascinating new
book that shows
how easily
we’re misled
by statistics