INTRODUCTION
1. Children’s Defense Fund, The State of America’s Children Year-book—1994 (Washington, D.C.: Children’s Defense Fund, 1994), p. x.
2. Twain uses the expression in his autobiography, but refers to it as “the remark attributed to Disraeli.”
3. Darrell Huff, How to Lie with Statistics (New York: Norton, 1954). For a more sophisticated discussion, see A. J. Jaffe and Herbert F. Spirer, Misused Statistics: Straight Talk for Twisted Numbers (New York: Dekker, 1987). There are also some outstanding books on specialized topics: on graphs and charts—Edward R. Tufte, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (Cheshire, Conn.: Graphics Press, 1983); on maps—Mark Monmonier, How to Lie with Maps (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); on polls—Herbert Asher, Polling and the Public: What Every Citizen Should Know, 3d ed. (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly Press, 1998). Mark H. Maier’s The Data Game: Controversies in Social Science Statistics, 3d ed. (Armonk, N.Y.: Sharpe, 1999) explains the most familiar social, economic, and political measures, and outlines their limitations. There are also various specialized volumes, such as Clive Coleman and Jenny Moynihan, Understanding Crime Data: Haunted by the Dark Figure (Buckingham, U.K.: Open University Press, 1996).
4. John Allen Paulos, Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences (New York: Random House, 1988).
CHAPTER 1
1. Timothy J. Gilfoyle, City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790–1920 (New York: Norton, 1992), p. 57.
2. Marilynn Wood Hill, Their Sisters’ Keepers: Prostitution in New York City, 1830–1870 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), p. 27. The various estimates cited are documented in this book and in Gilfoyle, City of Eros.
3. Christopher Hewitt, “Estimating the Number of Homeless: Media Misrepresentation of an Urban Problem,” Journal of Urban Affairs 18 (1996): 432–47.
4. On statistics’ history, see: M. J. Cullen, The Statistical Movement in Early Victorian Britain: The Foundations of Empirical Social Research (Sussex: Harvester Press, 1975); and Theodore M. Porter, The Rise of Statistical Thinking, 1820–1900 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986).
5. There are many studies of the social construction of social problems. For introductions to this approach, see: Malcolm Spector and John I. Kitsuse, Constructing Social Problems (Menlo Park, Calif.: Cummings, 1977); Joel Best, ed., Images of Issues: Typifying Contemporary Social Problems, 2d ed. (Hawthorne, N.Y.: Aldine de Gruyter, 1995); and Donileen R. Loseke, Thinking about Social Problems (Hawthorne, N.Y.: Aldine de Gruyter, 1999).
6. On statistics produced by activists and experts, see Neil Gilbert, “Advocacy Research and Social Policy,” Crime and Justice 20 (1997): 101–48.
7. On powerful institutions’ ability to produce statistics that promote their ends, see Cynthia Crossen, Tainted Truth: The Manipulation of Fact in America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994).
8. Gary Kleck, Targeting Guns: Firearms and Their Control (Hawthorne, N.Y.: Aldine de Gruyter, 1997).
9. Paulos, Innumeracy, p. 3.
10. John I. Kitsuse and Aaron V. Cicourel, “A Note on the Uses of Official Statistics,” Social Problems 11 (1963): 131–39; Robert Bogdan and Margret Ksander, “Policy Data as a Social Process,” Human Organization 39 (1980): 302–9.
11. On suicide recordkeeping, see Jack D. Douglas, The Social Meanings of Suicide (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967).
12. There are many studies of the effect of organizational practices on statistics produced by the police; for example, see Richard McCleary, Barbara C. Nienstedt, and James M. Erven, “Uniform Crime Reports as Organizational Outcomes,” Social Problems 29 (1982): 361–72.
CHAPTER 2
1. Albert D. Biderman and Albert J. Riess Jr., “On Exploring the ‘Dark Figure’ of Crime,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences 374 (1967): 1–15. Criminologists have used the term “dark figure” for decades; the problem was understood in some of the earliest criminological writings, e.g., Lambert A. J. Quetelet, A Treatise on Man and the Development of his Faculties (Gainesville, Fla.: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1969—reproduction of the 1842 English translation of the 1835 French original), p. 82.
2. Quoted in Christopher Jencks, The Homeless (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), p. 2.
3. Examples include claims that there are one million victims of elder abuse each year (Stephen Crystal, “Elder Abuse: The Latest ‘Crisis,’” The Public Interest 88 [1987]: 56–66), two million missing children (Joel Best, Threatened Children: Rhetoric and Concern about Child-Victims [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990]), and, of course, three million homeless persons (Hewitt, “Estimating the Number of Homeless”).
4. Scott Adams, The Dilbert Principle (New York: Harper Collins, 1996), p. 83.
5. I borrow the expression “number laundering” from David F. Luckenbill.
6. Kathleen S. Lowney and Joel Best, “Stalking Strangers and Lovers: Changing Media Typifications of a New Crime Problem,” in Images of Issues, 2d ed., ed. Joel Best (Hawthorne, N.Y.: Aldine de Gruyter, 1995), pp. 33–57.
7. Mike Tharp, “In the Mind of a Stalker,” U.S. News & World Report, February 17, 1992, pp. 28–30.
8. Sally Jessy Raphael, “Miss America Stalked,” February 15, 1994, Journal Graphics transcript no. 1420.
9. William Sherman, “Stalking,” Cosmopolitan, April 1994, pp. 198–201.
10. The first serious attempt to measure the national incidence of stalking involved a national survey conducted in late 1995 and early 1996. In this case, the study produced estimates higher than the original guesses; the investigators estimated that more than one million women and over 370,000 men experienced stalking annually. Patricia Tjaden and Nancy Thoennes, “Stalking in America: Findings from the National Violence against Women Survey,” National Institute of Justice/Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Research in Brief, April 1998, p. 3.
11. Hewitt, “Estimating the Number of Homeless.”
12. Peter H. Rossi, “No Good Applied Social Research Goes Unpunished,” Society 25 (November 1987): 73–79.
13. In the 1994 National Crime Victimization Survey, 36 percent of respondents who reported having been raped said they’d reported the crime to the police: Kathleen Maguire and Ann L. Pastore, eds., Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics, 1996 (Washington, D. C.: Bureau of Justice Statistics, 1997), p. 224. A variety of factors are known to affect reporting: Ronet Bachman, “The Factors Related to Rape Reporting Behavior and Arrest: New Evidence from the National Crime Victimization Survey,” Criminal Justice and Behavior 25 (1998): 8–29.
14. Mary P. Koss, “The Underdetection of Rape: Methodological Choices Influence Incidence Estimates,” Journal of Social Issues 48, 1 (1992): 61–76.
15. Max Singer, “The Vitality of Mythical Numbers,” The Public Interest 23 (1971): 3–9; Peter Reuter, “The Social Costs of the Demand for Quantification,” Journal of Policy Analysis and Management 5 (1986): 807–12; and Reuter, “The Mismeasurement of Illegal Drug Markets,” in Exploring the Underground Economy, ed. Susan Pozo (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Upjohn Institute, 1996), pp. 63–80.
16. Some analysts advocate broad definitions precisely because they lead to larger numbers: “most national crime surveys, which define violence in narrow legalistic terms, uncover very low levels of violence against women…. Feminist surveys, on the other hand, that define violence on the basis of women’s subjective experiences of violence, including noncriminal and marginally criminal acts, uncover very high levels of violence”: Michael D. Smith, “Enhancing the Quality of Survey Data on Violence against Women,” Gender and Society 8 (1994): pp. 110–11.
17. Joel Best, Random Violence: How We Talk about New Crimes and New Victims (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999), p. 105.
18. Gordon Hawkins and Franklin E. Zimring, Pornography in a Free Society (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
19. On shifting definitions of literacy and illiteracy, see Harvey J. Graff, The Legacies of Literacy: Continuities and Contradictions in Western Culture and Society (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987).
20. On competing definitions of homelessness, see: Jencks, The Homeless; and James D. Wright, Beth A. Rubin, and Joel A. Devine, Beside the Golden Door: Policy, Politics, and the Homeless (Hawthorne, N.Y.: Aldine de Gruyter, 1998).
21. James D. Wright, Peter H. Rossi, and Kathleen Daly, Under the Gun: Weapons, Crime, and Violence in America (New York: Aldine, 1983), pp. 215–41; Kleck, Targeting Guns, pp. 325–29.
22. Lloyd Stires and Philip J. Klass, “3.7 Million Americans Kidnapped by Aliens?” Skeptical Inquirer 17 (Winter 1993): 142–46.
23. Mary Koss, Christine Gidycz, and Nadine Wisniewski, “The Scope of Rape: Incidence and Prevalence of Sexual Aggression and Victimization in a National Sample of Higher Education Students,” Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 55 (1987): 162–70.
24. Gilbert, “Advocacy Research and Social Policy.”
25. Smith, “Enhancing the Quality of Survey Data.”
26. Leonard Beeghley, “Illusion and Reality in the Measurement of Poverty,” Social Problems 31 (1984): 322–33; Patricia Ruggles, Drawing the Line: Alternative Poverty Measures and Their Implications for Public Policy (Washington, D.C.: Urban Institute Press, 1990).
27. Michael Fumento refers to this as the democratization of risk: The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS (New York: Basic Books, 1990).
CHAPTER 3
1. Carol Lawson, “Doctors Cite Emetic Abuse,” American Anorexia/Bulimia Association Newsletter, June 1985, p. 1.
2. Christina Hoff Sommers, Who Stole Feminism? (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994), pp. 11–12.
3. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract of the United States: 1997, 117th ed. (Washington, D.C., 1997), p. 96.
4. Michael Kelly, “Playing with Fire,” New Yorker, July 15, 1996, pp. 28–36.
5. Michael Fumento, “A Church Arson Epidemic? It’s Smoke and Mirrors,” Wall Street Journal, July 9, 1996; James B. Jacobs and Elizabeth E. Joh, “Tremors on the Racial Fault Line: The 1996 Black Church Fires in Retrospect,” Criminal Law Bulletin 34 (1998): 497–519.
6. James B. Jacobs and Kimberly Potter, Hate Crimes: Criminal Law and Identity Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).
7. Ann Pellegrini, “Rape Is a Bias Crime,” New York Times, May 27, 1990, p. E-13.
8. Michael J. Berens, “Hatred Is a Crime Many Just Ignore,” Chicago Tribune, January 11, 1998, pp. 1, 16.
9. Ibid.; Jacobs and Potter, Hate Crimes, pp. 55–59.
10. Marty Rimm, “Marketing Pornography on the Information Superhighway,” Georgetown Law Journal 83 (1995): 1849–1934.
11. Philip Jenkins, Moral Panic: Changing Concepts of the Child Molester in Modern America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), pp. 210–11.
12. Dennis Gaboury and Elinor Burkett, “The Secret of St. Mary’s,” Rolling Stone, November 11, 1993, p. 54.
13. Philip Jenkins, Pedophiles and Priests: Anatomy of a Contemporary Crisis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 80.
14. Marc Riedel, “Counting Stranger Homicides: A Case Study of Statistical Prestidigitation,” Homicide Studies 2 (1998): 206–19.
15. Philip Jenkins, Using Murder: The Social Construction of Serial Homicide (Hawthorne, N.Y.: Aldine de Gruyter, 1994).
16. Riedel, “Counting Stranger Homicides.”
17. Joel Best, “The Vanishing White Man: Workforce 2000 and Tales of Demographic Transformation,” in Tales of the State: Narrative and Contemporary U.S. Politics and Public Policy, ed. Sanford F. Schram and Philip T. Neisser (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997), pp. 174–83; and William B. Johnstone and Arnold E. Packer, Workforce 2000:Work and Workers for the Twenty-first Century (Indianapolis: Hudson Institute, 1987).
18. U.S. Department of Labor, Workforce 2000: Executive Summary (Washington, D.C., 1987), p. xiii.
19. Frank Swoboda, “Students of Labor Force Projections Have Been Working without a ‘Net,’” Washington Post, November 6, 1990, p. A17.
20. Warren Furutani in U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on Education and Labor, Hearing on H.R. 2235, Workforce 2000 Employment Readiness Act of 1989, November 3, 1989, p. 69.
21. Lisa M. Schwartz, Steven Woloshin, and H. Gilbert Welch, “Misunderstandings about the Effects of Race and Sex on Physicians’ Referrals for Cardiac Catheterization,” New England Journal of Medicine 341 (1999): 279–83.
22. The expression “odds ratio” has various meaninings in statistics. Sociologists most often use the term when interpreting the results of sophisticated logistic regression analyses. The researchers in this study used the term to refer to a simpler, very different statistic.
23. Alfred C. Kinsey, Wardell B. Pomeroy, and Clyde E. Martin, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders, 1948); Kinsey, Pomeroy, Martin, and Paul H. Gebhard, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders, 1953).
24. Kinsey, Pomeroy, and Martin, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, p. 651.
25. Edward O. Laumann, John H. Gagnon, Robert T. Michael, and Stuart Michaels, The Social Organization of Sexuality: Sexual Practices in the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).
26. For this example, I am indebted to an unpublished paper by Philip Jenkins.
CHAPTER 4
1. Mary Allen and Terri Sanginiti, “Del. Drivers at a Deadly Pace,” [Wilmington, Del.] News Journal, July 2, 2000, p. A1.
2. Douglas J. Besharov, “Overreporting and Underreporting Are Twin Problems,” in Current Controversies on Family Violence, ed. Richard J. Gelles and Donileen R. Loseke (Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage, 1993), pp. 257–72; U.S. Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract of the United States: 1997, 117th ed., p. 219.
3. Ronet Bachman and Linda E. Saltzman, “Violence against Women: Estimates from the Redesigned Survey,” Bureau of Justice Statistics Special Report, August, 1995.
4. Fred Block and Gene A. Burns, “Productivity as a Social Problem: The Uses and Misuses of Social Indicators,” American Sociological Review 51 (1986): 767–80.
5. James A. Inciardi, Hilary L. Surratt, and Christine A. Saum, Cocaine-Exposed Infants (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1997), pp. 21–38.
6. Fumento, The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS.
7. Cheryl L. Maxson and Malcolm W. Klein, “Street Gang Violence: Twice as Great, or Half as Great?” in Gangs in America, ed. C. Ronald Huff (Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage, 1990), pp. 71–100.
8. Ray August, “The Mythical Kingdom of Lawyers,” ABA Journal 78 (September 1992): 72–74.
9. David C. Berliner and Bruce J. Biddle, The Manufactured Crisis: Myths, Fraud, and the Attack on America’s Public Schools (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1995), pp. 51–63; Gerald W. Bracey, “Are U.S. Students Behind?” The American Prospect 37 (March 1998): 64–70.
10. The 2000 census was the first to give respondents the option of indicating they were of mixed racial heritage. On issues of racial classification, see William Petersen, Ethnicity Counts (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1997).
11. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1997, 117th ed., p. 201.
12. David M. Heien and David J. Pittman, “The Economic Costs of Alcohol Abuse,” Journal of Studies on Alcohol 50 (1989): 577.
13. William Fremouw, Ty Callahan, and Jody Kashden, “Adolescent Suicidal Risk,” Suicide and Life Threatening Behavior 23 (1993): 46.
1. Best, Threatened Children, pp. 45–64.
2. Scott Bowles, “Park Police Can Count on a Disputed Crowd Figure,” Washington Post, October 15, 1995, p. B1.
3. Stephen A. Holmes, “After March, Lawmakers Seek Commission on Race Relations,” Washington Post, October 18, 1995, p. A1.
4. Christopher B. Daly and Hamil R. Harris, “Boston U. Sets March at 837,000,” Washington Post, October 28, 1995, p. C3.
5. Herbert A. Jacobs, “To Count a Crowd,” Columbia Journalism Review 6 (Spring 1967): 37–40.
6. Leef Smith and Wendy Melillo, “If It’s Crowd Size You Want, Park Service Says Count It Out,” Washington Post, October 13, 1996, p. A34. In 1997, sociologists Clark McPhail and John McCarthy estimated that the crowd size for a Promise Keepers’ rally—according to McPhail “much larger than the Million Man March crowd”—was 480,000; one minister in the crowd insisted there were 2.5million present. Linda Wheeler, “Unofficial Estimates Point to Crowded Day on the Mall,” Washington Post, October 5, 1997, p. A17.
7. For introductions to contemporary census issues, see: Margo J. Anderson and Stephen E. Fienberg, Who Counts? The Politics of Census-Taking in Contemporary America (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1999); Harvey Choldin, Looking for the Last Percent: The Controversy over Census Undercounts (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1994); and Peter Skerry, Counting on the Census? Race, Group Identity, and the Evasion of Politics (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2000).
8. For introductions to contemporary income distribution issues, see: Peter Gottschalk, “Inequality, Income Growth, and Mobility: The Basic Facts,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 11 (Spring 1997): 21–40; Maier, The Data Game, pp. 144–65; Martina Morris and Bruce Western, “Inequality in Earnings at the Close of the Twentieth Century,” Annual Review of Sociology 25 (1999): 623–57; and Stephen J. Rose, Social Stratification in the United States, rev. ed. (New York: New Press, 2000).
9. For example, contrast the interpretations of statistics related to race in Stephan Thernstrom and Abigail Thernstrom, America in Black and White (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997), and Stephen R. Shalom, “Dubious Data: The Thernstroms on Race in America,” Race and Society 1 (1998): 125–57.
10. William J. Bennett, The Index of Leading Cultural Indicators: American Society at the End of the Twentieth Century, rev. ed. (New York: Broadway Books, 1999); Marc Miringoff and Marque-Luisa Miringoff, The Social Health of the Nation: How America Is Really Doing (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). Examples of other specialized volumes include: Women’s Action Coalition, WAC Stats: The Facts about Women (New York: New Press, 1993); Joni Seager, The State of Women in the World Atlas, 2d ed. (London: Penguin, 1997); Farai Chideya, Don’t Believe the Hype: Fighting Cultural Misinformation about African-Americans (New York: Plume, 1995); Doug Henwood, The State of the U.S.A. Atlas (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994); and Bennett L. Singer and David Deschamps, Gay & Lesbian Stats: A Pocket Guide of Facts and Figures (New York: New Press, 1994).
11. Bennett, Index of Leading Cultural Indicators, p. 4.
12. Miringoff and Miringoff, Social Health of the Nation, p. 5.
13. Miringoff and Miringoff compare economic and social indicators: Social Health of the Nation, pp. 11–14. Obviously, all economic statistics must confront the standard statistical issues—definition, measurement, sampling, and so on. For an overview of the limitations of many economic statistics, see Maier, The Data Game.
14. Miringoff and Miringoff, Social Health of the Nation, pp. 84–85.
15. Bennett, Index of Leading Cultural Indicators, p. 74.
16. Women’s Action Coalition, WAC Stats, pp. 21, 25.
17. On occasion, the press does investigative stories that call dubious statistics into question. Examples include the Denver Post’s 1985 stories on activists’ exaggerated estimates of the numbers of missing children, and the Philadelphia Inquirer’s 1999 exposés of systematic underreporting of crime rates by the Philadelphia police.
AFTERWORD
1. A summary of this incident, including a video clip of Kyl’s speech, a summary of statistics reported by Planned Parenthood, and a link to coverage of the explanation offered by the senator’s office, may be found at PolitiFact.com. “Jon Kyl Says Abortion Services Are ‘Well Over 90 Percent of What Planned Parenthood Does,’” last modified April 8, 2011, accessed March 11, 2012, http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2011/apr/08/jon-kyl/jon-kyl-says-abortion-services-are-well-over-90-pe/.
2. “Services,” Planned Parenthood Federation of America, accessed March 11, 2012, http://www.plannedparenthood.org/files/PPFA/PP_Services.pdf.
3. Rachel K. Jones and Kathryn Kooistra, “Abortion Incidence and Access to Services in the United States, 2008,” Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health 43 (2011): 41–50.
4. Recent examples include: Laura Amico, “Understanding MPD’s 94% Homicide Closure Rate,” Homicide Watch D.C., last modified December 30, 2011, accessed March 11, 2012, http://homicidewatch.org/2011/12/30/understanding-mpds-94-homicide-closure-rate/; Greg Toppo, Denise Amos, Jack Gillum and Jodi Upton, “When Scores Seem Too Good to Be True: To Help Students and Schools Make the Grade, Are Some Educators Crossing the Line?,” USA Today, March 7, 2011; and Kevin Selig, “Greed, Negligence, or System Failure: Credit Rating Agencies and the Financial Crisis,” Kenan Institute for Ethics, last modified 2011, accessed March 11, 2012, http://www.duke.edu/web/kenanethics/CaseStudies/Moodys.pdf.
5. Recent examples of such critiques include: Michael Blastland and Andrew Dilnot, The Numbers Game: The Commonsense Guide to Understanding Numbers in the News, in Politics, and in Life (New York: Gotham, 2009); Bernard L. Madison and Lynn Arthur Steen, eds., Calculation and Context: Quantitative Literacy and Its Implications for Teacher Education (Washington D.C.: Mathematical Association of America, 2008); and Steven Woloshin, Lisa M. Schwartz, and H. Gilbert Welch, Know Your Chances: Understanding Health Statistics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008).
6. Kimberly Chin, “States with Smoker-Friendly Laws,” Main Street, last modified May 5, 2011, accessed March 11, 2012, http://www.mainstreet.com/slideshow/family/family-health/states-smoker-friendly-laws-0.
7. See, for instance: Jason Linkins, “Jon Kyl Is Sorry If He Gave Anyone The Impression That The Things He Says In Public Are Factual,” Huffington Post, last modified June 8, 2011, accessed March 11, 2012, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/04/08/jon-kyl-is-sorry-if-he-ga_n_846941.html; Steve Ertelt, “Politifact Misleads in Bashing Jon Kyl Over Planned Parenthood,” LifeNews.com, last modified April 11, 2011, accessed March 11, 2012, http://www.lifenews.com/2011/04/11/politifact-misleads-in-bashing-jon-kyl-over-planned-parenthood/.
8. Paulos, Innumeracy; Madison and Steen, Calculation and Context.
9. Michael Lewis, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game (New York: Norton, 2003).