CAN I TRUST WHAT I READ
IN THE PAPERS?
How spin doctors conjure with figures
This final chapter is about magic. Things will appear from nowhere, or with a touch will suddenly grow ten times as big. You will see something become smaller and yet bigger at the same time, and all before your very own eyes. This is not the work of the witch doctor, but something far more sinister. This is the magic of the spin doctor, and his props are numbers.
Spin doctors help all sorts of people to manipulate the truth, but most often they are associated with politicians. There is nothing new about this. In the nineteenth century, Benjamin Disraeli declared, ‘There are lies, damned lies and statistics’, and no doubt propagandists had been using numbers to distort the facts before then, too.
This old craft acquired its new name of spin-doctoring from baseball, where a pitcher can deceive the batter by spinning the ball to make it swerve. The media seized on this metaphor to describe the way in which press and public-relations officers manipulate information in order to deceive the recipient in some way.
The aim of such spin is usually to make information sound better than it actually is. Numbers play a crucial role in this, taking advantage of the public’s general discomfort with maths and their consequent reluctance to challenge the figures. It turns out, too, that numbers can be surprisingly helpful as a flexible tool in helping you to say what you want to say.
Making something out of nothing
Here is one of the simplest tricks of all. To illustrate it, presented below are two simple facts about a company called Cuddle-Co, who make a range of toy rabbits called Mr Snuggles:
Is this good news for Cuddle-Co? Of course it is, say the PR department, who are the in-house spin doctors. RECORD SALES FOR MR SNUGGLES! announces the headline. And this is quite true, the money earned by Mr Snuggles bunnies has never been so high.
So where is the trick? What PR have conveniently ignored, because it doesn’t help their case, is that this year, as every year, there has been inflation, which just happens to have been 3 per cent. Every economy experiences an annual inflation rate, in which prices and wages increase. If prices go up by 3 per cent and wages go up by 3 per cent, then nothing has changed – every consumer has exactly the same purchasing power as in the previous year. Cuddle-Co’s sales have gone up by £15,000/£500,000, which is precisely 3 per cent. In other words, nothing has changed in the business. ‘No news’ has been turned magically into ‘good news’.
Conveniently ignoring inflation is probably one of the most common sleights of hand practised by spin doctors, and passed on to the public without challenge by the media. Everybody likes to see teachers’ salaries, money spent on hospitals and the value of possessions rise every year, and because of the normal process of inflation they usually do. It all sounds like good news, but in itself these increases are meaningless. ‘More’ does not necessarily mean ‘better’. Nor, of course, does it necessarily mean worse. By exactly the same argument, electricity bills, beer prices and the amount of tax raised by the government are all likely to rise each year (each one a ‘shockhorror’ story) and yet, because of pay rises, these increases may have no effect on people’s standard of living.
Double-counting, or turning one into two
One of the classic conjuring tricks, of course, is making things appear from nowhere. A well-documented example of making money appear from nowhere was the so-called double-counting escapade of the Labour government, much criticised in the press at the time. It was an early example of what the press has refered to ever since as spin.
Early that year, the Education Secretary, who was then David Blunkett, announced a £19 billion increase in spending on schools. Given that the total amount being spent per year at the time was £38 billion, this sounded like a quite astonishing investment – an increase of 50 per cent. This was great news for schools, and a big vote winner.
The £19 billion increase was statistically correct, but, as with most magic tricks, all was not as it might appear. To see why, consider a different example. Suppose that your local water company announce that, due to rising costs, they are going to have to increase your annual bill by £5 for the next three years.
This is clearly not good news, but just how bad is it? If you wanted to be really pessimistic you would say that water bills are going to go up by £15 – that’s £15/£60, which is a 25 per cent increase.
However, that would be a little harsh. The £15 increase is still three years away. We’ve already seen that inflation has to be taken into account. A fairer statement by a neutral observer would be that, if annual inflation is about 3 per cent, water bills are going to increase not by 25 per cent but by about 15 per cent in real terms – that is, once inflation has been taken into account. In today’s money, bills will have increased by about £10 and not £15. Bad, but not quite as bad as it first seemed.
How would you react, then, if a spin doctor announced to you that you are not going to have to pay £10 more, not even £15. In fact you face a shocking increase of £30 for your water, which is 50 per cent of what you pay at the moment? You are probably a bit surprised at this. Where has this massive bill come from? Is the water company hiding something?
Not at all. It’s just a question of how you interpret the figures. In Year 2 you will pay £5 more than you currently pay; in year 3, £10 more; and in year 4, £15 more: £5 + £10 + £15 = £30! Strictly speaking this is correct, but it is certainly an unconventional way of using the figures. In fact, it probably reminds you of the missing-pound trick in Chapter 2.
Yet this is exactly how the new spending on education was presented. Education spending was set to increase as follows:
What was the increase in spending after 1998 going to be? By 2001, it was due to reach £47.5 billion, £9.5 billion more than in 1998. If you add up each lump of ‘extra spending’ for the three years, however, it adds to £19 billion. So what was the extra investment in schools, £19 billion, £9.5 billion, or taking account of inflation, less than £9.5 billion? How long is a piece of string?
Making something smaller and bigger at the same time
Percentages are a particularly good prop for performing the spin doctor’s magic. Take, for example, the miracle of vanishing exports.
‘I won’t deny that these have been tough times for the company,’ said the spokesman. ‘Last year, due to the strength of the currency, our exports fell by 40 per cent, but I’m delighted to announce that, thanks to the outstanding efforts of our marketing team, this year has seen us bounce back with a sensational 50 per cent increase.’ The shareholders are impressed – 40 per cent down followed by 50 per cent up. Sounds like a net increase of 10 per cent.
This is another classic piece of misdirection by the number magicians. Here are the real figures:
So last year, the exports dropped by 40,000 from their previous 100,000 level. That is indeed a 40 per cent decrease. This year, we are told, has seen a 50 per cent increase over last year. Last year’s exports were 60,000, and 50 per cent of this is 30,000, so after the 50 per cent increase we now have:
Hang on a second, that isn’t a net increase of 10 per cent over two years ago. A drop of 40 per cent followed by an increase of 50 per cent led to a net decrease of 10 per cent. Incredible! How’s it done? There’s nothing hidden, that’s just the way that percentages work. The spokesman compared the 40 per cent and the 50 per cent as if they were the same thing, but, since they were based on different starting figures, it was like comparing apples with pears.
Want to feed the five thousand? How to turn 1% into 50%
First spin doctor: ‘Last year, the price of coffee went up by only two per cent. This year it has gone up by three per cent – that’s an increase of only one per cent, which is quite reasonable given the poor crop this year’
Second spin doctor: ‘Not at all. If it went up by two per cent last year, and three per cent this year, that means it has gone up by fifty per cent!’
1% or 50%? You choose.
Use averages to make everyone feel better – or worse
You can pull off a lot of tricks with averages. The whole concept of what ‘average’ means is a slippery one, bandied about by politicians with little respect for its subtleties. What, for example, is an average household?
Consider nine houses in Acacia Avenue.
• Four houses have 0 children
• One house has 1 child
• Three houses have 2 children
• One house has 15 children (OK, it’s not a typical household)
What is the average number of children per household? You might remember that there are three common ways of expressing an average: • The mode. This defines the average as the category that appears most often. In the case of Acacia Avenue, the most common number of children in a household is zero so this is the modal average. But it seems ridiculous to say that in Acacia Avenue the ‘average’ household has no children, since there are clearly lots of them running around in the street.
• The median. This says that the average is the middle value in the list if all the figures are put in order, from smallest to largest. In Acacia Avenue, the numbers of children in the nine households are: 0,0,0,0, 1, 2, 2, 2, 15. The middle, or median, value is 1. This seems odd too. How can the average household have one child when it is far more likely that a household has two children or none at all?
• That leaves us with the most popular form of average, the mean. This adds up all the values and divides them by the total number in the group. There are 22 children in the road and 9 houses, which means an average of roughly 2.4 children per household. Arguably this is the biggest nonsense of all, since none of the houses have exactly this many children, and only one house has more than this.
Still, means are the most popular form of average, including, as it happens, the one that is used to express the average income of the population. Average income is calculated by adding up all the incomes and dividing the result by the total number of people. In Britain, this figure is close to £30,000. Very few people earn exactly this amount, of course. In fact, as it happens, far more people earn less than this average income than more. This is because income is not evenly distributed. The majority earn less than £30,000, but a significant number earn between £50,000 and £100,000, and there are many thousands who earn vast salaries up to the high millions. These big earners distort the average in the same way that the large family in Acacia Avenue distorted the average number of children per house.
This means that it is easy for a spin doctor working in opposition to make the voters unhappy with the government. ‘I wonder how many people looking at this average income are thinking, “It’s all right for the other half, but what about me?” ’ says the canny spokesperson, knowing full well that (a) well over half of the people watching are in ‘the poor half’ and, (b) in any case, whatever people are paid they always think they deserve more. It’s a simple trick, but very effective.
But now for something spectacular. The conjuror David Copperfield has had a reputation for performing stunts on a large scale, but this is nothing to what a spin doctor can do. It’s possible to increase the average wealth of two entire countries by moving just one person. Not convinced? Here’s how.
Let’s say the average (mean) income per person in Scotland is £29,000 per year, while the average income in England is £31,000 per year. (These are not far off the published figures.)
An Englishman Wilf, on a salary of £30,000, is being transferred on the same pay from the London office to the Edinburgh office of his employer. Since Wilf’s salary is lower than the average in England, his disappearance from the English statistics means that the average income in England will go up very slightly. Meanwhile, since his income is higher than the Scottish average, when he moves location the average income in Scotland will also increase slightly. So, by moving office, Wilf increased the average wealth in both countries.
This is beyond a mere conjuring trick: it seems to be positively miraculous. Yet, once again, the figures are absolutely true. It’s just the conclusion that is false. The averages may have improved, but this is simply demonstrating the limitation of averages as a measure. The total wealth of England and Scotland has not changed with Wilf’s moving, it has simply been distributed differently. But imagine what the spin doctors can do with this powerful tool!
Better than average
‘I’m delighted to announce,’ said the headmaster ‘that this year, half of our pupils performed better than average. However, the other half of you are going to have to pull your socks up.’
In the ‘common-sense’ use of the word ‘average’, what the headmaster said was of course complete nonsense. Since the average is the midpoint, there will always be a half who perform worse than average, no matter how well they do.
Strictly speaking, however, this is only true if the average being referred to is the median. If the average referred to is the ‘mean’, then it is possible for more than half or less than half to be above average.
Missing the big picture
Another ploy of the good conjuror is to make you concentrate on a small part of what is going on so that you completely miss something else. Good patter will normally help with this. Consider, for example, this graph showing the decline in hospital waiting lists in a regional health authority:
Impressive, isn’t it? Sitting next to a photo of the chief executive with the caption ‘We’re making progress’, it leaves an overriding impression that things are going very well. What the conjuror doesn’t want you to look at too closely is the scale on the left-hand side of the graph. In fact, the actual decline in people waiting over six months has been about 100 out of a total of 5,000 – a minuscule 2 per cent. The graph looks rather different if the left-hand axis is shown all the way to zero:
The so-called improvement in the waiting lists is so tiny that it’s hardly worth mentioning. Once again something big has been made out of something small.
Selective presentation of the figures like this is so much the norm that a spin doctor would probably regard this as accurate reporting, but of course it is a presentation of numbers designed to convey a completely different impression from the truth.
Blind them with science
Finally, of course, there is the big flash, the mesmerising bit of chicanery that leaves the audience saying, ‘Wow, I’ve no idea how they do that!’
One way to keep out prying eyes is to send out the message, ‘We are so clever, it’s not even worth trying to understand what we do.’
A standard way of doing this is to make simple things complicated, with the implication that complicated = sophisticated. The truth is, of course, that complicated often means no more than muddled thinking.
Not long ago, a story came out that ‘scientists’ (whoever they are) had worked out a formula for the perfect football commentator. The formula, as merrily published in one newspaper, was as follows:
SQ stands for Speech Quality, and the other variables include Pitch, Loudness, Rhythm, Tone and so on.
It was all presented by the press in a slightly tongue-in-cheek way, since clearly this formula is complete gobbledegook. Only people involved in the research in question can evaluate whether it makes sense, and to everyone else it has no practical use. It is just a string of letters, but, because it is in the form of mathematics, it is supposed to be, by definition, a sign of cleverness and boffinhood; indeed it is little short of magic that can never be exposed.
A lot of maths is extremely difficult, but most of the maths needed for everyday life is not. Throughout this book we have tried to show that an understanding of maths can have all sorts of benefits: it can stimulate curiosity, it can answer those questions that bug us all the time, it can improve decision-making, and it can help to settle arguments. But perhaps the most important role of maths in everyday life is that it can help to prevent us from being conned, defrauded, misled and otherwise ripped off. There is nothing that spin doctors would like more than a generally innumerate society, so that we can be fed exactly the numbers they want to feed us.
With mathematics, it is possible to fight back.
