Torture Stastics Long Enough, and They Will Confess to Anything (John F'n Kerry's misery index)

The New Republic ^ | April 13, 2004 | Gregg Easterbrook

[quidnunc]

A standard economic indicator is the "misery index," the combination of unemployment rate and inflation rate. This index has the virtue of simplicity: unemployment and inflation are both leading indicators with widely agreed-upon meaning. Also, this index has the virtue of clear importance — unemployment is a disaster for those it strikes, while inflation harms almost everyone. (Sometimes borrowers come out ahead.) So as statistical indicators go the standard misery index is viewed as pretty solid, and in a moment we'll discuss what the standard misery index says.

First the new "middle class misery index" unveiled Monday by John Kerry's campaign. It's a campaign tool, so naturally, it finds that things have never been worse than at this very moment. On the Kerry middle-class misery index, George W. Bush has "the worst record of any president ever" — though "ever" goes back only to 1976.

The Kerry index tracks seven indicators: median family income, personal bankruptcies, job growth in the private sector, home ownership rates, and the costs of gasoline, health care, and college. Median family income trends are indeed troubling, though Kerry's index uses the 2002 trend to project a 2003 figure (the Bureau of the Census has not yet spoken on 2003), and there's a decent chance 2003 will prove to have been better than 2002 on this measure. Nevertheless, real-dollar median family income has been down under Bush, and that's indeed troubling.

But otherwise, the indicators in Kerry's middle-class misery index have been chosen because they are negative. Homeownership rates are positive; this category seems to have been added to allow for one favorable trend. But many other major positive categories have been ignored, and when what purports to be a weighing of evidence only takes into account negative evidence, the result is foam. Suppose I announced an Easterblogg Happiness Index with these indicators: mortgage interest rates, crime rates, rates of heart disease, life expectancy at birth, rates of car ownership, median home size, air quality, water quality, highest educational degree earned, rates of accidental death, percentage of workforce employed in white-collar professions. Needless to say, I've chosen these because all trends in these categories are favorable. My happiness index would not be a fair assessment of society, because I've excluded the negatives. (Maybe I should throw in "accuracy of NBA jump shots" just to have one negative.) My all-positive index wouldn't tell you the larger trend just as Kerry's all-negative index does not.

-snip-

[counterpunch]

[Citizen Tom Paine]

Two old sayings spring to mind which might be appropriate for this post:

There are lies, damn lies, and statistics.

The other one is: Figures don't lie, but liars figure.

[Smartass]

[skr]

By the time Kerry enumerates the ingredients in his misery index, his listeners' eyes will glaze over. Of course, that wouldn't be new for a Kerry audience.

[.cnI redruM]

That's about what the old lounge lizard went and did.