Don't Fall For Scaremongering

Have you ever noticed that Americans do really terribly on international tests and surveys? The latest example involves a survey that purports to show that American adults rank 21 of 23 in math and 15 of 23 in literacy among the developed world. Panic!!! Hold on. This number is misleading, as are many such numbers. Let’s discuss.

Fear sells. If a magazine put “Everything is fine!” on its cover, then no one would buy. So instead, they push fake crises. Politicians do this too, as do businesses who want your money. This is how numbers like the 21/23 and 15/23 come about. They are meant to scare you. They are meant to shock you: “You mean we aren’t the best in the world?! Something has gone wrong! Ahhhhhh! We must ____!” And when you are sufficiently panicked, they will happily fill in that blank for you. Don’t fall for this. Always look behind the numbers. Observe.

The rankings above are the result of a random survey of 5,000 people. They took a quick test which was ranked between 0-500 points. The results were then averaged and fed to the news as the latest example of how bad things are in America. But these numbers don’t actually say that. How can I be sure? Well, each score is within +/- 4% of the median. Why does this matter? In a normal survey, that would put them well within the margin of error. Here they claim that is not true because the survey size was large – at 5,000 people. Thus, the margin of error is around 1-2%. But that’s misleading. That margin of error only applies to the median because that’s the only number created by all 5,000 people. When you look at each country’s score, what you find is that only around 220 people were tested in each country. That means that margin of error for any particular country score is closer to +/- 8%. That means that every country is within half the margin of error. That means that mathematically speaking, there is NO difference between these countries that we can say with any degree of certainty.

But that’s not scary, so they cite this number as if it really has meaning.

It’s the same thing with so many other numbers. When they talk about test scores of high school kids, for example, those numbers are so close that using those numbers to rank countries is like ranking toothpicks by height when the issue is comparing toothpicks to yardsticks to trees. Other numbers meant to scare us are similarly warped. People point to meaningless differences, ignore key facts, and make wrong comparisons.

For example, did you know that Mohammed is the number two name for children born in Britain? Wow, that means they must be awash in Muslim kids, right? Panic!! When someone says that Mohamed is number two, people wrongly assume (1) that there must be millions of these Mohameds being born otherwise they wouldn’t be near the top of the list, and (2) if it’s the number two name, then there must be almost as many Muslims being born as Christian British. And that is what the scaremongers want you to believe. But is this right? Hardly.

First, being number two isn’t that big of a deal. Do you know how many Mohamed were born last year? 7,549. That’s it. And that’s out of 706,248 child born. Essentially, 1% of children born in Britain were named Mohamed. Not so scary anymore, is it? And what about this idea that being second means there must be an equal number of Muslims as Christians being born? People forget that almost all Muslims name their sons Mohamed, whereas whites don’t do that, i.e. we don’t all name out sons Jesus. Thus, Mohamed’s high ranking is deceptive because Muslims are more likely to name their children Mohamed whereas people wrongly assume a normal distribution similar to Christian behavior. In other words, the high number of Mohameds does not imply an equally high number of Omars and Saddams. So how many Muslims do think there are in the UK? All of 2.7 million... 4.8% of the population. Not so threatening anymore, is it, certainly not compared to hearing that Mohammed is now the number two name!!

All right, so what about this 47% of the public who pay no taxes? (The number actually fell to 43% in 2013, but that’s neither here nor there.) I bought this one at the time, but I shouldn’t have. Let’s take a closer look at the figure than we have in the past. Consider this: 27.3% of the population is under 20 and 12.8% of the population is over 65. Combined, these two groups account for 41% of the population and most members of these two groups likely pay no taxes. If you subtract them from the 47% figure, then you get 6%. In other words, only 6% of working age Americans pay no taxes. That’s a very different world than the one painted by the assertion of the 47% figure.

Folks, America ain’t so bad, and things are nowhere near as dire as people want you to believe with these headline grabbing, but ultimately false, numbers. When we look at things to worry about and talk about plans to fix them, let’s be sure we know what the real extent of the problem is.