The sin of statistics

Reality is complex. It doesn’t fit neatly into normal distributions or simplistic versions of the tiny images in our head of how the world should be. Should, by the way, is one of the more frightening words in the English language. This I discovered recently while talking among friends.

Late last year, all the king’s writers and all the king’s economists confidently commented on what they called the “Great Resignation” because of an unusually high quits rate. The labor department uses this particular statistic to see how many workers voluntarily separate from their employers. A high quits rate meant that workers were fed up with working and simply dropped out of the labor force. We have millions of fewer workers than we did pre-pandemic. That’s it, right?

By the spring, these same commentators declared that the “Great Resignation” was, in fact, merely a tale. That’s because other statistics told a much fuller picture. It looked more like a “Great Reshuffling,” where employees were quitting their jobs only to find new ones, often higher-paying jobs or jobs in new industries that were more fulfilling.

So, these analysts and writers were confidently but incorrectly describing reality based on a statistic.

Similarly, many writers today confidently declare the evils of “our broken economy, in one simple chart.” Ah, yes. According to this view of the world, “only the very affluent” have “received significant raises in recent decades,” while “the middle class and the poor” have fallen behind.

“The message is straightforward,” this writer touted. “The basic problem is that most families used to receive something approaching their fair share of economic growth, and they don’t anymore.” The basic problem, straightforward, simple chart. Nothing else to it, right?

Yet in that same newspaper, another writer used similar data to show that individuals’ incomes change over time, going from “rags to riches to rags.” The truth is that over half of Americans will find themselves in the top 10% of income earners at one point in their lives. “It is clear,” he wrote, “that the image of a static 1 and 99 percent is largely incorrect.”

The difference is that the first story looks at statistical categories over time while the second follows individuals over time. The first uses data that’s easier to find and understand, while the second more accurately describes reality.

It seems that when we look at charts and headlines, we think we’re being “data-driven” and “research-backed,” when in fact we’re looking through a pair of glasses that represent the world we wish to see rather than the world that is actually there.

Some have commented that the way we talk about politics today follows patterns that look more like religious fundamentalism than enlightenment. One BBC journalist called it “the church of social justice.” Another writer in The Atlantic believes it’s the “new puritanism.” These patterns may be due to the loss of religious participation in modern societies, now replaced by visions of a triumphant working class casting down to hell the evil capitalists.

I know this because in this new religion, in some ways I’m a damned sinner too.

Last week, some friends shared a video of a racist yelling at a group of Indian women in north Dallas. Due to some confusion in the text thread, I argued that in some ways it could be seen as a non-event. Most people most of the time, I wrote, don’t experience racism to that extreme. I was looking through a lens of normal distributions and standard deviations. It was cruel.

The problem was that these friends are Indian, and they experienced the same kind of racism a few months prior when, in some department store, a Karen told them to “speak English” and “go back where they came from.” I knew they had this experience, but I put it aside for the sake of statistical accuracy.

In 1932, the German satirist Kurt Tucholsky wrote, in a quote often misattributed to Stalin, “The death of one man: this is a catastrophe. Hundreds of thousands of deaths: that is a statistic!”

Tucholsky’s statement is true in the sense that many people simply cannot comprehend the devastation others experience around the world at all times.

The eighteenth-century economist and philosopher Adam Smith argued in The Theory of Moral Sentiments that it’s because we’re inherently selfish. He wrote that thousands dying in a flood in some foreign land is not as painful as you merely losing your pinky. Your loss is the supreme object of your attention, while the thousands of deaths abroad overwhelm your imagination. He concluded that we shouldn’t bore people with our problems because they can’t comprehend them.

Yet Tuchoslky’s statement is not true in another sense. Hundreds of thousands of deaths may be a statistic, but they’re still real, still terrible. The depths of sorrow their family members experience shapes their entire existence, but that grief can’t be captured in data.

Economic data and statistics are only a single tool, a single lens through which we can see the world. There are many more lenses that are just as accurate at describing reality, perhaps even more accurately describing reality than whatever data we happen to find in a Google search.

In the first century, the apostle Paul knew this well when he wrote in his first letter to the Corinthian church: “If I could speak all the languages of earth and of angels, but didn’t love others, I would only be a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.”

You see, the Corinthians were wealthy elites, modern urbanites and merchants who had it all together. They were educated and influential. Yet it seems that there was a lot of infighting in their group, and Paul wrote to give them a fuller picture of reality.

“Now our knowledge is partial and incomplete . . . we see things imperfectly, like puzzling reflections in a mirror.” He said that he could give everything he owned to the poor and even sacrifice his body, but if he didn’t love others, he would have gained nothing.

If I had to guess, the Corinthians were likely going through what we’re going through in our modern discourse. We’re talking past one another, throwing “truth bombs” at each other, armed with simplistic, statistical representations of reality rather than actual reality. In other words, we’re not loving one another.

Thankfully, the sin of one-dimensional statistics is one that can be absolved. It can be forgiven. All we need is love.