As a statistician and political scientist, I care about getting the numbers right, and I am also interested in how people get things wrong. With economic statistics, it is often all about interpretation: were President Obama’s policies a failure given that unemployment was higher at the end of his first term than when he took office, or were his policies a success given that the unemployment rate was in decline? Are record-high budget deficits a national scandal or at a reasonable level as percentage of GDP? But there are also examples of hard numbers, political statistics that have lodged themselves in outlets such as The New York Times opinion page even though they are just plain wrong. What can be done to correct this sort of mistake? [cont.]
Andrew Gelman (Columbia), Symposium Magazine