How to Lie With Statistics

Introduction When author Darrell Huff moved from Iowa to California, he remembers his father-in-law stating "There's a mighty lot of crime around here." And according to the newspaper his father-in-law was reading, there was. The problem with the statistics, however, was that it was based on a biased sample, and like many sophisticated statistics, "it was guilty of semi attachment: It assumed that newspaper space given to crime reporting is a measure of crime rate." Unfortunately, averages, trends, and graphs are not always what they seem. There is a secret language of statistics that is meant to sensationalize, inflate, confuse, and oversimplify. Of course, statistical methods and statistical terms are necessary when reporting the mass data of social and economic trends, business conditions, and polls, but if writers aren't using words with honesty and readers don't know what they mean, the result can only turn into nonsense.