Thc Cult of Statistics

...it would be a comfort to us harassed beings if it were better known that the majority of the statistics were futile, because their collectors and interpreters do not know enough physics to understand the Law of the Virial, which proves that a generalization from statistics can be valid only in so far as the activities of the individuals forming the collection are negligible...

...But of course Professor Fisher does not believe his own figures, for he declares at the conclusion of his study that "present conditions are intolerable...

...On this subject, Professor H. M. Johnson, of the Mellon Institute of Industrial Research, wrote in Harper's Magazine: In a second form, the method of interrogation becomes the questionnaire--a method which is quite fashionable in the scientific underworld...

...Can it be affirmed confidently that physiographic conditions control the political action of a district of aoo,ooo voters when 9%ooo were in opposition...

...we have gone the whole Pythagorean hog with the philosophy of Number One...

...The good statistician always remembers that such compilations tell us absolutely nothing about any individual case, but regard only the mass...

...Dublin and the medical world at large that heart disease had become a more common cause of death than tuberculosis...

...History went quantitative many years ago...

...The merit of a composition can't be expressed mathematically, but only in the relative terms of the impression this composition makes on that teacher or reader at a given time...

...Facts are his delight, especially if they be isolated and uninterpreted...

...They possess figures showing the amount of variation of one factor in a situation, and blandly assume that all the other factors will be kind enough to remain constant long enough for them to do their little forensic juggling act...

...Louis Trenchard More, the physicist, in his delightful The Dogma of Evolution, dates the change from the publication of Buckle's The History of Civilization, in I857: Since Buckle's time, the activities of statisticians have been unceasing and we are swaddled in sheets of figures...

...The case of Professor Fisher is typical, illustrating two of the errors into which the statisticians constantly fall...

...Seniors will he particularly warned against using the unfortunate expression of accountants, "The figures reflect...

...Now all this must not be taken to mean that I see no sense in figures at all, either in business or in life...

...Many a graduate student in education nowadays owes solely to his ability to run a tabulating machine his degree of doctor of philosophy...

...Nor does the purveyor of medicaments offer to the individual any proof that he is one of the unfortunate four rather than the lone lucky one in fivemthe lucky one who, presumably, dances with all five girls at the senior prom while the other four exhale noisomely along the wall...

...We need look no further back than the last presidential election to see the use of this vicious method: the papers of the successful party claiming an overwhelming popular mandate in support of its policies on the ground that: a. More voters had turned out than ever before...

...Then will come the climactic moment (to which Gabriel's much-advertised trumpet will furnish only the preliminary fanfare) when the World's Greatest Statistician, released from the trammels of earth and big business, clad in the glorified uniform of a celestial top sergeant, will step before the assembled human hordes and roar, in a voice of thunder, "By the numbers I . . . Count off l...

...Professor Allen Johnson of Yale (in The Historian and Historical Evidence) has this to say concerning the method of writing political history by plotting majority election returns : In many of these tables no account is taken of opposing election returns, which are only slightly less than a majority through a period of years...

...On the front page of the college catalogue let us print this quotation from the words of Nicholas Murray Butler, President of Columbia University, the home of educational statistics: The modern Philistine is just what Matthew Arnold described him, inaccessible to, and impatient of, ideas...

...More to the point, Professor Franklin T. Baker, of Columbia, has written: Many of us, however, are inclined to accept these new scientific standards with a hospitality tempered by reflective scepticism...

...I can imagine no more useful member of society than, for instance, Dr...

...the Babson Statistical Organization will furnish figures on anything in the world...

...The defects of the questionnaire are even worse than in the other form of interrogation [individual personal questioning] for besides the uncertainties of observing, one encounters the uncertainties of estimating and averaging...

...The figures are meaningless...

...The statistician knows that the more exact the figure he gives, the more his reader is impressed with its mathematical quality...

...and make the freshman write at the foot of the table the axiom of elementary school days: "You cannot add apples and potatoes...

...Let him like a true scholar assure the graduating class that the corruption consisted in "making the worse appear the better reason"mthe sin of all bad statisticians...

...There remain other aspects which have been excluded, not because they are of less importance, but because they have not the special property of measurability...

...Bradstreet...

...Dun does not always see eye to eye with Mr...

...but life is an affair of more than one variable, to put it mildly...

...He estimates by an unknown method of calculation that the total consumption of alcohol today "is certainly less than 16 percent of pre-prohibition consumption, probably less than Io percent and possibly less than 5 percent...

...Squarely against this we may place the dictum of A. S. Eddington, the English physicist, who says (in The Domain of Physical Science) : Physics (or exact science) can only take within its scope certain aspects of the external world...

...In the field of education--where, of all places, we should expect the quantitative concept to meet with intelligent opposition--"objective measurement" has pretty nearly won the battle...

...In the first semester let the entering student be taught to scrutinize the statistics offered in the newspapers...

...In his sophomore year ask him to find out exactly how many unemployed adults there were in this country at the moment when the Republican figures showed 5,000,000 out of work and the Democratic, 1,8oo,ooo...

...The most laboriously built tables may omit some essential element, or include some disturbing factor that impairs their validity...

...To which might be added the growing army of the half-educated: playing with figures is easier than thinking...

...In our own day, the bludgeon of statistics is wielded to great effect in the political world, the more so as our form of government is based almost entirely on quantity...

...but no longer do they tarry in the porches : the Holy of Holies itself must be "reorganized on a sound business basis...

...But there were in other ages the philosophers to decry the common tendency to seek safety in numbers...

...has the distinction of yielding a statement every part of which is false: In an entire business life 60 percent of all we do is the result of instinct, inheritance and environment and 30 percent is the result of religion...

...What fools these historians have been, from Herodotus to Wilson l What Is Success...

...In l~e manner the reformers summon conventions and vote and resolve in multitude...

...October i6, 1929 THE COMMONWEAL 611 It doesn't even sound like anything unless, perhaps, a psychological hash...

...On the other hand, the investment statistician has not been born who will tell his clients that the average rise of a given stock in the past five years conveys no information concerning what that stock will do tomorrow: if he did, he'd go out of business...

...It was perhaps inevitable that when "the quality" failed us in government, we should turn to numbers and assume that God was on the side of the greater number of presidential electors...

...A wise student of our times might draw a pretty picture from the perusal of some of the Babson books written in the past fifteen years and sold broadcast...

...and the increasingly important place assigned to the physical sciences, which recognize only quantitative values...

...I must also salute the good statisticians in the field of education: the men, for instance, who by statistical methods found out the words most frequently used in daily life and the words most frequently misspelled, thereby making spelling for the first time a practical subject and saving future generations of pupils from "eleemosynary" to "Skaneateles...

...If this computation were correct, Professor Fisher ought to be very happy...

...The reflective utterances of Bergson and K6hler pass over our heads...

...If I say that most people suffer from elephantiasis of the cranium, the statement leaves the reader cold...

...The graphic urge takes charge again in New Tasks for Old Churches, and produces (under the heading Facts Churches Must Realize) a clock-graph of the industrial cycle, nine o'clock bearing the gorgeous title, Religious InterestmHigh Stock Prices...

...modem materialism, which measures importance by counting dollars...

...Is not a man better than a town...

...the greater the concourse and with each new uproar of announcement, The delegation from Essex/ The Democrats from New Hampshire...

...They are to be numbered among the good statisticians, however: they may tell a man that the tables give him a life-expectancy of thirtyseven years, but they explain that since the tables are a composite of thousands of death ages, the chances are overwhelming that he will not die just thirty-seven years after his policy is written...

...Babson shows in a beautiful graph the whole span of history from 975 B. C. (once more those exact figuresl) to I9oo A. D., with the notation: "The peaks represent periods of prosperity following religious revival...

...Social philosophers wotild perhaps tell us that this numerical urge is the natural result of a combination of causes: democracy in government, wherein right and truth are decided by counting votes...

...At the outset of this article I said that we had made the statisticians our philosophers: there is no stronger proof that we are living, as James Truslow Adams has so ably contended, in a "business man's civilization" than the fact that the business statisticians have be...

...Babson, himself, however, increasingly devotes his time and his interest to questions which would seem far removed from the purview of the mathematician...

...The other lo percent is given to the forming of habits and is called reason or intellect...

...The Lord having departed therefrom, the money-changers return to the temples...

...Pythagoras is generally blamed for having started it all, with his philosophy of Number, though Aeschylus makes poor padlocked Prometheus boast, "I found Number for them, chief device of all...

...Having thus got the number, so to speak, of the statisticians, the young collegian may face life unafraid, nor worry longer along statistical lines until the day of judgment...

...But I abominate the others, who try to tell me that the composite judgment of a thousand teachers expresses mathematically the merit of an English composition, when I know that a dozen of the thousand said it was worth zero and another dozen rated it well-nigh perfect...

...Among important questions now before the American people none is argued more often from the statistical viewpoint than that of prohibition...

...if Professor Fisher had said "about Io percent," we should have known that the figure was a mere approximation, but "certainly less than I6 percent" sounds as certain as certain...

...Next in honor to the tabulating machine in the seats of learning comes the questionnaire...

...Nowadays, however, the decrying note is absent, since it is the height of our enlightenment that we have made the statisticians our philosophers...

...No one knows whether there were more bootleggers to catch in I925 than in I922...

...But not so O friends...

...Louis I. Dublin, of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company...

...While we are revising the aims of education, then, let us include as proper to this age the understanding and interpretation of statistics...

...Despite the objections of physicists and mathematicians, who surely ought to know something of statistics, the educators go on their merry way trying to turn qualities into quantities and making graphs of everything from "general merit in composition" to "the character profile...

...Make him expound Simeon Strunsky's wise saw: "Mr...

...There are many chances of error when we deal with those imponderables that make up what we call mind, especially in its emotional and aesthetic reactions...

...The greatest good of the greatest number" is really not a quantitative concept: we have twisted it to read, "Whatever the greatest number wants must be best," and go blithely on our way assuring ourselves that we are supported by an indisputable axiom, until some keen mind like Walter Lippmann's asks, "Why should the majority rule ?" We do not even remember that Lippmann derives from Emerson, who wrote in 184x: The political parties meet in numerous conventions...

...It is only as a man puts off from himself all external support and stands alone that I see him to be strong and prevail...

...Not that the belief in the importance of quantity is a new one...

...They neglected to feature equally the facts that c. The unprecedented vote affected both parties d. iS,oIt,Ix5 citizens had voted for Smith...

...Every college president now employs a special "questionnaire answerer" among his secretaries...

...will the God deign to enter and inhabit you, but by a method precisely the reverse...

...It will be demonstrated to them that figures 9 reflect nothing but their own dumb images...

...We reasoned that if the results of interrogating any one person were worth nothing, the results of questioning ten thousand persons would be worth ten thousand times nothing, or, in accordance with old-fashioned arithmetic, nothing...

...Luckily for culture and scholarship, not all educators have bowed in deep humility before the shrine of the tabulating machine...

...In The Future of the Churches, Mr...

...It is the purpose of this paper briefly to examine the dogma and the ritual of this cult of statistics of which we are becoming the bounden devotees, and to point out one or two little fallacies that the good statisticians know (but very often don't tell us) and that the wicked statisticians never heard about...

...Walter Lippmann has the following to say regarding the prohibition statistics of Professor Irving Fisher: Professor Fisher cites the increase in federal convictions from 22,000 in 1922 to 38,000 in I925...

...nor can I conceive of a piece of public service more important than the compilation of the figures which showed Dr...

...The second error is more serious, because deliberate...

...b. 21,482,588 citizens had voted for Hoover...

...The Whigs of Malnel, the young patriot feels himself stronger than before by a new thousand of eyes and arms...

...come not only our philosophers, but what is worse, our religious prophets as well...

...Yet the insurance companies gather statistics primarily for business purposes...

...if, however, I assert that "four out of five" are thus afflicted, no one stops to ask me how long it took me to survey the whole human race, and how I got them to stop being born and dying while I did the job...

...At the commencement exercises let Prexy tell the story of Socrates, how he was condemned to drink the hemlock for corrupting the youth of Athens...

...October 16, I929 THE COMMONWEAL 609 i THE CULT OF STATISTICS By FRANK WHALEN NE of the distinguishing marks of the present age hereabouts is the tendency to express ideas statisticallyhor to use statistics in place of ideas...

...To take one example: I suppose Roger Babson might be called without offense the Big Number among American business statisticians today...

...Give him the "tables showing the comparative illiteracy of the nations of the world," show him the different ways in which the nation gathered the percentages of illiteracy cited (from the sweeping statement "we have no illiterates but the feebleminded" to the census-taker's question, "Have you any illiterates in your family...

...Juniors will be required to memorize and repeat daily the following formula: Figures must he Properly compiled Adequately presented Thoughtfully interpreted And even then they lie like hell...

...Professor Boyd H. Bode, of Ohio State University, has asserted that the mere use of scientific methods to take the place of the careful scrutiny of problems of curriculum and learning is a dangerous substitute for thinking . . . a camouflage for mental stagnation...

...He does not think because he cannot, and at every opportunity he weakens or destroys the necessary tools of thought...

...The high priest here is Professor E. L. Thorndike, of Columbia, and his shibboleth, "Everything that exists exists in some quantity, and hence can be measured...

...A law which is enforced 9o to 95 6~o THE COMMONWEAL October I6, I929 percent is very successfully enforced...