POLITICIZING STATISTICS

...The Report, Miss Shanahan held, "contains many of the earmarks of a whitewash...

...Although the Report indicates that all persons interviewed expressed suspicion about the cancellation of the press briefings, it concluded that there was no evidence of political pressure on the preparation and dissemination of data...

...Their value, however, is deflated and their evaluation made more difficult when analysis is withheld...

...The Survey, initiated years ago by Willard Wirtz, then secretary of labor, was conducted as part of the 1970 Census, and published in 76 volumes in January 1972...

...COMMENTS AND OPINIONS 143 tors, legislators, journalists, students...

...The problem festers, but its visibility becomes obscured...

...and this was to relieve civil servants "from having to respond to inquiries that call for policy response...

...Data from the 1970 Census, however, have been available since late fall 1971...

...and those compendia became a factor leading to intensified claims for more encompassing social programs...

...The process is invariably hidden from public view, and definite proof of political influence can never be adduced...

...The highway providing efficient connection between suburban home and downtown office relieves the traveler from unsettling sights and helps make invisible those whom he would rather forget...

...it is now replaced by "low income...

...The comparable issue for 1969 still called poverty by its name...

...A recent congressional report, titled Investigation of Possible Politicization of Federal Statistical Programs (Subcommittee on Census and Statistics of the Committee on Post Office and Civil Service, House of Representatives, October 5, 1972) reads more like a Kafkaesque novel than a serious inquiry...

...So far, the effort to collect the quarterly data regularly has not been resumed...

...WE HAVE DESISTED from charging that statistical data have actually been suppressed...

...But questions might remain to disturb him who time and again witnesses poverty and degradation...

...This aspect of statistical programs has probably at times led to prevention of their preparation or dissemination...

...This process is aborted when they are not presented in meaningful form, e.g., through analytical tables, indexes, textual explication, etc.—and when they are not actively disseminated through COMMENTS AND OPINIONS the press and relevant compendia...

...Otherwise, "freedom of information," while formally preserved (no one can charge that the data are being "suppressed"), becomes an empty shell...

...All that is necessary is to make them less accessible or, in Eileen Shanahan's words, ". . to make it nearly impossible for any layman to detect even the most elementary truths...

...They can be interpreted, where appropriate, as pointing to basic flaws in the social and economic system, and they can be used to strengthen arguments for radical change...

...The federal government currently spends nearly $300 million a year on statistical programs...

...Statistical data are in fact nearly useless unless the concepts informing them are made explicit, and a frame 1 The Social and Economic Status of the Black Population in the United States, 1971 (Washington, D.C.: Bureau of the Census, July 1972...

...By this definition, 29 percent of all black families and 8 percent of all white families were poor in 1971...

...By William Spring, Bennett Harrison, and Thomas Vietoricz...

...Secretary of the Treasury George Shultz is reported to have said in a recent radio-TV interview that we shouldn't be concerned so much with the unemployment statistics, and rather look at the human reality behind them...

...But it is not necessary actually to suppress statistical data that might be politically damaging...

...Health, Education and Welfare Trends, an annual compendium of a wide range of statistics and text, disappeared, together with its monthly edition, Health, Education and Welfare Indicators, by early 1967, a few years after having been first issued...

...To speak of the "politicization" of govern ment statistics would seem at first blush mean ingless...

...So they are...

...Living on a "low income" seems less outrageous than living in poverty...

...Such data represent mere planning indicators for public manpower agencies (and manpower planning was the rationale for Congress to fund the collection of these statistics...

...Statistical programs are central to the planning processes of all industrial countries, especially to those of the United States where decision-making power is relatively dispersed...

...q...

...The discontinuance, since December 1971, of unemployment statistics for the low-income neighborhoods of central cities is a case in point...

...work of verbal explication and interpretation is provided...

...Withdraw the data collection and dis semination programs, and all knowledge about such conditions as that of the urban poor is deprived of generality...

...Members of the press who formerly attended the briefings were generally consistent in their feelings that there was no great loss as a result of the discontinuance of the briefings" (page 7...

...Private groups require statistics from known impartial sources to gauge the costs and extent of their present and planned activities, or the reasonableness of claims (as in the case of collective bargaining...

...The data exist, but become nonfacts...

...1 Such changes in terminology minimize the problem, and not only in the minds of philistines...

...To belittle the statistics as not representative of reality is to deny that they are an indispensable element of social knowledge...

...Somewhere in The Other America, Michael Harrington conjures up the image of the federal highway system bypassing city slums and the rural poor, speeding on the affluent traveler undisturbed by the marks of struggle for a daily living...

...it lives below the "low-income" level...

...Whether statistics about these conditions add new knowledge may be debatable...

...The heart of the matter is that the impact of the unemployment statistics on public opinion and the resultant pressures on public officials is lessened when a hitherto major channel of statistical analysis and explication is closed...

...But so to view social statistics is to misconstrue their purpose...

...A family of four living on less than $4,137 in 1971, is no longer "poor...

...The hopes of many liberals linked with the expansion of Great Society programs were dashed by the Vietnam war...

...Thus, to minimize the importance of statistics is to make that reality less visible...

...The dimensions of the human reality of unemployment cannot be known without collecting, compiling, and analyzing the pertinent data...

...But this clash in interpretation—inadvertently precipitated by the civil servants involved—was not given as the reason for discontinuing the briefings...

...but they have other, less reassuring qualities...

...but assuming that they are basically reliable, they quantify and summarize the facts, and lend them au thority...

...The very structure of society, pre sumably affluent and equipped with a highly productive technology, is put in question by the knowledge of such conditions...

...The term "low income" first replaced "poverty" in the issue of this publication for 1970 (see especially page 35...

...It deals inter alia with the cancellation of the monthly press-briefings on the unemployment rate and the Consumer Price Index, which had been held for 20 years and conducted by high-level civil service statisticians...

...The CES is a vast compilation of data on the social and economic characteristics of nearly 9 million youths and adults residing in the `low-income" areas of 51 cities and 8 rural areas in 1970...

...that is a reason for their devotion to it...

...The problems they portray persist, but consciousness of them recedes...

...The cancellation followed what appeared as a minor incident at the time: a decline in the January 1971 unemployment rate of 0.2 percent, greeted as of "great significance" by the secretary of labor, was characterized as being but "marginally significant" by one of the assistant commissioners of the Bureau of Labor Statistics...

...The reason given for the discontinuance of the collection program for urban unemploy ment data was that the selection of geographi cal areas had been based on the "outdated" 1960 Census...

...Such lack of improvement raises a widening circle of questions, involving not merely the effect of the programs or the labor markets that discriminate against blacks from the inner city—but ultimately about the whole complex of low-wage, low-status employment, without tenure rights or significant COMMENTS AND OPINIONS fringe benefits, which a large proportion of blacks and other minority people are compelled to accept...

...The "politicization" of official statistics denotes a more far-reaching process than the mere over- or underplay of momentarily "favorable" or "unfavorable" data...

...They possess, let us say, heuristic value...

...A striking case in point has been the manner in which the Census Employment Survey (CES) has been "presented" to the public...

...Whatever the benefits of manpower planning and programs for individuals, the unemployment rate for urban blacks has shown no improvement relative to that for whites...

...Not that he would necessarily be a better man were he compelled to use congested city streets and two-way country roads...

...But as Eileen Shanahan pointed out in the New York Times (October 22, 1972), only three of the (nine) reporters interviewed by the committee staff regularly report on economic statistics, and these three evidently thought that the briefings had been of importance...

...The statistics issued by federal agencies have become somewhat like the federal highway system: they enable business and government to plan their activities ever more efficiently, but they are increasingly designed so as to make poverty and the struggle for a living less visible...

...Such people would not be what they are were they to be specialists...

...The authors believe that the CES findings "should eventually lead to better solutions than welfare or income maintenance and should in the long run contribute substantially to the nation's overall prosperity...

...Social and economic statistics thus seem to be merely apolitical instruments of bureaucratic planning and contractual arrangements...

...142 They cannot be, and as a rule are not, permitted to become suspect...

...In these neighborhoods unemployment ran to 12.4 percent of the resident labor force in 1971, more than twice the rate for whites residing in the nonpoverty areas of these cities...

...They are directed and compiled by large, highly trained professional and technical staffs who owe their standing more to the judgment of their peers than to their employers, and usually will try to resist the distortion or misuse of their work...

...The discontinuance of the report on the size distribution of personal income, presented annually in the Survey of Current Business until April 1965, appears to have been an outstanding case of outright suppression, although the basic data continue to be available in Census releases...

...They are complex, rigidly standardized, and often sustained by vocal user groups, which, where public bodies are involved, often depend for their funding upon what the data indicate...

...Dealing with some of the main features of the CES, an article in the New York Times Magazine of November 5, 1972, 2 points out that ". . . the Administration has chosen not to analyze the numbers or even to calculate the simplest indexes of economic well-being for these 51 cities...

...The obscuring of poverty has led to an expunging of the very term from the official language...

...Nor does it dwell in a poverty neighborhood, but in "low-income" areas...

...But while available to those in need of technical information, they are not accessible to those in search for social knowledge—educa 2 "Crisis of the underemployed—in much of the inner city 60% don't earn enough for a decent standard of living...

...Here, again, was an attempt to lower the 144 visibility of a major indicator of social welfare...

...The Report states that "with the passage of time, interest in and the necessity for the press briefings has declined dramatically...

...This was done, according to a subsequent statement by the secretary of labor, in the interest of speedier availability of the data without such briefings, and in the interest of consistency with the practice of other federal agencies, whose release of data was not accompanied by press briefings...

...See the Report, page 7.) Washington journalists, however, know that civil servants eschew replies to policy-directed inquiries, although they are of course aware of the policy implications of their work...

...While generated by the planning and research requirements of new or ongoing programs (social security, unemployment insurance, wage legislation), statistics tend to take on a life of their own, and intensify as well as broaden the concerns to which they are addressed...

...True, the body of data from which Trends and Indicators drew were—and are—available...

...But there is nothing in the attitude of the Administration, eloquently expressed by its silence on those findings, to encourage such a belief— quite aside from the persistence of poverty itself, indicated by the CES and the many less comprehensive surveys that preceded it...

...Without the generalizing tendency inherent in the statistical data, we will not know what kind and how much effort is needed to change the "human reality" of unemployment...

...The vitiation of politically "sensitive" data has not been limited to the Nixon administration...

...They lend themselves to raising questions about the status quo preferred by private and public bureaucracies...

...THE HIGH COST and prominence of major statistical programs usually make their outright suppression infeasible...

...The absence of relevant statistical compendia has the same effect as the absence of an informative daily newspaper—access to a universe of knowledge and to participation in public life is foreclosed...

...See the Note on page 28 of the April 1965 Survey...