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Lies, damned lies and statistics

By Peter Honey (June 2004 Issue)
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I think I’m becoming a statistics junkie. I’m a sucker for those histograms giving the percentage of bankruptcies in 2003 compared to those in 1993, or the increase in house prices in Berkshire compared to those in Dorset, or the percentage of goals scored in the Premier League during extra time, or the percentage decrease in Church of England congregations. (The latter gives me the excuse I need to pass on the amusing quotation I have just found attributed to a Mrs Robert A Taft. She is alleged to have said: ‘I always find that statistics are hard to swallow and impossible to digest. The only one I can ever remember is that if all the people who go to sleep in church were laid end to end, they would be a lot more comfortable’.1)

I’m addicted to the Fact File page in Edge (published by The Institute of Leadership & Management) telling me that 44 per cent of workers have sent e-mails they later regretted, and that 75 per cent of people continue to work when they have a cold and that 59 per cent would air-kiss a business associate (surely sensible in view of the fact that up to 75 per cent of them could have a cold!).2

Recently I went to the Annual Lecture of the Prisoners’ Education Trust at which Lord Hurd, a previous Home Secretary, was the guest speaker. Inevitably he rattled off some statistics about prisons (and out came my notebook!).

We imprison more people per head of population than any other European country. There are 139 prisons in England and Wales. The prison population is the highest ever at a little over 75,000 (it has nearly doubled in just 12 years despite crime levels being much the same). Overcrowding means that approximately 15,000 prisoners are sharing cells designed for single-person occupancy. Some 59 per cent of prisoners are reconvicted within two years of their release (in the case of young male offenders, the reconviction rate is 74 per cent). Some 65 per cent of prisoners have a reading age of less than eight years of age. Research shows that education is the biggest single factor in reducing re-offending rates for the simple reason that literacy and other basic skills dramatically increase employability. And so on.

Lord Hurd was the first to admit that raw statistics like these are relatively meaningless (he should have used Mrs Taft’s quotation!). If they are going to stick, you have to convert them into something that brings them to life. For example, the Sun is about 93 million miles away from the Earth. I find it hard to comprehend how far that really is, but on a recent visit to The Space Museum, in Leicester, I read a notice that told me that if you drive at exactly 62 mph it will take you 171 years to reach the Sun. (I took this on trust and haven’t checked the arithmetic!) Or, to return to prison statistics, since 1993 the amount of time prisoners spend doing purposeful activities (such as education or PE) has risen by 23 million hours per year. Sounds impressive? Unfortunately, because of the exponential rise in the number of prisoners during this period, purposeful activity per prisoner has only risen by an average of about 10 minutes.

In the waiting room of my chiropractor’s surgery there is a notice that reads:

Imagine a bank that credits your current account each morning with £86,400. At the end of the day it deletes the balance you haven’t used and credits you with the next instalment of £86,400. What would you do? Draw out every pound, of course! You have such a bank. Its name is time. Every morning it credits you with 86,400 seconds. It carries over no balance. It allows no overdraft. It is up to you to use the daily balance and treasure every moment you have. Yesterday is history. Tomorrow is mystery. Today is a gift – that’s why it’s called the present!

Very corny, but I must admit that I had never bothered to break down a day into seconds. The discovery has inspired me to work out that there are 525,600 minutes in a year (1,440 more in a leap year) and that I have already used up approximately 35 million of them!

And now I have succumbed to a pedometer! I can tell you precisely how many steps I took this morning when I walked the dog (5,385), how far this took me and how many calories I burnt off. Sometimes, despite pushing the right button, my pedometer fails to cut in, and I feel seriously deprived not to have the vital statistics about my walk – almost to the extent of doing it all again. See what I mean about becoming a junkie?

Well, my word count tells me that, prior to this article being edited, I’ve reached 791 words (3,656 characters, not counting spaces), which just allows me to squeeze in one more profound quotation, this time from Aaron Levenstein: ‘Statistics are like a bikini. What they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital.’3

Further information about The Prisoners’ Education Trust can be obtained from Wandle House, Riverside Drive, Mitcham, Surrey CR4 4BU or visit www.prisonerseducation.org.uk

 

Dr Peter Honey, FRSA, FCIPD, FIMC is a Chartered Psychologist and founder of Peter Honey Publications. He can be contacted on +44 (0) 1628 633946, at peterhoney@peterhoney.com or visit www.peterhoney.com

 

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