"If you torture the statistics enough, they will confess to anything."
I used to think numbers were a pretty sure bet. Our institutions have put so much stock in numbers that they seem so objective and untouchable.
Then I got me some higher learning, and the fraud was revealed. Behind most numbers, there are subjective decisions and even out-right biases. Then there are numbers that tell one side of the story, while there are numbers that tell another side of the same story. When you want to know how much money a program spends in a year, what do you want to report--the cash accounting, or the accrual accounting? Do you report what has been spent based on the total dollar amount of cheques cashed, or do you report on the total dollar amount of cheques issued? Which official figure do you use? Do you get the amounts from the Public Accounts of Canada? Or the Monitoring and Assessment Reports? Or maybe special reports issued by the Parliamentary Budget Office, or the Auditor General of Canada? The answer may shock you.
It depends.
Ask one bureaucrat, you'll get one answer, ask another, you'll get a different one. Why? Because of the function of their job. A policy analyst will tell you one thing, while an accountant will tell you something else, and a budget officer will give you yet another answer.
Next time you see big numbers floating around, give a passing thought (if only that) to what story those numbers are meant to tell. You'd be surprised where a question like that can lead you, if you have time to look further.
The art of numbers...
...Wish you were here.
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