There is still much to lament in our ruling classes, but thank goodness we are no longer led by the likes of Lord Randolph, whose epiphany with regard to the decimal point is quoted above. However low your opinion of contemporary politicians, Gordon Brown is unlikely to mistake ".34 per cent" for "34 per cent" (although our financial ruling class would probably reward themselves handsomely for being out by only a factor of a hundred). Before we congratulate ourselves too readily for our mathematical sophistication, we should reflect upon the salutary fact that Darrell Huff's classic text is as necessary today as it was when it was first published over half a century ago. It is remarkable that, despite certain figures showing their age (we might be heading back to an average wage of £1,400 but we're not quite there yet), there is nothing dated about his style. A maths book on statistics from the fifties? If this seems as appetizing as a cold spam butty during a power cut, you're in for a surprise. That decade was not entirely in black and white.
If you spotted the fast one I pulled in the first paragraph, you're either one of "the crooks" who already know these tricks or else are an honest soul who has learned them "in self-defence". Hence the title of this fantastic little book: knowing how a burglar thinks helps secure your house. Most of the time, I would pass over the phrase "average wage" without a second glance. We all know what an average is, don't we? Distant maths lessons are just that for most of us, and even if I'd dredged up the question - what kind of average? - would I have been bothered to ask it? Complacency translates into vulnerability.
"When you are told that something is an average you still don't know very much about it unless you can find out which of the common kinds of average it is - mean, median, or mode." Without a clear understanding of these different kinds of average, you have to hope it doesn't really matter which one is being used, but this is only the case "when you deal with data... that have the grace to fall close to what is called the normal distribution." Otherwise, it makes a big difference, so much so that, "as usually is true with income figures, an unqualified 'average' is virtually meaningless."
Advertisers, of course, are among the most culpable and capable when it comes to lying with statistics (although at least their motives are plain). It is typical of Huff's sense of mischief that, alongside the calculations, he presents us with an ethical dilemma of enormous proportions: should we feel sorry for advertisers who are themselves victims of statistical skulduggery? For example, a magazine publisher is happy to state the median age of its readership, while leaving the kind of average for incomes "carefully unspecified". "Could it be that the mean was used instead because it is bigger, thus seeming to dangle a richer readership before advertisers?"
This is a short book, made even shorter by pictures of cows and charts that take up half a page. (How the innocent-looking graph can be manipulated by adding "schmaltz" is another example of Huff's style: a simple unpicking of the familiar to demonstrate an important point.) It is also unreasonably funny in parts. I don't recall maths, let alone statistics, ever being this entertaining at school. And yet the intellectual content is not compromised. Huff's message is a serious one and perhaps more important now, since our propensity for attaching numbers to almost anything shows no sign of diminishing. It ought to be common knowledge that samples can be "biased by the method of selection", that "well-biased samples can be employed to produce almost any result anyone may wish", that it can be difficult to obtain "a representative sample... one from which every source of bias has been removed", that people who answer survey questions have "a desire to give a pleasing answer", that strange results "crop up when figures are based on what people say".
Most of us can understand these ideas when they are explained by someone like Huff (although it might help not to be an aristocrat). If we're honest, out in the wild without a guide, we're not so sure. Have you ever been scared by "accident statistics"? Would the fact that more people "were killed by aeroplanes last year than in 1910" give you pause for thought? Are modern planes really more dangerous? "Nonsense. There are hundreds of times more people flying now, that's all."
"It is sometimes a substantial service simply to point out that a subject in controversy is not as open-and-shut as it has been made to seem." Or, as Goldacre's slogan has it: "I think you'll find it's a bit more complicated than that..." Both belong to that noble tradition of satire with a serious message, and it is a tribute to Huff's writing style that he can end with a quote from Mark Twain that fits perfectly: "There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact."
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