Chapter 5 - Manipulating Statistics and Statisticians

Summary

This chapter introduces a Schematic Guide to present some of our arguments about the political manipulation of statistics by governments in power. We apply this Guide to examples of manipulation in four countries: two autocratic (Stalin’s Russia and contemporary China) and two democracies (Greece and Argentina). The Guide highlights three possible stages in the process of statistical manipulation, each stage involving different acts of manipulation. Stage One: a government minister puts pressure on official statisticians to manipulate official statistics; Stage Two: the statisticians comply and produce biased, misleading numbers and/or biased misleading descriptions of the numbers; Stage Three: the government seeks to manipulate the public by using the manipulated statistics to persuade them of the government’s successes. The four examples show that in practice the manipulation does not happen necessarily in a neat sequence. Each of the examples has its own unique features. The persecution of statisticians is a feature of three of the examples, including the two democratic examples. The example of China raises the possibility that statistics can be manipulated by the data that is not collected and published, just as much by the data that is collected and published.