The Statistics That Come Out of Nowhere

Abstraction: How fabricated "decorative statistics" launder into authoritative fact

Key points:

• "$1 trillion in annual bribes" is the stripped midpoint of a $600B-$1.7T range from early-2000s surveys; stripping the range removes enormous uncertainty from already-questionable estimates
• "$2.6 trillion corruption cost" traces to an unsourced one-sentence bullet in an advocacy brief — later cited by the UN and OECD as if authoritative
• "Statistics laundering": dubious claim recycled by a respectable institution gives the number false credibility; Dan Quayle's "70% of lawyers are American" (actual ~25-35%) and "$300B lawsuit costs" (from a CEO's offhand remark) illustrate the pattern
• Numbers migrate through broken telephone: ranges collapse to single figures, narrow domain estimates are applied broadly, caveats disappear
• Body heat/head myth originated from a US military study of clothed participants — only exposed part lost heat; actual figure ~10%, not 50-80%

Connections: Statistics · Data Integrity · Misinformation · Scientific Communication

Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/03/bad-misleading-statistics-false-information-estimates/673359/