Sometimes you have to wonder: Are we living in the midst of an information explosion or a baloney explosion?
The misinformation seems to be everywhere.
Last week, while I was assembling information to show that the end of the 55 m.p.h. speed limit had not resulted in thousands of additional highway deaths (as Ralph Nader and others had forecast), the New York Times ran a front-page story noting that most of the statistics being used in the teenage smoking debate were "wild projections."
Now Lancet, the British medical journal, has taken another crack at countering the contention that left-handers die sooner than right-handers (though it's probably too late to catch up with the earlier reports, which missed the fact that many elderly southpaws were forced to become right-handers early in life).
One could go on to rattle off episodes such as the asteroid that was going to hit the Earth or the never-proven link between silicone-breast implants and connective-tissue disease.
The examples are almost endless.
Where does the misinformation come from? Often, right from the top. In announcing a 1995 program to counter violence against women, President Clinton solemnly declared that FBI figures showed a violent crime was committed against a woman every 12 seconds.
To its limited credit, the White House acknowledged the next day that there was no such FBI statistic. But it's doubtful the retraction ever caught up with the initial sound bite, which also exaggerated the increase in the number of rapes.
"The question of how to analyze this flood of information is the fundamental problem of the modern age," says David Murray, director of research at the Statistical Assessment Service, a four-person, foundation-financed Washington organization that analyzes the use of statistics in public debate.
Murray and his colleagues have had their successes.
For example, they won the White House retraction on violent crime against women. "Those are fake numbers," Murray told a Washington Post reporter, and he presented the research to prove it.
But he often feels like a man standing in the middle of a river of sewage, trying to reverse the flow with a canoe paddle. The cascade is fed by many sources, including personal-injury lawyers trying to shake down businesses; businesses trying to manipulate government regulators into zapping their competitors; scientists trying to get more grants for their areas of research; and social activists with agendas.
Some people seem to enjoy the thought that some catastrophe or another is right around the corner. It gives a spring to their step, a purpose to their life -- often because they can then undertake to head off the catastrophe, however imaginary, much like volunteer firemen who set blazes so they can heroically put them out.
The effects of Chicken Little-ism can be quite costly.
Happily, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration has not yet undertaken a massive program of retraining and new procedures to protect left-handers from early death in the workplace.
However, the Environmental Protection Agency has instituted expensive monitoring procedures for certain estrogen-like chemicals -- even though the report on the dangers of such chemicals, on which the regulations were in large part based, has been withdrawn.
For most of those who spread phony statistics or make wildly inaccurate predictions about the probable effects of public policy, there is no down side. They are never called to account; their bungles are forgotten, and they are left free to fudge the numbers again.
Murray has at least one suggestion: Why not have people who release information to the public post a bond -- a large sum of money -- that would be forfeited if the information turned out to be bogus?
This idea, however, raises the question of with whom the bond would be posted and to whom it would be forfeited. Certainly the government couldn't do this, because it is such a major source of bunkum itself.
Perhaps there should be more wagers, such as the one that the late Julian Simon had with Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb. Ehrlich forecast the rapid depletion of natural resources in his book, and Simon bet him $1,000 he couldn't name any resource that would become more expensive over a given time period.
Ehrlich took the bet and lost, but this did surprisingly little to damage his reputation. Although his principal predictions about population and starvation turned out to be wrong, he received a MacArthur Foundation "genius grant" the same year he lost the bet.
Maybe what we need is a declared willingness to submit ourselves to ridicule if wrong.
Let me try to start the ball rolling, so to speak.
One of my beliefs, as regular readers know, is that tuition vouchers will result in significantly improved student achievement within a few years.
If I am wrong, I will push a tennis ball through the City Hall courtyard with my nose at noon on a weekday.
Any takers?
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