The Standard of Liberty Voice
For God,Religion,Family,Freedom
A publication of The Standard of Liberty Foundation
www.standardofliberty.org
August 21, 2005, #9

Super Numbers

It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s Statistics Man! He’s out to make a difference – not with speed, strength, or x-ray vision. With numbers. But don’t mistake him for a super hero. He’s a super villain. Instead of defending truth, justice, and the American way, Statistics Man is out to destroy those things. It’s easy. All he has to do is spin, slant, skew, exaggerate, even make up, statistics. He knows people will believe oft-repeated numbers – they’re easy to spout and simple to understand. Often numbers can make a point more succinctly and credibly than words can. Once StatisticMan has strewn his numbers across the sky, everybody will start quoting them. And once taken as fact, the people themselves will start making those “facts” come true.

Here’s one of many examples. There is a much-quoted and widely accepted statistic that says the divorce rate in America is fifty percent. Let’s take a closer look.

According to the Census, every year there are about 2 million marriages in America. And every year there are about 1 million divorces. If you do the simple math, you’ll think the divorce rate is 50%, or that one out of every 2 marriages ends in divorce. However, what is not being considered is the total number of existing intact marriages in our country which is 40 million. Now if you divide the 1 million divorces per year into the 40 million total marriages, you find that the annual divorce rate is more like 2.5 %. What they did was take the number of marriages occurring per year and compare it against the number of divorces occurring per year, leaving out the total number of continuing marriages there are, and many other relevant factors. In order to present the institution of marriage as failing dramatically across the board, they have pretty much compared apples and oranges. What certain people really want us to believe is that half of all marriages will end in divorce. And that is simply not reasonable. Look around you, at your extended family, neighbors, friends, community. Over the years, have half of them divorced? Not likely. In my world, I still think of divorce as a rare and tragic event. Yes, it happens more than we’d like, but it’s not as common as, say, Hollywood represents.

Why not report the divorce rate by saying that the number of marriages per year is twice the number of divorces per year? All of a sudden we have what sounds like good news instead of bad. Twice as many people are getting married as are getting divorced! Every year forty times as many people are staying married as are getting divorced! That’s a far cry from what we constantly hear.

While traditional American parents have been busy raising their children to obey God’s moral laws, Statistics Man has been busy getting everyone to believe conjugal marriage and the natural family is passe. After all, if half of all traditional marriages are going to dissolve, why get married at all? There are plenty of other options for “close personal relationships” and “family” that don’t carry that risk, including promiscuity, co-habitation, single parenting, homosexuality, sperm donors. Heck, these days your Pekingese can pass for kin.

Other examples of super numbers? American children with AIDS (it’s less than 200 per year), gays making up 10% of our population (according to census data it’s more like 2%), the number of homeless people, violent crime rates, obesity in America, the cost per mile of driving a car, etc., etc., etc.

So who is Statistics Man? Why does he lie? For money and power. He is one of the cultural revolutionists in our society, and he is making great headway. Truth be told, the great silent majority is being taken for a numbers ride like never before in order to help bring to pass disadvantageous societal change. What can we do? For one thing, we can refuse to take statistics at face value. We must get to the bottom of these bottomless numbers, ask ourselves what people hope to gain. At the very least we can discern and squelch unreasonable statistics when we hear them.

-Stephen & Janice Graham


Copyright 2005 by Standard of Liberty Foundation, Inc. All rights reserved.

Return to VOICE page.