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 We’re all familiar with the “Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics” line that comes out every time someone tries to prove something through anything as radical as actual data. The point is that you can read statistics a number of ways and prove what you want to with them, but actually I think this phrase is a pretty lazy cliché and is largely untrue.
We shouldn’t be afraid of going to the raw data and analysing it properly. What actually causes the problem isn’t that the statistics tell us a lie, but that what we add to those numbers and how we fill in the gaps is subjective, so we can end up with radically different interpretations.
Never was this more true than last week when the government released statistics on youth smoking. The actual data is not under dispute: a 7% reduction in youth smoking between 2007 and 2010. This covers the period of time since the increase in legal tobacco purchasing age to 18. You may have noticed that both ACS and Cancer Research put out statements on the day the youth smoking figures were released with polar opposite views of what these statistics (over which there was no dispute) told us.
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