How To Say Something With Statistics
November 6, 2007 by Kristina Chew, PhD
Filed under Health
These and other statistics are frequently heard in discussions about autism, and especially when the topic is the so-called autism epidemic and the rising prevalence rate of autism (occurring in only about 3 in every 10,000 children in the 1960s); they make for good t-shirts and headlines. I guess it’s known that you can lie with statistics—that numbers don’t always add up to what they seem to say. As Temple University mathematician and author John Allen Paulos writes in the November 4th ABC News in Deny All You Want, They’ll Still Believe: Why Public Denials May Only Fuel Conspiracy Theories:
The difficulty in processing denials is probably part of the reason for their frequent ineffectiveness. Complexity and logical connectives get lost in transmission. (Quick, what does the following sentence mean? “It’s not the case that Waldo denied that evidence was lacking that he did in fact fail to do X.”) In fact, the new research suggests that people quite often mentally transmute a denial into an assertion. They hear “X is not this bad thing Y,” and soon enough what remains with them is the link between X and Y, which eventually becomes “X is Y.” [my emphasis]
These foibles, it should be repeated, affect our beliefs about many disparate phenomena, not just political issues. Health scares are a rich source for them. Sticking with the vaccine theme, I note that the denial by medical researchers and scientists of a connection between mercury in childhood vaccines and the increased incidence of autism (defined now to include Asperger’s syndrome and other “autism spectrum disorders”) has not quelled the controversy over the vaccines or weakened the belief that mercury was the culprit. The number of cases cited for all such disorders also serves to anchor our estimate of the prevalence of autism proper.
Paulos is onto something here: It does seem that, no matter how much valid scientific evidence and how many myth-debunking critiques are written about the theory that vaccines or something in vaccines causes autism, many marshall many arguments and evidence to prove that there is, indeed, a link and that treatments for autism should focus on biomedical remedies based on these theories. Paulos refers to three “common psychological biases” that color how we view numbers and, too, what we interpret them as representing: The availability heuristic is the “pronounced tendency of people to view any story through the lens of a superficially similar story that comes easily to mind or is psychologically available”; the anchoring effect “refers to our tendency to credit and easily become attached to the first number we hear about a particular phenomenon”; confirmation bias is something I need to remind myself constantly to be aware of in weighing accounts of this or that treatment or therapy resulting in amazing results for one autistic child:
Confirmation bias” refers to the way we check a hypothesis by looking for occurrences that confirm it (as well as our amazing perspicacity) and ignoring those that do not. We “just know” something is true because it’s the only possibility we consider as we search mightily for whatever might confirm our beliefs and pay scant attention to whatever might disconfirm them. Consider the Iraq war again, dot-com stocks or many medical snap judgments.
Harvard economics professor N. Gregory Mankiw also takes a careful look at healthcare numbers in the November 4th New York Times and, after examining three “true but misleading statements about health care that politicians and pundits love to use to frighten the public,” admonishes us to be “careful not to be fooled by statistics into thinking that the problems we face are worse than they really are.” This is Statement 3:
Health costs are eating up an ever increasing share of American incomes.
In 1950, about 5 percent of United States national income was spent on health care, including both private and public health spending. Today the share is about 16 percent. Many pundits regard the increasing cost as evidence that the system is too expensive.
But increasing expenditures could just as well be a symptom of success. The reason that we spend more than our grandparents did is not waste, fraud and abuse, but advances in medical technology and growth in incomes. Science has consistently found new ways to extend and improve our lives. Wonderful as they are, they do not come cheap.
Fortunately, our incomes are growing, and it makes sense to spend this growing prosperity on better health. The rationality of this phenomenon is stressed in a recent article by the economists Charles I. Jones of the University of California, Berkeley, and Robert E. Hall of Stanford. They ask, “As we grow older and richer, which is more valuable: a third car, yet another television, more clothing — or an extra year of life?”
Jones and Hall forecast that, by 2050, 30 percent of income will be devoted to healthcare; this is not a “problem,” but “the modern form of progress”: If you have the health services, the trained professionals, the medical technology, and all of these accessible and affordable to much of the population (I’m saying this very hypothetically), people will use and want to use, and pay to use, for those healthcare services.
If you expand a 2-lane highway to 5 lanes, there will be more cars using it and, eventually, just as much traffic……..
If you build autism schools, families with autistic children will come with IEPs in hand……….
Kristina. A little seven year old autistic girl starved to death, here in Australia last week.
The poor little girl was found dead in her bed last Saturday morning.
Her little emaciated body weighed only 9 kilograms.
I am so shocked and deeply saddened that such a situation could occur in an affluent nation like Australia.
You can read the full article in the Daily Telegraph(Sydney newspaper)
Such a beautiful little girl.
Such a short life.
Jesus Weeps…..
I think we all are……..
And, if people like you weren’t lying about autism, she might have been cured.
If people might learn to understand that autism is not something to be “cured” of, and also learn the best ways to teach and help a child in all of her or his unique abilities, we might be able to discuss this young girl’s death with the appropriate dignity, thoughtfulness, and respect.
Hello friends –
“Jones and Hall forecast that, by 2050, 30 percent of income will be devoted to healthcare; this is not a “problem,” but “the modern form of progress”: If you have the health services, the trained professionals, the medical technology, and all of these accessible and affordable to much of the population (I’m saying this very hypothetically), people will use and want to use, and pay to use, for those healthcare services.”
Talk about finding ways to use numbers but not tell the whole story! The flip, and unsaid side of this, is that nations that spend several times less than the US does per capita have much higher life expectancies, and better health as measured by a variety of factors.
Some of this, no doubt, is due to how we eat, and (sinister voice), what we put into our bodies. Make no mistake, we have scant little evidence to support the notion that higher spending on health care is making us healthier; and plenty of evidence that you can spend much less on healthcare and live longer. But it requires some siesmic changes from the for profit machinations of our current health care system, as well as fundamental changes in how we eat, excercise, and live.
“If you expand a 2-lane highway to 5 lanes, there will be more cars using it and, eventually, just as much traffic……..”
Where we those cars before? Not being driven due to a lack of highways? People go out and purchase cars with the express desire to drive them; why would they do so if there were no roads? As near as I can figure, no one goes out with the intent of having an autistic child because all these great schools are popping up.
“If you build autism schools, families with autistic children will come with IEPs in hand……….”
For this analogy to hold true, it requires the belief that parents only start being worried about their child’s development once services were available. Our parents must have been a pretty poor generation of parenters, they didn’t care at all about autism, or whatever it was called back then, because there were no services.
Boo!
- pD
But what if there weren’t any schools or programs for autistic kids to go to, as there were not in the past…..
I don’t know how much practical experience you have with autism, Kristina, but I can assure you that you wouldn’t be making these comments if you had mine! I started working with children with autism and other disabilities 30 years ago in a large school district. The characteristics of classic autism were rarely seen. We had one autism classroom because that’s all we needed, though I’m sure there were other unidentified kids on the spectrum. I am now an autism program specialist in an equally large district with 47 classrooms of full time autism and many more less severe children served in the mainstream. Yes, statistics can say whatever we want, but these flesh and blood kids are real and can’t be ignored or manipulated. Their numbers are growing for WHATEVER reasons and it’s NOBODYS imagination!! I see it every day of my life and see the grief in their parents’ faces. So, Kristina, perhaps there were schools and programs years ago, but not the autistic kids?
It’s great to hear from a teacher with so many years of experience. My son is 10 1/2 and we have lived in 3 states and moved 8 times in order to get him the best things that he needs. In the state where I now live, New Jersey, there are many autism programs and schools, but many were not in existence until recently, or (if they were in existence) served different populations of students, and more programs are still being created. 47 classrooms! May I ask what state you live in? Thank you again.
Terri:
You might want to read about “The Old Schoolteacher Anecdote”, here:
http://www.autismstreet.org/weblog/?p=157