Policy Argument and Policy Data

Assembling evidence

• A quick guide
• Scholarly literature and statistics
• Bureaucracy and public policy

Demographics

• Sources
• Counting the undocumented
• 1940 Census:  actual raw data

Manipulation and Misunderstanding

• Lying with graphs
• Lying with statistics

From Mother Jones:

The study, by Yale law professor Dan Kahan and his colleagues, has an ingenious design. At the outset, 1,111 study participants were asked about their political views and also asked a series of questions designed to gauge their "numeracy," that is, their mathematical reasoning ability. Participants were then asked to solve a fairly difficult problem that involved interpreting the results of a (fake) scientific study. But here was the trick: While the fake study data that they were supposed to assess remained the same, sometimes the study was described as measuring the effectiveness of a "new cream for treating skin rashes." But in other cases, the study was described as involving the effectiveness of "a law banning private citizens from carrying concealed handguns in public."

The result? Survey respondents performed wildly differently on what was in essence the same basic problem, simply depending upon whether they had been told that it involved guns or whether they had been told that it involved a new skin cream. What's more, it turns out that highly numerate liberals and conservatives were even more—not less—susceptible to letting politics skew their reasoning than were those with less mathematical ability.

Mythical numbers:

• More on heroin addicts
• Recovery.gov
• Super Bowl & domestic violence
• Other myths

A puzzle whose answer I do not know:

1.  Assume an autism prevalence of one in 150.

2.  Find historical population data here.

3.  Find data on mental hospitals and institutions for the "retarded" here:  United States Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1975), 84-85. Online: http://www2.census.gov/prod2/statcomp/documents/CT1970p1-03.pdf  (pp. 84-85) 

4.  Compare the estimated Number of people with autism and total population of mental hospital and institutions for the "retarded."

            Total Population           Population/150 Total in Institutions

1940    132,164,569                  881,097                     578,222

1950    151,325,798                1,008,839                    705,375

1960    179,323,175                1,195,488                    769,682

1970    203,302,031                1,355,347                    580,956