Innumeracy

I think I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of illiterates I have met in my lifetime, but the number of innumerates I’ve met are innumerable.

OK now I’ve had my little joke let me explain.

Innumeracy is to numbers as illiteracy is to writing. An illiterate cannot read on a functional level, an innumerate can’t do simple math.

Way back in 1988, mathematician John Allen Paulos published a book called “Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and its Consequences.” I remember how something Paulos said in an interview struck me. That people who’d be ashamed to admit they had never seen a Shakespeare play would boast about how they were unable to balance their checkbook!

Among other things, it motivated me to go back and teach myself some more math than I’d left high school with. I learned for example, how to solve quadratic equations and messed around a little with matrix algebra.

I forgot it almost immediately, but the point is that I proved to myself that I could learn it, I could relearn it if necessary, and it wasn’t because I was incapable of math that I hadn’t learned it to begin with.

This meant that years later when I took advanced statistics in grad school I approached it with confidence.

That’s why I read with shock and a good deal of resentment a column by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof.

In an article dated August 25, 2015, “Lessons from the Virginia Shooting,” Kristof made several claims involving numbers of which two leaped off the page at me.

“More Americans have died from guns in the United States since 1968 than on battlefields of all the wars in American history,” he claimed.
And further, “More Americans die in gun homicides and suicides every six months than have died in the last 25 years in every terrorist attack and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq combined.”

I am not going to argue the issue one way or the other. What I want to do is have a look at the numbers.

Gun deaths vary from year to year, there were 33,636 in 2013. Let’s round down to 30,000 per year to make the figures easier to grasp. Approximately 60 percent of all gun deaths are suicides and 3 percent accidental discharges. Suspects killed by police amount to a few hundred per year at most and can be omitted.

That’s 47 years since 1968, and 47 times 30,000 is 1.41 million.
Of which 37 percent (the percentage of gun murders) is 527,700 which is far short of the casualties on both sides of our single most devastating war, the Civil War (750,000 all causes, both sides).

In the second claim Kristof cleverly said, “gun homicides AND suicides every six months” so let’s divide the whole number by two, which nets 15,000.
Combined American casualties only in Iraq and Afghanistan amount to about 7,600. Throw in only the 3,000 killed on 9/11 and that’s 10,600.

OK, so that’s true – but how significant? Iraq and Afghanistan are noted among our wars for how few American casualties there were, given how long they’ve dragged on.

And if you counted only gun murders, that’s only 5,550, a little more than half the U.S. casualties from the war on terror.

As I said, I used a rounded number for ease of calculation and because the figures I got varied from source to source over a five-minute search. I am perfectly capable of doing the math by hand, but I used a calculator for convenience. I could have done rough estimates in my head.

The extraordinary thing about this is, it would seem that anyone familiar with basic statistics, heck basic arithmetic and a passing knowledge of American history would see the glaring errors in these claims. These claims are not just a little off, they’re wrong by orders of magnitude.

So what’s the matter, the guy can’t do basic math?

Kristof was awarded a Phi Beta Kappa at Harvard, and was a Rhodes Scholar.

I can think of two explanations, both of them worrying.

One is that a Harvard grad and Rhodes Scholar didn’t see at a glance there was something screwy about these figures (if he himself read the claims elsewhere).

The other is that he did see – and was counting on his readers not being able to see.