how the numbers lie (and don't)

A favorite blog I've been going through obsessively of late is Laura Wattenberg's baby name wizard blog. Even though we've had our last kid, and named her, the interesting thing is that this blogger goes into hard data, and comes up with the most interesting stuff.

I'll show you an article that to me is enlightening about the art of interpreting data, but promise me you'll get her superb analysis on red-state/blue-state names.

In it, she discovers that on political issues the reds and blues are mainly purple: there's near-complete agreement on things like guns and welfare (though we don't see it because the conversation is often between the extremes) — but the real difference is in names, AND, counterintuitively, the progressive names are coming from the red states and the traditional conservative names are coming from the blue states. (Blue: Patrick, Sarah / Red: Jaxxon, Kynlee) Crazy!! Then she goes into why that's the case, and it's absolutely true and absolutely a revelation.

Meanwhile, this article I wanted to show you is about the name Jacob and its current reign in popularity. In the process, she uses two different graphs that show that though the name is the most popular, the percentage of Jacobs has gone down because of the greater diversity of names (including the mind-boggling fact that in England in 1800, six names covered half the population!!!! Zow! In America in 1950 it was 75 names; now it's in the 500s. That's a wave of change!).

What it points out to me is that numbers do lie if you don't look at the complete message they're giving. Two different people could show you the two different graphs in this blog, and get you to believe two different things — more and more Jacobs! fewer and fewer Jacobs! — but the true story is deeper and more interesting than that. To her credit, she tells the whole story, but how many numbers and charts and graphs do you see everyday that seem to prove something, and what if the people who made them really looked at what the numbers were saying as carefully and insightfully as she does? My guess would be that we'd think differently about money, art, cities, health care, relationships, kids, everything we think we're informed about.