From
David Leonhardt (via DeLong):
When
I read that John Boehner, the speaker of the House, had said that the
federal government added 200,000 federal workers under President Obama, I
wondered, “Really? Where?” I’m not aware of any major federal hiring
initiatives since January 2009.
... It turns out that the 200,000 number is simply incorrect.
...
Second,
Mr. Boehner was starting his clock in December 2008, the month before
Mr. Obama became president. The Bureau of Labor Statistics conducts its
monthly survey during the week that contains the 12th day of each month,
so there is no reason to start the clock in December 2008 as opposed to
January 2009. On Jan. 12, 2009, George W. Bush was still president.
To
be more accurate there wasn't an honest reason. As Leonhardt points out
later, 11,000 jobs were added by President Bush in his last month in
office. Speaker Boehner was interval shopping, one of the most effective
and time-honored methods of lying with statistics. (Given that, by
Leonhardt's estimate, Boehner went from 57,000 actual jobs to a claim of
200,000, he used lots of effective and time-honored methods of lying
with statistics.)
Interval shopping is based on the idea that if
you can adjust the period being studied, you can make something look
much better or worse than it actually is. For example, if you take one
day off of the service record of the Titanic, it looks like a remarkably
safe form of transportation.
The method also allows you to have a
great deal of fun with denominators. You will often see people in
positions of responsibility pointing to a period of growth that started
just after a disastrous collapse and ends just before the next one. The
worse that initial collapse was, the better your growth rate looks.
Interval
shopping can be particularly effective when the groups being compared
are at different stages of life. You can, for example, use it to argue
that a product is less reliable than one that was introduced a couple of
years later, not taking into account the difference in average ages, or
you could 'prove' the mental inferiority of one immigrant group over
another by comparing test scores, not taking into account the higher
proportion of non-English-speaking first generation immigrants.
For beautiful example of egregious interval shopping, check out this excerpt from a rebuttal to Gore Vidal written by
Peter Bogdanovich in
the New York Review of Books:
Now
I’m getting in a foul mood because I’m reading this sentence again:
“The badness of so many of Orson Welles’s post-Mankiewicz films ought to
be instructive.” That’s another of those glib, sweeping statements that
play right into the reader’s lack of information and is written so as
to presume a general critical atmosphere, which in this case is not just
superficial, it is decidedly untrue, which makes it all the more
offensive and irresponsible on Gore’s part. Almost everyone with any
sense knows that Orson Welles is a great director and that Herman
Mankiewicz was a talented hack,* but for the record, here is a list of
the movies Orson Welles has directed since Citizen Kane:
The Magnificent Ambersons
The Stranger
The Lady from Shanghai
Macbeth
Othello
Mr. Arkadin (Confidential Report)
Touch of Evil
The Trial
Chimes at Midnight (Falstaff)
The Immortal Story
F for Fake
And these are all of Herman Mankiewicz’s post-Welles films:
Rise and Shine
Pride of the Yankees
Stand by for Action
Christmas Holiday
The Enchanted Cottage
The Spanish Main
A Woman’s Secret
The Pride of St. Louis
One
of the surest signs of interval shopping is the arbitrary start point,
but the key to making it work is finding an arbitrary point that doesn't
look arbitrary. Here Bogdanovich is able to make use of a sloppy
writing by Vidal. The phrase "post-Mankiewicz" implies that there is
some special significance to these films coming
after Citizen Kane.
If Vidal were comparing Welles' post-Mankiewicz films to his
pre-Mankiewicz films (which he obviously isn't), or if he were arguing
that Welles was changed by working with Mankiewicz (which seems
unlikely, though I'd need to get behind the paywall to be sure), then
the wording would have been appropriate. Here, though, we simply have
Vidal saying "post-Mankiewicz" when he means "non-Mankiewicz."
This small bit of imprecision on Vidal's part gives Bogdanovich the opportunity to use
Kane
as the start point for his interval (and Peter Bogdanovich has never
been one to pass up on opportunity). When comparing careers you would
normally look at entire careers. This interval includes all of Welles'
films and less than half of Mankiewicz's.
To make matters worse,
the intervals aren't even close to the same length for the two men.
Mankiewicz drank himself to death in 1953. Welles died in 1985 (the last
film on Bogdanovich's list was released in 1974).
More
importantly, though, this list includes all of Orson Welles' career as a
director barring some shorts and TV work, while it leaves out most of
Mankiewicz's major accomplishments as a writer and producer. Even in his
final, declining, alcohol-soaked years, Mankiewicz still managed a
good picture or two, but a list of films that he wrote or produced
before Kane would include
Dinner at Eight, Million Dollar Legs (with W.C. Fields) and three out of four of the Marx Brothers' best movies
Monkey Business, Horse Feathers and
Duck Soup.
And when you leave out
Duck Soup, that's just going too far.
*Bogdanovich's
senseless group here include Mankiewicz collaborators and admirers such
as Alexander Woollcott, Heywood Broun, Dorothy Parker, Robert E.
Sherwood, George S. Kaufman, Marc Connelly and Nunnally Johnson, but
that's a topic for another post and perhaps another blog.
Update: The conversation continues
here and
here.