TWISTING FACTS AND MATH TO SUIT ONE'S OWN PURPOSE

Saturday, September 6, 2003

This sounds like a riddle: What do you get when you average the percentage of married women aged 15 to 49 using birth control with the percentage of central government expenditure spent on education?

Alas, it isn't a riddle; it's a joke. Those are two of the indicators used in a new report by an anti-growth group called Population Connection to rank ``Kid-Friendly Countries.''

I do not understand the touching, even magical faith some people put in the process of converting a bunch of wildly disparate measurements to the same scale and computing the average.

In some cases, such as students' grade-point averages, the process makes sense. Sure, English and math and history are different subjects, but combining a student's performance in different subjects yields a useful overall measure of academic achievement.

If we were to start adding in other stuff, however -- hours per day spent watching television, for example, or days absent from school -- by converting them to percentile scores and averaging them with class grades, the result would tell us less about performance, not more. Those things are related to success in school, of course, just not that way.

But people will do it. Why? Population Connection, which describes itself as ``an organization dedicated to slowing population growth,'' rhetorically asks that question of itself, and answers itself that ``history shows that as population growth slows in a country, the quality of life in that country rises,'' so population stabilization is essential to ensuring a high quality of life.

I doubt that history shows any such thing, except in the narrow circumstances of poor countries undergoing the demographic transitions of the 20th century, in which death rates fall before birth rates. And if there is a causal connection, it points the other way; as people get richer, they tend to have fewer children.

But anyway, that's their starting point, so it is to be expected that stabilization of population is one of their measures. As a result, the United States, whose population is expected to grow by 44 percent by 2050, gets a B-, while Italy, where population is expected to fall by 10 percent, gets an A-.

U.S. population growth is almost entirely the result of immigration; birth rates for the native population are almost exactly at replacement level (supposedly the goal to strive for). In Italy, though, the lifetime fertility rate for women is dropping toward 1.2 children. Unless the Italians get a lot friendlier to children, they will be extinct as a people within a few generations.

Or take one education measure: central government spending. Yes, the report does note that it does not consider funding from ``cities, districts, states, counties, provinces, and the like.'' But the U.S. gets a B- on this one, too -- along with such educational powerhouses as Guatemala and Kazakhstan -- because for historical reasons most of our national spending on education is done at local and state levels. Are we less friendly to our kids on that account? No, but having chosen a silly indicator allows Population Connection to claim, ``Developed countries spend a miniscule [sic] amount of money on education.''

Many countries, including North Korea, Uzbekistan and ``the Philippinnes,'' get higher marks than the United States for basic literacy, which they define as, ``The percentage of population aged 15 years and over whom can both read and write a short simple statement on her or his everyday life.''

I am delighted to observe that them are sensitive to gender-oppressive pronouns even if they're none too clear on the difference between subjective and objective cases.

A lot of international comparisons of this sort seem designed to make the United States look bad, but that doesn't seem to be on the agenda here. In fact, because of its high income, the United States comes out in seventh place overall, out of the 80 countries with populations of 10 million or more included in the report. But it still makes no sense to compute an average containing such incompatible statistics as per-capita income and availability of sanitation.

Population Connection is apparently fond of asking itself questions, and in a section titled ``How we did the math,'' it asks, ``Just how did we go about making sense of a staggering sea of numbers, huddled together on Excel spreadsheets? How did we grade Colombia with a B+ and the Netherlands with an A?''

The short answer is that they didn't make any sense at all.