73% of all statistics are made up on the spot

I don't teach statistics but I do teach research, and one of the things I press on my students is not to accept statistics at face value but to look at the questions asked and of whom they're asked. so when I heard about this report this morning, I had to look it up. among religious liberals we talk about budgets and taxes being moral statements about our priorities, and as with god and the devil, the point is in the details. I don't know much about who was asked beyond a generic picture I take away from the breakdown of respondents: married white women between 50 and 64 who graduated college and earn less than 70K. but 80% of us distrust the government? we must be on the cusp of another civil war! or at least another massive uprising on the order of the 1968 chicago democratic convention.

however, a quick look at the actual report shows that it's another case of god using statistics to teach americans how to read. here's the pertinent question from the pew questionaire and its findings (question 21). what you see is that reports are conflating the responses to both "only sometimes" and "never," which aren't really saying the same thing; but if we grant that they're close enough to be taken together, while the numbers in 2010 are higher than ever, it's not that those numbers have suddenly taken wings. they conform to a trend upward that made the jump in 1974 from 45 to 63%.

just as important is that responses never happen in a vacuum. what happened in the nation between 1972 and 1974? the 2010 poll results were gathered from march 11 to the 21st: what was happening at that time? things have settled down since the ugliness surrounding passage of the healthcare bill: would the question receive similar responses today? now that a majority of taxpayers have discovered that their taxes actually decreased as a result of the obama administration's legislation, would their responses reflect a sudden uptick in their trust of government? perhaps most importantly, if I'm answering the question "how much trust do you place in the government?" I'm thinking of the events just in my lifetime that have shown it to be least trustworthy: the inability to protect jfk, the gulf of tonkin incident, the vietnam war, the my lai coverup, the pentagon papers, spiro agnew, watergate, abscam, bert lance, the keating 5, irancontra, oliver north, wedtech, not funding aids research, the clarence thomas affair, dan rostenkowski, newt gingrich, bill clinton lying about a blowjob, the starr report, enron, ignoring warnings leading to september 11th, the war on iraq, the downing street memo, abu ghraib, lawyergate, the outing of valerie plame. THOSE events would color my view of the us government's likelihood of doing the "right thing" more than anything done in the past year, let alone a single week.