LIES, DAMN LIES, AND...

For those of you who weren't able to see my Pensioners Platform column in the April-May 2015 edition of South Devon's Torbay Times newspaper, here it is in its entirety. By the way, I'm not in the habit of saying "I told you so" but read on:-

 

Benjamin Disraeli (Image courtesy of Pixabay.com)

VICTORIAN Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881) is credited by many, including the celebrated American author Mark Twain (1835-1910), as having coined the phrase, “There are three kinds of lies: namely lies, damn lies and statistics”. Around 150 years after Disraeli first used the term, life today seems to be governed – some might say blighted – by statistics that invariably prove to be wrong. And that begs one question; can statistics ever be relied upon to be accurate?

Mark Twain (Image courtesy of Pixabay.com)

As I write this article, we’re being bombarded by statistics relating to the general election on May 7. Indeed, it will be interesting to see if any pre-election statistical prediction gets anywhere near the actual result. Will we be asking, on May 8, why the pollsters got it so wrong? If so, perhaps our next question should be, what’s the point of polls and statistical projections anyway?

Don’t worry, that’s all I’m going to say about the general election in this month’s column because I would like, instead, to share with you, a worrying example of how statistics can be used to mislead and misinform. Let me explain. On Thursday March 26, I was browsing through a copy of that day’s Daily Mail when, on page three, I came across an article titled, “Cheers to retirement!” Harmless enough you might think, but the sub-title made for rather disturbing reading, and I quote: “Typical OAPs take three holidays a year, splash-out £330 a month, go rambling, and put their feet-up with a glass of wine at 6.30pm every day.”

Excuse me? Typical OAPs? I then read deeper into the article to discover that a survey of retirees over the age of sixty had produced results that claimed 94 per cent of those polled “are enjoying their post-work life, while half said they were having more fun than ever before.”

The article then went-on to talk about, “an average disposable income of £330 per month, which allows them to go on three holidays a year, plus two weekends away, and seventeen day trips. The study also showed that most pensioners eat out three times a month, and one in ten do so more than twice a week.”

By the time I had reached that part of the Daily Mail article, I was wondering how “most” or “typical” pensioners could possibly afford that kind of lifestyle? My wife Jenny and I certainly can’t. In fact, I had to read the reference to three holidays a year several times before realising it wasn’t a misprint. Given the deeply discriminatory cost of travel insurance for the Over 60s today, we’ll be lucky to afford one holiday this year. In truth, Jenny and I have no such plans for 2015, because there are things that need sorting-out in our home, so it’s all about prioritising. In fact, the majority of our retired friends and acquaintances are in exactly the same situation. Surely, then, we are far more representative of average UK pensioners than those referred to as “typical” and “most” in the Daily Mail article?

As if I’d not already seen enough I then read a reference to, “one in twenty pensioners taking at least five weekend breaks in Britain every year”. That was when I lost patience and jumped to the end of the article to find-out who had organised the poll. It came as no surprise to discover the survey was commissioned by Senior Railcard, an organisation which runs a rail discount scheme for train companies. Senior Railcard will, of course, have an interest in how we UK pensioners travel throughout the year but, in the light of what I’d read in the article, I was sceptical. Just how reliable were the survey’s results?

My suspicions were soon justified because, on the very next line, I read that Senior Railcard had polled just 1,260 pensioners. Hang-on I thought: how on earth can a poll of a mere 1,260 out of more than ten million UK pensioners be expected to produce an accurate picture? Who were those 1,260 pensioners anyway? Were they a true cross-section of the UK pensioner community? Your guess is as good as mine.

Yet again, it seems, pollsters (statisticians) have taken the circumstances of a tiny sample of people and massaged the results to produce a distorted bigger picture. That’s what Benjamin Disraeli meant when he stated statistics are the biggest lie. And that’s why we should, perhaps, treat all polls with suspicion. In truth, some UK pensioners may be able to afford three holidays a year, but are “most” or “typical” UK pensioners in that fortunate position? I doubt it very much.

 Cheers to Retirement? (Image courtesy of Pixabay.com)