Rocket attacks were what triggered the Israeli military offensive against the occupied territory starting December 27, 2008.  Cease-fires were declared on January 17 and 18, first by Israel and then by Hamas, the militant group which is also the ruling political party in the Gaza Strip.  Since then, however, sporadic rocket attacks from Gaza have been met with focused bombing by Israeli forces.

The World Health Organization and most media seem to have accepted the Palestinian Ministry of Health’s estimate of at least 1,300 people killed in Gaza during the fighting.  Although independent confirmation of that number is not available, the International Committee of the Red Cross reports that the Palestine Red Crescent Society recovered 750 bodies while helping victims of the bombings.  During the same period, thirteen Israelis were killed – ten soldiers and three civilians.

I have spent the past month writing about numbers in the news.  For the most part, these numbers have had dollar signs attached to them.  Money, even more than usual, is the pre-occupation of the Western world these days.  But some numbers in a news story serve to remind you of how trivial are the day to day worries of us fortunate few.

Every single one of the deaths in Gaza and Israel is a tragedy.  Every bereaved family is unique in their grief, in their particular loss that cannot be countered or balanced by anyone else’s.  But it is in the long distance view that the policies of governments and international organizations are judged.  And it is in the contrast of the numbers that any attestations of Israeli victimhood ring hollow.

Now, one could argue that it is very well for me to talk of right and wrong and proportionality of response from the other side of the world.  I’ve never had to rush to an air raid shelter. I’ve never had friends or family killed by a suicide bomb or rocket.  If I was awakened by a huge explosion on my street, my first assumption would be a natural gas leak.

But at the same time, I’m pretty sure that most people in Israel have not experienced anything compared to the hardships of life in the besieged territory.  Per capita GDP in Gaza is approximately 1/10th of what it is in Israel.  The unemployment rate is nearly seven times higher.

Now, I want to emphasize that I have no intention of being an apologist for Hamas.  It turns my stomach to see its political leaders asking for pity for its fighters and their “simple, home-made rockets.”

But it is not difficult to understand why they have gained such support in the face of the ongoing economic and periodic military attacks on the two Palestinian territories.  And it is not surprising to see that popular support for Hamas has increased in the aftermath of the latest round of violence.

And that is what really makes Israel’s position so difficult to understand.  Forget any moral or humanitarian arguments, and let’s stick to the most pragmatic assessment. The bombing of Gaza may have killed key political leaders who had advocated for violence, and it may have destroyed important infrastructure.  But it did so in a way that only multiplied the greatest asset of any terrorist organization:  a ready supply of aggrieved people wanting retribution.

To try to destroy Hamas by bombing schools and sanctuaries is like trying to kill a Hydra by cutting off its head.  There are 1.5 million people in Gaza, and among them there are now thousands more who have lost a loved one because of Israeli military actions.  Some of those people – hopefully most of them – will react with a strengthened desire for peace and resolution.  But many will react with anger and a desire for vengeance.  Threats of further violence are not likely to calm that reaction.

In the end, it doesn’t matter too much what Prime Minister Ehud Olmert says; there is an election in Israel on February 10th, and he is not running.  But the ministers of Foreign Affairs and Defence – who have been the main government spokespeople about the conflict – are both leaders of major parties, and will be competing for the PM’s job.

A poll released this week showed that support for the two governing parties has faltered recently.  Is this a sign that citizens reject their government’s military approach to the Gaza dispute?

It does not seem so:  the political parties that are gaining ground in Israel are considered to be even more “hawkish” than the ones they would replace.

An earlier version of this post contained a number of errors.

Some of these can be attributed to a foreigner’s poor grasp of the nuances of Middle East politics. For example, I had described Hamas as the “ruling political party in Palestine”.  While it is true that Hamas won a majority in the most recent parliamentary elections in the Palestinian territories, subsequent fighting between supporters of Hamas and of the rival Fatah party ended with Hamas in control of Gaza and Fatah in control of the West Bank.

Even worse – considering the theme of this blog – I twice muddled the key numbers in the story.  Looking back, I can understand why I mis-typed “thirteen hundred” as 13,000 (oops!).  But I have no understanding of how I converted the ratio of thirteen hundred to thirteen into 10 to 1 in my original headline, instead of 100 to 1.

My only explanation is that I wrote the original post late at night, at the end of a long day, and that the quantitative analysis sections of my brain had shut down for the night.  It’s a weak excuse, but it is a reminder of how easy it is for the meaning of numerical information to be completely perverted by a misplaced comma or a missing zero.

As Barbie I’m sure would agree, math is hard.  Especially when you’ve got a 9:30 am deadline and all you want to do is go to sleep.

It’s an eye-catching number, if you’ve been doing some rate comparisons lately.  No one else is offering even 4.5% guaranteed interest on term deposits.

So what’s the catch?  Well, the catch is to get that great interest rate on the third year of the term, you have to accept merely okay interest rates (1.75% and 2.45%) in years one and two.  If you do the math, the net income works out as slightly less than a 3.55% rate over three years:

Now, 3.55% on a three-year term is a pretty good rate these days.  But it isn’t exactly headline-worthy.  A month ago, I could have got a 3.75% rate on a three-year term at the same institution.  Last year, I could have got 4% over four years if I hadn’t greedily put my money into a one-year term at 4.5%.

Now, I can’t really blame myself for not predicting the collapse of the international banking system.  Nor can I blame my bank for wanting to put eye-catching numbers on their advertisements.  It’s just a little reminder, to myself and anyone else, to get out your calculator before getting out your wallet.

You might also want to get out your calculator before you go out to vote, too.  If you’re checking out RRSP rates this month, you’ll inevitably also run into something called a TFSA: a Tax-Free Savings Account.  This was a big announcement in last year’s federal budget, back when times were good and the government wanted to encourage people to save money instead of making it easy to borrow it.

The Tax-Free Savings Account is all about eye-catching numbers that pale on closer examination.  Under this program adult Canadian residents can deposit up to $5000 per year in a designated account and not pay tax on any interest income.  Unlike an RRSP, the TFSA is aimed for shorter-term savings: for a new car, a new house, or a return to school.  Also unlike an RRSP, you don’t defer taxes on the money you contribute: neither contributions nor withdrawals affect your taxable income.

Five thousand dollars tax free.  Sounds great, doesn’t it?  But you’re not avoiding taxes on $5000 – you’re avoiding taxes on the interest on $5000.  Assuming a (currently generous) interest rate of 4%, that means you’re avoiding the taxes on $200.  If you’ve got a relatively low income (less than $38,000 per year), the tax you would have paid is 15% of this amount – i.e., $30.  That’s my first problem with the TFSA – false advertising.  It sounds great to say $5000, but it works out as at most $30 extra in your pocket.

But that’s if you’ve got a relatively low income.  In contrast, if you’re in the highest tax bracket, the tax you’re avoiding is 29% of the extra income – i.e., $58.

That’s my second complaint about the TFSA.  Any tax scheme whereby two people can do the exact same thing but the wealthier one gets nearly twice the tax break just doesn’t seem right.

And, of course, the discrepancy only gets worse when you consider that the effect is cumulative.  Next year, our two hypothetical citizens could be avoiding taxes on the interest on $10,200.  The year after (assuming a constant 4% interest rate, compounded annually), it would be $15,608.

That also assumes, of course, that the low-income person could afford to find $5000 at the beginning of each year to put aside.  More likely, such a person would only be using the account temporarily, before withdrawing the money to pay for whatever they have been saving up to buy.

But the cumulative effect doesn’t just affect an individual’s finances.  It also changes the impact on the federal treasury.  In the 2008 Budget, it was estimated that the lost tax revenue would grow from $50 million in 2009-10 to $385 million in 2012-13.  That’s good if you think the government collects too much tax, not so good when you think that the government is currently predicting a deficit from now until 2012-13.

So those are my three strikes against the TFSA:  it’s a heck of a lot of paperwork for a small amount of return, the return you do get is better the wealthier you are, and it has a progressively greater impact on the budget each year (with the progressively larger benefit going to those who can afford to put money aside without touching it).

But $30 bucks is still $30 bucks, and I do have money in the bank, saved up to pay for going back to school, which could temporarily be moved to a tax-free account.  So in addition to rate comparing on RRSPs, I’ll also be scouting out the best TFSAs this month. But I’ve been procrastinating about it, ’cause I’m uncomfortable endorsing such a problematic tax policy.

Well, that and I’ve just been hoping to find a great interest rate that isn’t too good to be true.

That’s how much money the Government of Canada spent in 2007-2008 paying off interest charges on the federal debt.  Thanks to lower interest rates and the budget surpluses of the past decade, that number is considerably reduced from the high of over $49 billion in 1995-96.  But it’s still nearly $1000 per person in this country.

Most provincial governments have accumulated debt, too.  Nationwide, these paid out over $22 billion in debt servicing charges in the same year.  That makes the total amount of tax dollars devoted to government interest payments approximately $1,660 per Canadian resident.

I point this all out because federal Finance Minister Jim Flaherty presented his budget to the House of Commons this week.  The budget was, of course, full of a dizzying array of very large numbers, much of it connected to the “Economic Action Plan” and “Extraordinary Financing Framework” which are supposed to stimulate our economy out of a recession.  Since Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff has said his party will support the plan (with the only condition being that the government submits regular status reports), expect the money to start flowing soon.

I’ll leave the detailed analysis of the budget and its objectives to those who make a profession of such things.  But one does not need an economics degree or accountant’s designation to understand the significance of the number at the bottom of the ledger sheet.

As had been revealed in the press the week before the budget, the federal government expects to spend $34 billion more than it collects in revenue this year (2009-2010).  That deficit will be piled on to the $457 billion federal debt that was outstanding at the end of last year.  An expected deficit of a similar size will add to the total next year.

Experts, analysts, and interest groups of all kinds tell me that these are extraordinary times and that lavish government spending is the best defence against a crumbling economy.  I have no grounds to dispute it.

I just want to point out that, if the Government of Canada was not paying interest on decades’ and decades’ worth of debt, it could have made all the exact same fiscal stimulus measures and the budget would very nearly be balanced this year.

A $34 billion deficit, $33 billion dollars in interest payments.  Those are numbers worth putting side-by-side.

The budget documents make a point of noting – in easy-to-understand graphical form – that Canada’s debt, at less than 30% of our annual GDP, is not as weighty as that of other G7 countries.  That may be true, but I really don’t think this is an area where we should be keeping up with the Joneses.

Maybe it’s just my personality; maybe it’s the way I was raised; maybe it’s because I’m fairly good at math; whatever the reason, in my personal finances I hate the idea of being in debt.

Yes, I have a credit card.  I broke down and got it a year ago because it was just becoming too inconvenient to do without.  But I haven’t paid a cent of interest on it yet, and don’t intend to start anytime soon.  I was shocked – stunned, really – when I found out that some of my relatives had gotten so deep into credit card debt that they are paying many hundreds of dollars a month in interest charges.

My relatives are not a unique case, of course.  Personal debt levels are a huge problem in Canada and the rest of the industrialized world.  But I still cannot quite fathom how they got themselves into a situation where they are paying as much in interest as my sister pays in rent on her studio apartment in downtown Toronto.  Why would anyone want to give that much money to huge corporations, without even getting anything tangible in return?

My perspective is the same when it comes to government debt.  The $33 billion in annual interest payments may not be unmanageable compared to the federal government’s $200 billion-plus annual program spending, but neither is it insignificant.  And that figure is now expected to rise to nearly $40 billion by 2013-14.

Why would we want to be giving that money away to … well, to whomever?  I don’t even know who owns all the government bonds that make up our debt.  But I’m pretty sure that, whoever they are, they’re not short of cash.

Think of all the things that could be done with that money if it wasn’t paying off interest.  We could create universal, affordable childcare for all Canadian parents (the federal-provincial plan negotiated by the Martin government would have cost $5 billion a year).  We could live up to our commitments for foreign aid to help the neediest people in the world (0.7% of our GDP would be approximately $10 billion).  Or, we could just put that $1000 a year back into the pockets of individual Canadians, and let them stimulate the economy in the way they best know how.

But of course, we can’t do that, because we’ve got this monster of debt that has to be fed, year in, year out, regardless of all other budgetary plans and priorities.  We can’t do that, because a generation ago, politicians and economists decided it made sense to spend money they hadn’t got, and let the vibrant economy of the future pay it back.

At the time, inflation was rampant, and it made more sense to spend money than to save it.  Or so they tell me.  And, just as my relatives never intended to end up owing tens of thousands of dollars on credit cards, no one intended to have the Canadian government in 2008-09 devoting 1/8th of its budget to interest payments.

But regardless of intentions, the final effect is that, a quarter-century later, the federal government still owes more than $13,000 on behalf of each and every Canadian.  And now that we’re in tough economic times once again, we don’t have the flexibility to deal with it properly, because we’ve got that hungry monster breathing down our necks.  And what a strange monster it is, too – growing bigger if it doesn’t get fed!

So that’s why politicians have been busy assuring us, these past few weeks, that any budgetary deficits will – of course – only be temporary.  There will be no returns to the “structural deficits” of the past, they promise.

It’s something to remember in the coming years, particularly in future election campaigns, particularly as the economy starts to pick up.  All the big spending and big tax breaks handed out this year are likely to be addictive.  No one will like it when tax breaks are rescinded and spending programs phased out.  But all that spending is just money borrowed from the future.  And as soon as possible, we need to start paying that money back.  We need to start paying that money back, so that one day we can stop paying billions in interest.

Because I hate being in debt.

For residents of the city who have been walking, car-pooling, and cabbing to get around, there are probably only two numbers that matter on a daily basis:  the price of gas and the windchill factor.  But if you feel like looking into how numbers can be used and abused for political purposes, statements from the two sides of the debate are a good place to start.

The spin game – between the Amalgamated Transportation Union (ATU), Local 279 on the one hand and the City of Ottawa and OC Transpo management on the other – has got so bad that even when the two sides agree on a number, they can make it sound like they don’t.

On January 8, 2009, members of the union voted on the city’s latest offer, as they’d been ordered to do by the federal Minister of Labour.  A little after midnight, representatives from both sides emerged from counting to announce that the strike was still on.  This is how a CBC News online story described the results:

While both the city and union agreed on the outcome of the vote, the two sides were at odds over the numbers.

The union said 75 per cent of the 2,033 members who cast ballots rejected the offer, which included a 7.25 per cent wage increase over three years and a $2,500 productivity bonus.

The city said that 64.4 per cent of the 2,353 transit drivers, dispatchers and maintenance staff eligible to cast ballots turned the offer down.

Huh?  They were both observing the same vote, how could the results be different?

Well, of course, if you get out your calculator, you’ll find that the two sets of numbers aren’t really “at odds” – they’re just spun in different directions.  The percent depends on whether you consider all the people who could have voted, or only those who did.  After catching up on their sleep, somebody at the CBC dug a little deeper, and the next day posted these complete numbers:

‘Yes’ ballots	517
‘No’ ballots	1,516
Spoiled ballots	12
Total ballots cast	2,033
Total eligible voters	2,353

The unbiased numbers were from the Canada Industrial Relations Board, which had been supervising the vote.

It’s a little harder to find unbiased numbers when it comes to the issues at dispute in the strike.

A key point of contention in contract negotiations has been a city proposal to change the way bus drivers are assigned to their schedules.  Since 1999, bus drivers have been able to choose their own shifts; drivers with the highest seniority (most years on the job) get first pick.

Because demand for bus service is greater during morning and afternoon rush hours than in the middle of the day, many drivers work split shifts with mid-day breaks.  Currently, drivers pick their morning and afternoon shifts separately.  This causes two different problems for the city.  Some senior drivers pick shift combinations that regularly result in overtime pay, adding costs to the city as well as concerns about whether these drivers are getting enough sleep.  At the same time, low-seniority drivers often end up with a mix of early morning and late evening shifts, causing both safety concerns and also added costs if the shifts available don’t meet the minimum hours of work guaranteed in the drivers’ contracts.  The city wants the power to optimize combinations of shifts and have the drivers pick from the complete schedules.

Early on in the strike, the general manager of OC Transpo was quoted as saying the new system would save $3.4 million per year, and eliminate the need to buy 20 new buses.  The union argues that they could save that and more by investing more in in-house maintenance work.  More recent city documents have focused on safety risks from drivers not getting enough sleep between evening and morning shifts rather than monetary savings.

A cynic (like me) might point out one reason management stopped touting the $3.4 million per year projected savings from the scheduling change:  it looked a little disproportionate compared to the $3 million per week they said they would save because of the strike itself!

That second number is also questionable.  The transit company may be saving fuel and wages, but the total impact on the city budget is variable.  On the one hand, they are pulling in more money in parking fares and fines, on the other hand, they’re spending more in enforcement.  Furthermore, the city has spent at least $200,000 on taxi chits and other support for low-income residents, although that sum seems almost insignificant compared to the other numbers being thrown around.  In addition, the city will have to spend unspecified amounts of money to draw back transit riders once the strike is settled.  And there will be rebates of fares paid for useless bus passes and maybe even of property taxes.

As a bit of history, it should be noted that when bus drivers in Greater Vancouver went on strike for four months in 2001, initial calculations predicted that Translink (the regional transportation agency) would save $17 million.  Instead, it ended up deeper in deficit.

Regardless of how sketchy the numbers are, any talk of city savings from the strike isn’t likely to gain council and the mayor much support from residents paying for the lack of transit in their own time and money.  A group of local economic analysts have estimated that the cost of the strike on the Ottawa economy has been approximately $8 million per day.

None of these numbers can be verified or refuted the way a count of ballots can be.  Regardless of the outcome of the strike, it will be months before its impact on the city budget can be fully assessed.  It will be years before the effect of any contract changes – nevermind changes in Ottawans’ transportation choices – can be factored in.

In the meantime, there is one number residents of Ottawa don’t want to hear:  128 days.

That’s how long the 2001 Vancouver bus strike lasted before drivers were sent back to work by provincial legislation.

Isn’t it strange that two respected journalistic organizations would report such different, yet so very specific, figures?  Isn’t it even stranger that two U.K. papers, reporting on a U.K. news event, would use Canadian dollar figures?

Of course, the Times did not predict a “$187-billion-Cdn” bailout; they predicted a £100 billion bailout.  And the Telegraph did not mention a limit of “$368 billion Cdn”; they said the cost could get as high as £200 billion.

Admitably, the entire CBC story – a collection of rumours from other publications – looks like it was put together without much thought.  But it got me thinking about how media report the numbers in the all-to-frequent stories of government interventions in faltering economies.

There are a couple of issues raised by the story.  The most obvious is how to report on foreign currencies your readership may not be familiar with.  More importantly (and completely overlooked in this little news brief), is how to convey the impact and significance of the numbers being thrown around.

On the issue of reporting currencies, I’m going to risk offending the style police and argue that there is a preferred way to do it:  state the original figure, then follow it with the Canadian conversion in brackets.  That way you’ve got the accuracy of the original and the convenience of the conversion.  If you’re writing a two-inch news brief for a printed paper, there is some argument for avoiding duplication to save space, but online there is no such excuse.  And even if space was limited, I’d argue for keeping the original and dropping the conversion.

Both Canwest’s Canada.com news site, in a story from Reuters, and the Globe and Mail, in an Associated Press story, use the dual format.  However, both also use U.S. dollars as the converted value – the G&M story clearly identifying it as such, Canada.com leaving you to wonder what type of dollars they are talking about.

This is more than just a style issue.  If you tell me the U.K. government is going to spend 187 billion dollars, it reads as if you know that number to the nearest billion.  If you then say that someone else says the amount is $368 billion, that looks like a significant discrepancy.

If, instead, you say that media reports of the size of the bailout range from £100 billion to £200 billion, I immediately recognize that no one knows for sure the exact value, they just know it’s going to be big.

Furthermore, exchange rates change daily.  The Bank of Canada rate on Friday was $1.8481 Cdn per pound sterling, but the CBC seem to have used $1.87 for their first conversion and $1.84 for the second number.  Minor difference?  Maybe, but it changes the numbers in this story by three or six billion dollars.

So what do you do when you’re dealing with numbers for which billions of dollars are just rounding errors?  What do those numbers actually mean?

One thing I’ve found useful when trying to keep track of the various billion-dollar, billion-pound, billion-euro bailouts is to convert them into per capita values.  For the U.K., then, it helps to know that the population is close to 61 million.  That makes the proposed bailout in the range of 1,500 to 3,000 pounds per person (approximately 2,800 to 5,600 Canadian dollars per person).

That’s a pretty stunning amount of money.  When you include the information that the U.K. Treasury’s total tax receipts for 2007-2008 amounted to just under £550 billion (see p.21 of their end of year report), it brings it into even clearer focus.  The predicted expenditure would be one fifth (or more) of annual revenues.  And of course, to get the full picture you have to add in the £37 billion the Treasury invested in U.K. banks just a few months ago.

If the actual financial package to be announced tomorrow matches the predictions, the total U.K. government intervention will match that of the U.S. in relative measures.  The $700 billion US package approved by Congress in October 2008 works out as around $2,300 US (approx. $2,850 Cdn) per person.  That’s about one quarter of the U.S. federal government’s annual revenues ($2.66 trillion US for the fiscal year ending in September 2008, see p.36 in the annual financial statements).

No matter how you write it, it’s a lot of money.

The stock, which started falling with the collapse of the technology “bubble” in 2000 and 2001, has since been knocked farther and farther down by revelations of mismanagement and fraud. Wednesday’s additional drop came on news that the company had sought protection from creditors in Canada, the U.S. and the U.K.

One of the shares which closed at 12¢ on Wednesday and Thursday would have been worth $675 eight years earlier, at close of trading on January 14, 2000. The highest price paid was $1245.00 on July 26, 2000.

Of course, individual shares never traded for such huge figures. Repeated stock splits during the period when the stock was rising rapidly were reversed by a share consolidation in December 2006 which transformed ten old shares into one current share. Like an inflation-battered country redefining its currency to avoid printing extra zeros on every bill, the fancy accounting only emphasizes how much the value has dropped.

Business analysts are suggesting that this is the end for the once venerable telecom giant. The only way for Nortel to pay its debts, they say, is for the company to carve itself into pieces and sell them off to its competitors.

But the Canadian federal government, in contrast, seems optimistic that this is just a temporary “restructuring”. It has offered up a $30 million loan from the Crown corporation Export Development Canada (EDC). And that’s the number that got my attention in all this mess. What’s the point?

It’s not like Nortel is absolutely desperate for cash to cover this week’s payroll. The company claims to have cash reserves of over $2 billion. The bankruptcy protection actions on Wednesday were made to avoid having to pay a $107 million interest payment on an outstanding loan. A $30 million loan from EDC is nowhere near big enough to fix the problem. It is, however, plenty big enough to irritate the hard-working Canadian tax-payer worried about job losses in tough economic times.

Are federal cabinet ministers thinking about job losses, too? After all, they had to swallow some unpleasant numbers just last week when Statistics Canada released the latest national employment figures.

Nortel Networks is nowhere near the behemoth it was ten years ago, when it’s Ottawa-area research campus was the second largest employer in the region, after the federal government itself. (Many of my high school classmates had part time jobs doing office work or even coding for the company.) Nonetheless, the company still employs approximately six thousand Canadians, and losing those jobs would be a hard blow to an already stumbling economy. Maybe the loan is just a little “thinking of you” gift to Nortel execs in their time of troubles, to remind them who their true friends are.

That’s a possible explanation, but history would dispute it’s logic. The last few times Nortel has announced a corporate restructuring, they have cut Canadian jobs, sometimes by shipping positions to lower-cost labour markets such as Mexico and Turkey. That’s not exactly the type of exports that EDC is supposed to be encouraging.

Although government-owned, Export Development Canada is supposed to operate on commercial principles, paying for its operations through fees and interest. Although it does sometimes offer government-backed loans for high-risk ventures through a separate funding mechanism, there has been no suggestion of using that for Nortel.

Instead, the promised money is from EDC’s “existing bonding facility,” in the words of Industry Minister Tony Clement. EDC offers a number of different “bonding solutions”, and it’s not clear which is being offered to Nortel. All would involve some form of guarantee on a loan or contract between Nortel and a bank or supplier.

This makes a bit more sense, in that it makes the EDC offer more about protecting other companies rather than giving money directly to Nortel. However, with the company in bankruptcy protection, the chances that EDC will have to pay out the guarantee seem high.

And at a time when $30 million would buy up a majority of the company’s nearly half-a-billion stock shares in circulation, I’m still trying to figure out the math that would make this all add up.

“There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”
– commonly attributed to Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1886), Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

“People lie. Numbers don’t.”
– advertisement for the television show NUMB3RS (2005-ish)

In the Amazonian jungle, the Parahã people live in a world without numbers, with no need or ability to quantify the material of their lives.

In the concrete jungles of a North American metropolis, the same would be unthinkable, incomprehensible.

We use numbers to understand the world, and to try to control it.  We measure the temperature, the wind and the rain, and add it all up to tell us what coat to wear.  We count the days on a calendar, and calculate how long until spring.  We compare the local temperature with that of some sunny vacation destination, and wonder whether the numbers in our bank account are large enough to allow for a mid-winter getaway.

We communicate with each other in numbers, and judge the fairness of our interactions by them.  A shopkeeper and a customer may not speak the same language, but through gestures and symbols they can quantify the value of an item, and the customer would feel cheated if the next person in line was offered the same good at a lower price.

Most of all, we trust in numbers.  We rely on them to precisely, and concisely, convey information.  Numbers are absolute, they are objective. A temperature of 10°C is the same whether it’s a mild day in Iqaluit or a chilly one in Iraq. 

But of course, the residents of those two places would not react the same way to the same temperature.  Even in a single place, the reaction to the temperature would vary with the season.  The temperature might be the same to a physicist, but not to a climatologist, who would be more interested in how it relates to seasonal averages.

Numbers are meaningless without context.  You can measure something to the millionth decimal place, but the digits are irrelevant unless you can clearly specify what you are measuring and how you are measuring it.  And that’s where the two quotes at the top of this page come in.

Quotes are rather suspect without context, too.  The original setting (and source) for the quip about “lies, damned lies, and statistics” appears to have been lost to history.  Peter M. Lee at the University of York (U.K.) has compiled numerous uses of the quote going back to the 1890s without tracking down its origin.  Regardless, the fact that the phrase is oft repeated is a reminder of many people’s distrust of, and perhaps disdain for, complicated figures.

Lee suggests that the quote may be an adaptation of a jurist’s complaint about “liars, damned liars, and expert witnesses,” and really, it is the “expert” nature of statistics that makes them suspect.  If one doesn’t fully understand how a piece of information is derived, how can one know if one is being deceived?  We don’t all have the knowledge and experience to be like City of Ottawa engineer Ted Cooper, who nearly lost his job due to his insistence that the figures produced by a property developer’s complex computer models just did not make sense – only to be congratulated by local politicians last year, when further data backed up his conclusions.

And yet, there is still that trust in the precise, objective nature of numbers.  There is still that belief that “people lie, numbers don’t.”  It makes a snappy tag-line for a TV show, but what does it mean? One might as easily say “people lie, words don’t.”  Again, it’s all about the context.

Numbers make the news on a regular basis, whether it’s the up-and-down price of gasoline, the up-and-down fortunes of your favourite hockey team, or the latest economic and employment statistics.  Context? Sometimes. 

That’s what The Numbers Game is all about: looking at the numbers that make the news, and seeing if they add up.  Seeing if the conclusions match the data, or if there are more interesting interpretations than the ones being emphasized.

Because, those of us who don’t live in the Amazon need to know which numbers we can trust, and which, well, you know that old saying about the three kinds of lies…