Review of “The Misuse, Misrepresentation, and Politicization of Statistics in American Society”

Abstract

In this book, Robert E. Parker discusses four major statistics collected by the US federal government: the unemployment rate, life expectancy, crime rates, and the decennial count of populations. He argues that each are flawed and help maintain the neoliberal status quo. The Bureau of Labor Statistics has a strict definition of unemployment (the jobless need to report engaging in specific job-seeking activities to be classified as unemployed), so reliance on the official unemployment rate paints an overly rosy picture of the economy. Policy entrepreneurs point to growth in life expectancies to advocate for increasing the retirement age for Social Security and other pension plans, without acknowledging that this growth is unequal by race and class (and is also driven by reductions in infant mortality). The FBI Uniform Crime Report feeds into a popular preoccupation with “street crime” and does a poor job of enumerating cybercrimes and white-collar crime, which arguably are more costly than street crime. The decennial census undercounts children and Black and Latino residents in the United States, preventing the proper representation of those populations in the House of Representatives and also making it harder for social service agencies to target resources at populations that need them.