Lori Falce: Truth, math and politics

Do the math.

It’s a pithy, sarcastic little phrase that says if you take all of your numbers, line them up and funnel them into the right columns, you will get the answer that you want.

There is just one problem. Sometimes that is exactly what happens.

The thing about being a journalist is that you are frequently deluged with lists and reports. There are things like jobs numbers and economic pictures and crime statistics that can be good news or bad news depending on the half-full or half-empty glasses you peer through.

Right now, you can see it with the coronavirus numbers.

The United States leads the world in the total number of cases, now topping a million, and deaths, with more than 60,000.

The numbers don’t lie. They are what they are, dispassionate and frank. The frames they are placed in, however, can highlight very different images.

We can look at them compared to our own population and it doesn’t look that bad, just 0.3% positive and 0.018% dead. Covid-19 would make the top 10 causes of death in the U.S., but not in first place. It would be in eighth — more than suicide but less than diabetes.

But numbers are also about context, so we can look at them in comparison to other things, like our place in the world.

That million positive cases? It is just shy of a third of the total positives worldwide. America posts more than a quarter of coronavirus deaths. We have about 4% of the global population.

The thing about numbers is without interpretation, they are meaningless. Being first in your class doesn’t matter if you were homeschooled alone because you’re also last in your class. Falling off the Forbes 400 list of wealthiest people in the world doesn’t mean you lost money — just that someone else made more.

What matters about the numbers is how we use them. We can take the census and make people’s lives better with tweaking of representation and resources. We can look at school test results and see that kids need more help with reading. We can count votes accurately and spend money wisely.

But all of that demands that we look at the numbers without bias. Numbers themselves aren’t political. They don’t have agendas.

And sometimes they are going to tell us things we don’t want to hear.

The coronavirus numbers are scary, and there are interpretations that you may support or dispute. They may be incomplete. They may change. They may give answers or lead to more questions — or more likely, both.

We can’t see the truth about what numbers mean unless we acknowledge the good and the bad and the opposition.

In math, you don’t just trust that you’ve found the answer because you like it. You prove it by working the problem backwards to see if you get to the same starting point. That would be a good way to handle the arguments we make after we do the math.