The Crime Report » Archive » Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics

The Crime Report » Archive » Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics: "Every time we open a newspaper, we encounter statistics—from the money lost to identity theft each year to the number of children abducted by strangers. But where do these numbers come from? According to a new book, the public very often makes judgments—and politicians allocate money—based on numbers that are of dubious origin.

In April 2006, the New York Times reported that, according to witnesses at a Congressional hearing, “the sexual exploitation of children on the Internet is a $20 billion industry that continues to expand in the United States and abroad.”

But when Wall Street Journal reporter Carl Bialik looked into where that figure came from, he found that no one —not the office of the congressman who’d issued the number in a press release, not the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, and not the FBI—could tell him where it came from."

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