Of “Lies, damned lies, and statistics” (again)

As I previously wrote back in 2019, this is a phrase famous enough to have its own Wikipedia page. Mark Twain cited it in Chapters from My Autobiography, where he attributed it to Benjamin Disraeli. While that attribution is questionable, it certainly does not undermine the semantic substance. Mind you, statistical results are only as good as the sample space from which they are computed, which is why willful distortion of the sample space will often (if not always) lead to “damned lies.”

Photograph from the article for The Guardian showing private jets at an airport in Arizona (provided by Associated Press photographer Ross D Franklin)

That said, when we are not yet halfway through the first month of the year, Oxfam has come up with a chilling statistic. I read about it this morning in an article for The Guardian by Rosie Peters-McDonald. Her first two sentences say it all:

The world’s richest 1% have used up their fair share of carbon emissions just 10 days into 2026, analysis has found.

Meanwhile, the richest 0.1% took just three days to exhaust their annual carbon budget, according to the research by Oxfam.

Peters-McDonald then goes on to add insult to injury:

Not only are the super-rich responsible for most carbon emissions, but they also invest in the most polluting industries. A billionaire carries, on average, an investment portfolio in companies that will produce 1.9m tonnes of CO2 a year – roughly equivalent to the annual emissions of 400,000 petrol cars.

Now my guess is that many of these billionaires account on the belief that the “man on the street” neither knows nor cares about statistics. For better or worse, belief tends to be guided by “what television tells us;” and, sadly, too often television relies on that old line from the “Daily News” song:

Don’t try to confuse my mind with facts.

More often than not, the “human condition” relies on the preference of what we would like things to be, rather than what they are. My guess is that that “richest 1%” are well aware of these statistics. They probably even know better than to dismiss them as “damned lies.” Rather, they probably take comfort in the fact that the remaining 99% either just does not care or feels helpless about doing anything. I put myself in the latter category, since I know that this kind of writing is very unlikely to have much impact. Nevertheless, I feel that the least I can do is to make my opinions known “on the record!”