Bad Statistics
Here's an article from the current issue of the New Yorker: The Baby In The Well. It argues that empathy can blind us to important facts. It's therefore ironic that it contains the following throwaway claim:Meanwhile--just to begin a very long list--almost twenty million American children go to bed hungry each night, and the federal food-stamp program is facing budget cuts of almost twenty per cent.
(Emphasis mine.)
The irony here is that the claim in bold isn't just false, it's trivially false; you can check it mentally in about ten seconds. The population of the US is only about 300 million, and children are a fraction of that. Say one person out of 4 in the US is a child, that's 75 million. The author is claiming that about one child in four in the US goes to bed hungry every night! How did this get past the fact checkers?
You can go a lot further, though, with nothing more than a search engine, about five minutes of work, and a calculator.
Typing 'us child hunger rate' into Yahoo* gives me this link: Child Hunger Facts. The site states: "16.7 million children lived in food insecure households in 2011." This sounds similar to the author's claim, but what's a 'food insecure household'?
Back to Yahoo**: 'food insecure household' shows me this site: Food Security in the US. It turns out that USDA breaks 'food insecure' into two subcategories: 'low food security' and 'very low food security'. The classification methodology is a bit involved, but here's the tl;dr version:Low food security-Households reduced the quality, variety, and desirability of their diets, but the quantity of food intake and normal eating patterns were not substantially disrupted.
Very low food security-At times during the year, eating patterns of one or more household members were disrupted and food intake reduced because the household lacked money and other resources for food.
Now we're getting somewhere. 'Low food security' means you're eating crap but you're not going hungry. 'Very low food security' means someone in the household is going hungry at some point during the year.
OK, so if we're concerned about actual hunger, we need to look at 'very low food security'. What are the numbers for that? We follow the Frequency of Food Insecurity link on the previously mentioned USDA page. Key statement:The estimated prevalence of very low food security during a single day was lower yet--between 0.8 and 1.1 percent of households.
A very rough apples to apples estimate of true daily child hunger, then, would be about 1% of all children. childstats.gov says there are 76.7 million children in the US in 2013. 1% of 76.7 million suggests that about 767,000 children going hungry each night. We shouldn't take this number too seriously, though, because there are a lot of complicating factors. Households with children, particularly many children, are disproportionately likely to be low-income, and that could drive the estimate up; on the other hand, there are a lot of government programs specifically targeted at feeding children, and most parents will go hungry before allowing their children to do so, and that could drive the estimate down.
What we can say with confidence, however, is that the real problem is about 767,000/20 million, or 4%, as bad as the New Yorker article presents it. And that's just stupid.
*: Because fuck Google, that's why.
**: And not Google.
(Emphasis mine.)
The irony here is that the claim in bold isn't just false, it's trivially false; you can check it mentally in about ten seconds. The population of the US is only about 300 million, and children are a fraction of that. Say one person out of 4 in the US is a child, that's 75 million. The author is claiming that about one child in four in the US goes to bed hungry every night! How did this get past the fact checkers?
You can go a lot further, though, with nothing more than a search engine, about five minutes of work, and a calculator.
Typing 'us child hunger rate' into Yahoo* gives me this link: Child Hunger Facts. The site states: "16.7 million children lived in food insecure households in 2011." This sounds similar to the author's claim, but what's a 'food insecure household'?
Back to Yahoo**: 'food insecure household' shows me this site: Food Security in the US. It turns out that USDA breaks 'food insecure' into two subcategories: 'low food security' and 'very low food security'. The classification methodology is a bit involved, but here's the tl;dr version:Low food security-Households reduced the quality, variety, and desirability of their diets, but the quantity of food intake and normal eating patterns were not substantially disrupted.
Very low food security-At times during the year, eating patterns of one or more household members were disrupted and food intake reduced because the household lacked money and other resources for food.
Now we're getting somewhere. 'Low food security' means you're eating crap but you're not going hungry. 'Very low food security' means someone in the household is going hungry at some point during the year.
OK, so if we're concerned about actual hunger, we need to look at 'very low food security'. What are the numbers for that? We follow the Frequency of Food Insecurity link on the previously mentioned USDA page. Key statement:The estimated prevalence of very low food security during a single day was lower yet--between 0.8 and 1.1 percent of households.
A very rough apples to apples estimate of true daily child hunger, then, would be about 1% of all children. childstats.gov says there are 76.7 million children in the US in 2013. 1% of 76.7 million suggests that about 767,000 children going hungry each night. We shouldn't take this number too seriously, though, because there are a lot of complicating factors. Households with children, particularly many children, are disproportionately likely to be low-income, and that could drive the estimate up; on the other hand, there are a lot of government programs specifically targeted at feeding children, and most parents will go hungry before allowing their children to do so, and that could drive the estimate down.
What we can say with confidence, however, is that the real problem is about 767,000/20 million, or 4%, as bad as the New Yorker article presents it. And that's just stupid.
*: Because fuck Google, that's why.
**: And not Google.