When Numbers Lie: A Recipe for Misunderstanding
My wife said she wanted a rather complex soup for dinner the other night so I got to drive to several different stores to buy the meat, the produce, the beer, and some of the harder to find things. Which meant I got to listen to a lot of news. And then I made soup for several hours.
And, good lord, was the news annoying. Not because of the content, I'm rarely bothered by that one way or the other, but by how it was being reported…and the thought of how it was being received by people.
I'm moving away from my interpersonal communication thing here and going back to my analytic thing. Like children, I love them equally, though sometimes I don't pay the same amount of attention to them. And to be clear, again, I was an FBI agent for 22 years and I don't do politics. I do investigation and analysis.
Below are examples of how sometimes we simply misunderstand what the numbers are telling us because we don’t have the full context, how sometimes we have the context but we just ignore it in favor of what sounds good, and how at times data can be selectively used to bolster an agenda even if the actual data does not support the narrative.
The Job Growth Illusion: When 64,000 Is Actually Bad News
So, the first story I listened to was about how the economy had produced 64,000 new jobs in December. That sounds good, right? In one month, we've put an entire small town to work.
Except that during a normal economy, standard job growth is about 150,000 to 200,000 per month. So the 64,000 sounds good out of that context, but reality is we're about 60% below normal. Not so good.
And then it gets more complicated if you dive into it. Approximately 4 million people turn 18 in the U.S. each year, and thus technically enter the workforce. Meanwhile, we're in the peak of Baby Boomer retirements—roughly 3 million people per year are leaving the workforce. So we actually need job creation to keep pace with a growing workforce, and 64,000 doesn't cut it, i.e. we are not going to be able to employ 4 million new people even if 3 million leave the workforce.
The other question is where are these jobs being created? Based on recent month statistics, the highest growth rate is in home health care and construction. Valid jobs, but jobs that pay between $34,000 and $64,000 a year while the median household income in the U.S. is around $84,000. And those home health aide jobs? They have 40-60% turnover in the first year, with many workers qualifying for public assistance despite working full-time. So we are not creating the high-end jobs we might envision with all of the explosion around AI.
The point is, a gross number, 64,000 new jobs, means nothing out of context. And in context, it does not look that good.
The Inflation Shell Game: When Prices Keep Rising While "Falling"
Ironically, because I was going to the grocery store, the next story was about how consumer prices were dropping and specifically grocery prices. The story was that inflation was below expectation and thus prices were dropping at the grocery store. Step back and think about that for a minute. Inflation means prices are increasing.
And in general, that is okay when kept in check. Around 2 percent inflation means the economy is growing. But inflation is still inflation and whether it is at 2.6 percent or 3.1%, prices are still increasing.
So inflation over the past year has decreased from 3.1% to 2.6%, but that still means over the past year prices have increased 2.6%. The rate of increase has decreased, but the actual amount has still increased.
But that is not reported and we just hear prices are decreasing…which is objectively not true, they are just increasing at a slower rate. And coffee (climate change) and eggs (bird flu) have still become insanely expensive.
The Tariff Mirage: When Billions Are Actually Pennies
Next, there were tariff stories and how much revenue the tariffs have brought in. On the surface great, given that we have a $1.78 trillion budget deficit in 2025. Let's look quickly at the issues here.
First, who pays these tariffs. This should come as no surprise to anyone at this point, but it is us. It is not any foreign country. When you see 'China pays 25% tariff,' that means the U.S. company importing from China writes a check to the U.S. Treasury, then decides whether to eat the cost or raise your prices. Problem one in the reporting and our understanding.
Problem two is that right now tariff revenue is a drop in the bucket compared to our federal budget…and the deficit. We are bringing in at most $100 billion in tariff revenue (remember who is paying that, so there is an offset to be taken into account) while overall federal revenue is about $4.5 trillion.
This means that tariffs contribute, at the current and probably unsustainable high rate, only 2.2% of the Federal income.
To put this into perspective: even if you doubled tariff revenue to $200 billion (which would require economically devastating tariff rates), you'd still only be at 4.4% of federal revenue.
The news presents that we are bringing in massive amounts and we will soon be getting checks in the mail, but the reality is, what we are bringing in is a sliver of the Federal budget.
The Crime Wave That Isn't: When Fear Trounces Facts
And then there's crime and there were stories on crime and the National Guard. If you listen to current political rhetoric or watch the news, you'd think we're living through the most violent period in American history. The President is deploying National Guard units to cities across the country to combat what's being portrayed as an out-of-control crime epidemic.
Except the data tells a completely different story. According to the FBI's 2024 crime statistics, the violent crime rate is 359.1 per 100,000 residents—the lowest it's been in over 50 years. Murder is down 14.9% from the previous year. We're essentially back to early 1970s crime levels.
To put this in perspective: the violent crime rate peaked in 1991 at 758.2 per 100,000. We're now at less than half that peak. The murder rate hit 10.2 per 100,000 in 1980 and 9.8 in 1991. Today it's around 5 per 100,000. We are objectively living in one of the safest periods in modern American history.
So what's driving the perception that crime is spiraling out of control? This is where the analytical failures become really clear.
First, there's the selective timeframe problem. Yes, there was a spike in 2020-2021—murder jumped nearly 30% in 2020, one of the largest one-year increases on record. But that spike happened during the previous administration, and we've already recovered and continued dropping. If you cherry-pick your comparison point to that pandemic spike, you can make it look like we're still in crisis. But compare to any other period in the past 50 years and we're at historic lows.
Second, there's the absolute numbers versus rates problem. New York City had 377 murders in 2024, which sounds terrifying as a raw number. But that translates to a rate of 4.1 per 100,000—compared to 31 per 100,000 in 1990. The city is safer than it's been in decades, but the absolute number still sounds scary if you don't know the context.
And here's where it gets really interesting: despite these dramatic declines, Gallup polls consistently show that over 60% of Americans believe crime is up compared to the previous year. This perception gap has persisted for over a decade, even as crime has fallen year after year. The Brennan Center found that in New York, there were 129 newspaper headlines mentioning 'murder' in 1990 when the murder rate was 31 per 100,000, versus 135 headlines in 2013 when the rate was 4 per 100,000. Media coverage didn't decline with actual crime—if anything, it increased.
So we end up with a situation where policy decisions—deploying National Guard troops, implementing aggressive policing strategies, allocating billions in law enforcement funding—are being made based on a perception of a crime crisis that simply doesn't exist in the data.
Why This Matters: The Cost of Lazy Analysis
In my FBI career, analytical sloppiness had consequences. Latching on to the first or last bit of information you received and treating it as “the key” was always a recipe for disaster. It was always about how the information worked together and uncovering the context we didn’t yet have so all of it made sense. But too often we fail to find the context and just go with what we think a piece or two of information is telling us.
And we make the same mistakes in our own lives. We listen to the news, we hear something, and we don’t dig into the context or combine it sufficiently with other data, we just take it for what we think it is…and from that we form beliefs. And these ill-formed beliefs shape how millions of people vote, what policies they support, and ultimately, economic and social decisions that affect everyone's wellbeing.
When people hear '64,000 new jobs' and think the economy is healthy, they support policies that might actually be undermining long-term economic growth. When they hear “inflation is down” and think prices are falling, they don't understand why their grocery bills keep climbing – they feel gaslit by their own experience, which erodes trust in all economic reporting and institutions. When they hear “tariffs brought in billions” and think it's meaningful revenue, they support economically destructive trade policies that will cost them far more than any tariff revenue could offset. When they hear crime is out of control and believe we're living in the most dangerous time in history, they support policies that divert resources from actual problems to fight a phantom crisis.
The base problem is that we are confusing rates of change with absolute values (“slower price increases” becomes “falling prices”). We're ignoring baselines and context (64,000 jobs sounds good until you know normal is 150,000-200,000; today's crime rate sounds scary until you know the 1991 peak was double). We're failing to understand scale ($100 billion sounds massive until you realize it's 2% of a $4.5 trillion budget). We're cherry-picking timeframes to create false narratives (comparing crime to the 2020 spike while ignoring 50 years of data).
These aren't random mistakes. We're systematically terrible at this specific type of reasoning. It’s naïve to believe that we can demand better reporting. We can’t. What we can do is demand more of ourselves. Recognize that the second you read or hear something, if you do not question it, it starts to reshape your belief system. Thus, question…question…question. And dig. Make an effort to understand the broader context of what has just been reported and what is the reality.
Without that context, we're not being informed—we're being misled by technically accurate facts that create fundamentally false impressions. And imagine how this compounds over time with the barrage of data we are hit with every day on all forms of media with which we interact, further distorting rather than clarifying what is happening around us.
The Bottom Line: Context Is Everything
My point here is that we are told lots of things about subjects that are complex and it is easy to accept what we are told at face value. Take a step back and analyze. Ask, 'what does this number mean?' 'What else might be contributing to that?' 'How does this interact with X, Y or Z?' 'What's the historical context?' 'What's the baseline for comparison?'
Twenty minutes in my car and I was faced with four examples of not technically inaccurate reporting but nevertheless reporting that when accepted at face value would leave me with a wholly inaccurate understanding of the world in which we live. Add in the crime narrative that dominates our current political discourse, and the pattern becomes impossible to ignore.
We deserve better. And more importantly, the decisions we make based on this information – that directly affect our lives, our well-being, and our futures – demand better.
