Taxes, Lies, and the King Kong Effect

 "Figures don't lie, but liars figure" - Some Unknown Sage

This morning I was reading about how you can lie--or at least mislead--with perfectly accurate numbers and graphics.  People commonly present accurate numbers in a way that gives a completely inaccurate impression.  The book I was reading quoted an editorial in 2003 by the Wall Street Journal which lamented the tax burden of wealthy Americans, saying, "taxpayers with incomes over $200,000 could expect on average to pay about $99,000 in taxes."

This is technically true, but entirely deceiving, because it implies that once you hit an income of $200,000, you can expect to make pay nearly half your income in taxes.  That's not true.  The figure of $99,000 is the average tax for everyone with an income of over $200,000--from a doctor who makes exactly $200,000 all the way up to Bill Gates and Warren Buffett.  These ultra-rich people pay millions in taxes, and that drives the average way up, even for people with very high incomes.  I had a professor in grad school who called this the King Kong effect.  If you took 14 normal-sized gorillas, and then King Kong, and computed the average weight of all 15 gorillas in your sample, your average would be a whole lot more than the average (normal) gorilla weighs, because King Kong is skewing the average.  In the same way, most people making around $200,000 per year (the gorillas) would pay much less than $99,000 in income taxes, and those with very highest incomes (the King Kongs) would pay far more.  And they will still be very, very rich.

But I don't want to suggest that only anti-tax crusaders play this game.  This afternoon, I saw this rather compelling video: Why Obama Now?  The video shows a figure based on the one below (I should point out that, while the video is based on a speech by President Obama, this graphic was not cited in the speech--I'm calling foul on the makers of the video and the graphic, not the speech the video is based on).

From ReadyThinkVote.com

Here we have people against tax cuts for the rich, using the same tactic used by the Wall Street Journal when arguing for those cuts.  But what is exaggerated here are tax cuts, not taxes.  A more honest chart would continue showing higher and higher incomes, instead of lumping vastly different incomes together on the right.  A chart like that would show a gradual rise in tax cuts with income, not a sudden jump at the top 1%.  Of course, if that chart were drawn to the same scale as this one, and included the highest-paid CEOs, it would be around 75 feet across.  Those folks get paid a lot.

But that's a whole other issue, and I want to be clear that this post isn't about taxes or income distribution.  It's about deception.  Statements like the Wall Street Journal's, and charts like the one above, are deceiving--whether deliberate or not, I don't know.  But whatever side of the tax issue you're on, I hope you'll agree that deception is wrong.  Truth is what matters, not ideology.  As far as I'm concerned, the whole point of having an ideology is that it reflects what I think is true and right.  If I have to resort to deception to serve my ideology, then I've lost sight of the truth.  And then I've missed the point entirely.

The Impostors of Reason

With its seven-inch wingspan, the owl butterfly is an impressive bug by any standard.  But what is really striking are its fake eyes.  It has eyespots on the underside of its wings, which mimic the eyes of an owl. Since owls prey on the birds that eat butterflies, the sight of those fake eyes is likely to give any would-be predator pause.  The butterfly is able to survive because the bird doesn't take the time to discover the deception. If the bird stopped and watched the butterfly for a while, it would realize how harmless it actually is. 

As for the owls it imitates, they have been symbols of wisdom and reason in western culture ever since the ancient Greeks associated them with Athena.  Owls actually aren't particularly wise or reasonable birds, but owls and reasoning do have one thing in common: they both have impostors.  The imposters of reason are things like anger, hard-heartedness, rudeness, and smugness.  People commonly mistake these things for rationality, when they're really nothing of the sort. They are impostors.  Like owl butterflies, they draw their power from shock and credulity. The more they're mistaken for the real thing, the more powerful they become.

Critical Thinking: What it is, and Why it's Not Just a Catchphrase

I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society, but the people themselves: and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is, not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education. 

- Thomas Jefferson

Once I had a bumper sticker that said, “Think for yourself, or you're not thinking at all.”  I admired this sentiment a great deal, which is not surprising, since I had come up with it myself. Yes, I'm a little embarrassed to say it now, but I made my own bumper sticker.  I even bought some special paper to print it on. But the ink wasn't made for life in the elements, so it faded pretty quickly, and I didn't replace it. It's not that I didn't still believe it; it's just that I thought it was incomplete. After all, what good does it do to tell people to think for themselves, when so many people are terrible at thinking? I briefl considered making a twin bumper sticker that said, “...but think carefully.”  And then I thought, “That's ridiculous!”, and peeled the first one off.

As silly as my twin bumper stickers would have been, I do think both ideas are important. We live in a country where people are allowed, and even expected (in theory), to think for themselves. That being the case, you would think we would put more effort into teaching people how to think; not what to think, but how think, and how to think clearly and effectively. This sounds like a good idea, but it's pretty vague.  What exactly would we teach?  One of the first step in clear thinking is to define terms, so let me start by doing that.  The word “thinking" covers a huge range of mental processes, including concept formation, memory, decision-making, visual thinking, creative thinking, and so on.  I'm talking about something more specific. I'm talking about the kind of careful thinking that's aimed at deciding what to believe. This kind of thinking proceeds by carefully and honestly weighing the evidence for beliefs before accepting them. I'm tempted to call this “rationality” but that term, like "thinking" is also a little ambiguous. In economics, rationality is used to mean something like “optimal decision-making or action.”   Economists imagine ideal worlds in which there is an optimum way for “rational agents” to proceed in order to “maximize their utility”. This optimal strategy could easily include lying, and need not have much to do with what's true or morally right. That's not the kind of rationality I'm talking about here. What I'm interested in is honest, deliberate thinking aimed at finding what is really true, or what is really right...or at least getting as close to those things as possible.

Critical Thinking

This kind of deliberate thinking is already taught in school, though not nearly enough. It was once known as informal logic or reasoning, but these days it's usually called critical thinking. Most people have heard that term, because it's become an educational buzzword.  That's unfortunate, because it means it's in danger of being emptied of meaning by people who repeat it--parrotlike--because they like the sound of it.  But critical thinking isn't just some new educational fad that will soon go the way of New Math. It has roots going back as far at least as far as Socrates, and still has some very important lessons to offer.