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A mathematician dies in an air crash. What are his final words? “Statistically, this shouldn’t be happening.” But, unfortunately for him, it is.
You can use numbers to “prove” all kinds of things, but in truth everyone knows that 96.749 percent of all statistics are just made up on the spot by lazy opinion columnists who can’t be bothered looking up what the real figures on such things are.
Football by the Numbers
To some, the airy world of abstract numbers is far more real than the visible world of concrete reality we can actually see all around us every day. I could go off on a tangent about Plato’s quasi-religious views on this issue here, but an easier and more contemporary example to discuss might be Ruben Amorim, the present Manchester United manager. United had a very poor start to the current new English Premier League soccer/football season, winning only one of their first four games, losing two and drawing one, besides embarrassingly exiting the League Cup knockout competition at the hands of lower-division side Grimsby Town, despite United being one of the richest clubs in the world.
“A spreadsheet once told Ms. Low that, despite being married to a man, she should really become a lesbian instead.”
One’s own naked eyes told any random soccer fan a very obvious truth: United are shit right now. Yet Amorim himself possessed a far greater vision: that of numbers. Looking at the “underlying data” of his team’s piss-poor efforts, Amorim discerned that, when it came to having shots on goal, his team was actually the No. 1 side in the entire Premier League. The fact that these shots on goal were rubbish, and his players kept on missing or having them saved, enjoying a pathetic shot conversion rate of only 5.7 percent (i.e., about one in every twenty attempts), was immaterial. Although visibly in the bottom half of the league table at the point Amorim made his claim, the stats said his team was actually top of it. So, to him, they were the best team in the country. Even though they weren’t. Strangely, his club bosses agreed and refused to sack him.
Manchester United’s women’s team isn’t doing overly well at the moment either—at least on the surface of things. If they end up in need of a new manager equally as adept at massaging failure into success via the wonders of number magic, however, then an outstanding female candidate is available: a woman called Corinne Low. Admittedly, being an Associate Professor of Business Economics and Public Policy at the Wharton Business School in Pennsylvania, Low has zero experience managing a professional soccer team. But she does have experience in taking raw numbers and using them to provide conclusions highly counterintuitive to reality—because a spreadsheet once told Ms. Low that, despite being married to a man, she should really become a lesbian instead. So, numbers being more real than reality itself, she did exactly as the spreadsheet ordered.
Calculating Women
I wasn’t aware that Microsoft Excel possessed a special onscreen widget allowing one to determine one’s own secret hidden sexuality, but apparently it does: At least that’s what Bill Gates told his wife, Melinda, when trying to explain all those constant flirtations with younger female employees.
Remember that old “Clippy” character in Microsoft Office who used to spy on what you were writing like a word perv and offer up basic AI advice functions saying things along the lines of “It looks like you’re writing a coming-out-as-queer note to your friends and family. Would you like some help?” Corinne Low does, Clippy recently having aided her to pen a new book being published this very month, called either Femonomics in the U.K. or Having It All in the U.S., perhaps because the completely invented word “Femonomics” sounds like some kind of earnest left-wing study of “period poverty.” Also like periods, the book features a large and very dribbly blurb, which goes like this:
‘Femonomics’ gives you the tools to design the life you want. It will teach you how to turn your time into money, how to work out what you value, how to invest in the right partner, how to plan your career at every stage, how to organize your family life—and ultimately how to make the world work FOR YOU.
Scientific calculators sure have come a long way since I was a kid! A laudatory quote on the back from left-wing female feminist scribe Lucy Mangan makes it sound like the data on every last numbered page will guide a lady through life more surely and safely than any mere old-fashioned women’s intuition ever could:
The more I read, the more I felt that a wise, steely friend was reaching out across the abyss, offering to escort me to the far side of chaos and settle me there…. To say this was life-changing sounds disingenuous, but I really believe that once your eyes are opened to this stuff, you can’t go back to being blinkered.
To experience that kind of sudden enlightenment, people used to just try reading the Bible. But if they did, Lucy and Corinne themselves would probably never get past the Book of Numbers.
Spreadsheets, Spread Legs
In order to sell her new self-help-by-the-numbers tome, Low has settled upon the bizarre wheeze of publicizing the fantastic fact that staring at strings of digits for so long made her dump her husband and go away and marry a black woman, with whom she then had an artificial mixed-race gay-baby. In a pair of unintentionally amusing interviews in England’s Sunday Times and America’s The Cut, headlined “The economist who followed the data and started dating women” and “This economist crunched the numbers and stopped dating men,” Corinne explained in unnecessarily intimate detail just how it was she came to discover her new favorite number was 69.
Journalists summarized Low’s philosophy as follows: “[Dating] is a marketplace, children are public goods, and love is the error term in an equation.” If children are “public goods,” why can’t you just buy and sell them? With lesbian IVF, I suppose you sort of can.
After graduating from Duke University with a degree in Using Big Numbers and Being Really Clever, Low worked for the consultants McKinsey in New York, advising clients on how to make their firms more efficient by hiring more homosexuals. Here, after “interviewing for the position of boyfriend,” she foolishly met and married an adult human male, with whom she then sired a son via the natural, time-honored means, not via a test tube or soiled turkey baster.
Unfortunately, the adult male human legally contracted to perform an act of conjugal union with her proved himself distinctly statistically suboptimal, at least when Low comprehensively tabulated the respective hours either party spent doing the housework, as elaborately cross-referenced with relative salaried earning potential, finding she was both the higher capital earner and the one who had to do more hoovering. Why, she was even left “dealing with Amazon returns,” while her husband didn’t box back up a single faulty DVD!
However, as Low discovered when cowriting a research paper, “Winning the Bread and Baking It Too,” which used data from something called the American Time Use Survey, statistics appeared to prove conclusively that, “in gay and lesbian relationships, the primary breadwinner [like her] does less housework and the non-breadwinner [or lower earner] does more.” Therefore, it would appear that Corinne essentially decided to become a lesbian because she hated doing the washing-up so much. Why didn’t she just buy a dishwasher?
Homo Economicus
But, as the fact she was once married to a man might be taken to strongly indicate, Corinne was not actually originally a lesbian at all. But this did not matter. Becoming an interracial lesbian was both “an efficient decision” and an “evidence-based” one, because “feelings are just one data point,” she explained to journalists. She swore to “try to make only rational decisions of the brain rather than irrational decisions of the heart” in future, as if it is in any sense “rational” to marry another woman when you’re not even a lesbian at all…or was she?
Retrospectively, Low figured out that, numerically speaking, she was “2.5 on the Kinsey Scale,” even when she had married her original useless lump of a penis-haver, this being a special psychological gauge designed to measure how bent a person is, 0 being John Wayne and 6 being Liberace. Since marrying another woman, though, Low says she’s “now closer to the homosexual end,” perhaps literally as well as figuratively. Something of a “heteropessimist,” Low clarifies that she is “not physically repulsed by men,” just “socially and politically repulsed.” Most men doubtless feel the same about most left-wing females like her these days.
After meeting her future wife, Sondra, however (not Sandra—that would be too white!), Corinne saw her Kinsey Scale rating shoot through the roof like stocks and shares in the midst of a bull market, once she realized that marriage to her and her vital statistics would be “a very effective strategy for facilitating investments in children’s human capital.” So was sending kids up chimneys during Victorian times; maybe the stats say we should bring that back, too?
By promoting her newfound economic lesbianism in this way, Corinne presents herself as performing a selfless feminine act, by putting public pressure on America’s indolent, housework-shy hubbies to start doing a bit more dusting and window-washing, lest their wives suddenly turn all sapphic on them and leave for the nearest woman of a different race. “I need men to be more scared,” she says. Try threatening to marry them again, then.
What other “rational” decisions about one’s ideal marriage partner could be made based upon considering the data alone, and nothing else? Well, if you don’t want your husband to walk out on you and run off with another woman, why not marry a paraplegic? Figures and common sense alike would both tend to suggest that that particular undesired outcome would be 100 percent impossible. If you’re looking purely for a short-term relationship, meanwhile, a 24-hour union with a mayfly possesses all the right metrics.
Ironically, it is actually possible to find other statistical studies out there that purport to prove, using statistics, that statistics are useless for divining whom to take on as a successful love partner, statistically speaking. So which statistics do we choose to accept? The ones that prove data can make you decide upon the correct marriage choice, or the ones that prove that data cannot?
Appropriately enough, Low has a qualification her publisher describes as being “a BS in Economics.” Don’t all other economists have one of those too? It is perfectly reasonable to be attracted to women for their figures, but not in this sense.