Trump attempts to rig the hurricane tracking results.
Trump fired the Director of the Bureau of Statistics for ‘rigging’ the data. I want to outline why rigging is next to impossible.
I have some experience in this area, since I was part of a United Nations team to set up the Bureau of Statistics in the African country of Mozambique. There, I learned several things, which I wish to share here.
- A Bureau of Statistics is a large bureaucracy. Its Director is not necessarily a statistician, but largely a bureaucrat, charged with coordinating the various branches of statistics. The Director probably doesn’t know which reports to aggregate or which to rig.
- Statistics are collected at the grass roots level, are then combined by region, by ethnic group, and by countless other criteria. They are aggregated and then re-aggregated on many levels. Any discrepancy in the final tally could be (and always is) checked against the incoming partial tallies. Any attempt to rig the final tally would almost certainly come from one of the lower levels. Each contributing branch would know immediately whether its input had been falsified.
- Therefore, the Director would have to instruct the collectors and combiners all the way down the chain to falsify data. This is quite improbable, and even if so, there would be whistle-blowers.
I conclude that the Director fired by Trump could not have single-handedly rigged the results. Any rigging would have been carried out right down the chain of inputs.
Now Trump thinks that he can hire one of his own cronies to rig the results in his favor. The good news, as explained above, is that this is well nigh impossible.
The only way to rig the results is to intimidate the lower chain of statisticians so that ALL of them are in on the plot and would never blow the whistle for fear of retribution. Is it possible that Trump can intimidate thousands of workers in the entire Bureau of Statistics to rig the data in his favor? It’s possible but not probable.
Here’s a negative thought, though, stemming from the above photo of Trump altering the path of the hurricane with his blue sharpie. For Trump, truth is whatever he dictates it to be, no matter what the Weather Service or the Bureau of Statistics says. Just as he dictates that windmills cause whales to go ‘loco’ (as he said last week), or whether gasoline costs under $2 per gallon, that becomes his truth. Anything that doesn’t fit with his version of the truth must be ‘fake news.’
Look for his personal intervention in future statistical reports. He will personally report robust and glowing economic numbers, claiming that any other numbers have been rigged. No one will question him, on risk of being fired or jailed. But like the hurricane track before his sharpie intervened, the original data exist and cannot be destroyed.