Data Much

I think I've been subtly thinking this for a while but it became very concrete today that there is SO much data! How are there so many people getting jobs collecting, organizing, distributing and presenting data?! Who is using this data? Educators go CRAZY using data! Teachers in general (with some exceptions) just eat up the numbers they're fed and try to act on them. They get them from administrators and presenters and curriculum developers and they pass them along to students and parents and the community in general. Sometimes good educators do this because they care. They hear about the rise in teen suicides and statistics about the increase and the contributing factors and the ways to help these numbers come back down and they care enough to act. Some stop to ask how credible the statistics are but they are often labeled as uncaring or unhelpful, even if it might be a good idea to pause for a moment and demand logic before responding with emotion. Shouldn't we have the right to ask if the statistics we're getting are credible? Validating them doesn't mean you care less. Politicians are honestly statistic whores but all the data is SO manipulated!!! People on every side of every issue find data to support their views. How can data be helpful if EVERY viewpoint can be supported with data? I read an oldie but a goodie: How to Lie With Statistics.

Statistics are just tools for manipulation. I've been virtually attending a social workers conference and it's statistic overload. Educators have presented and mental health professionals and motivational speakers and most presenters really dive into statistics. I don't know the exact stats-ha ha-but I'm guessing by the 12th statistic you get in a day, your mind just can't keep processing and adding relevance to any more data. In the 1800s, the country involved so much farming. For the last half of the 1800s, the number of farms tripled and the number of people living on farms doubled (ah! more data!). The point is that if we strip down our modern world and look at the country's earlier history, people were working to survive. Did their job produce food? Perfect! That was useful. Did their job provide a place to live? Yep, farming gave you space to build a dwelling. That was useful! Could you teach children values and hard work and family connectedness on a farm? Yep. That was useful to both the quality of life as well as preparing offspring for the future. Did people find purpose and meaning? Um, yeah. You literally worked to live.

The work life balance meant did you work enough to live? If so, you found the balance. If not, work more or suffer and/or die. If we strip back to farming times, which were not so long ago, how did statistics fit into the picture? Overall, data would have been useless. Hearing how many children are formally educated wouldn't help cows produce more milk. It wouldn't yield more crops. It wouldn't even mean you were able to send your kids to school if they were needed on the farm to contribute to the family's survival. If you wanted to go into the field of data, you were going to starve to death. Could data be useful? Of course! Maybe people started learning ways to keep pest control effective and they could tell their other farmer friends, "Hey, we did this thing and yielded twice as many crops." That's useful data! The motivation for the data was simply to improve lives. It wasn't to persuade or to increase your political standing or to change people's mindset about life overall. It was ONLY used to improve life and it was a small amount of information. How is it that less than 200 years later more people are involved somehow in data than in farming? We still need food and animals to survive but statistics have never been LESS useful in helping us live. Yet, farmers are being increasingly driven away from the industry and data professionals are being increasingly recruited. Food consumption has NOT gone down, yet people who know how to master growing and harvesting food is dwindling...isn't it obvious that this is so clearly about control?

In chapter 9 of the book FDR's Folly, we learn that farmers supporting FDR greatly contributed to his win in 1932. He promised them they’d make more money with him in charge. Farmers overproduced for a while and Roosevelt thought limiting their supply might help boost prices. The Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) raised tariffs, unloaded excesses on the world market (known as dumping), and regulated how much of each crop farmers were allowed to plant in order to limit supply. By this method, perhaps farmers would make more money but everybody else was in worse condition. Farming affects the national food supply. By the time all of this was sorted out, crops had already been planted so the government paid cotton farmers $100 million to plow up 10 million acres of farmland. This did force up prices. More destruction occurred. 6 million baby pigs were slaughtered. (This is the most bothersome part to me and it shows a monsterous side to Franklin Roosevelt. His policies spread destruction and hardship but killing living things for no real reason is indefensible.) 12,000 acres of tobacco were plowed. California peaches were allowed to rot in the orchard. The government kept importing the very things they were destroying so it was a very confusing chain of actions. The government told the people there was a failure to produce enough food. Reduced farm acreage had a devastating effect on the poorest farmers, who were sharecroppers. Their cash income went from $735 in 1929 down to $216 in 1933. FDR didn’t care because most of them didn’t vote so he figured however he treated them wouldn’t affect his future elections. Farm foreclosures more than doubled. The supreme court declared AAA unconstitutional in January 1936. In February 1936, FDR signed the Soil Conservation and Preservation Act, which kept government control on farmers. In June 1937, FDR signed the Agricultural Marketing Agreement Act, which savaged parts of AAA. 80% of the farmers were worse off! This is a very concrete example of how getting the government involved in a “solution” just magnifies problems for everybody. It also demonstrates how the government's control with farms affects the whole nation. They will go to any lengths to be in charge at everybody's expense.

I see the irony here. I talk about how I can't believe how many statistics float around and then I support an idea with statistics. What can I say? I have grown-up in a statistic-laden society. Even though I would like to cut down on stats, I am used to using them to back up my ideas, because I've been taught to do that. I'm trying to see past that but yet habits are hard to break. We can take out the stats though and just say the basics: FDR destroyed crops, farmlands, and pigs to control food supplies and food prices in our country. He was willing to destroy anything to maintain control of the American people. When we see that this was the pattern set almost 100 years ago, we can start to see that it's still in play today. Whoever controls the food controls lives. We all know that government contols a WHOLE lot of land and the food supply related to it. Also, Bill Gates has a pretty alarming amount of land. Shouldn't more people be concerned about this? If it's NOT about control, why feverishly buy up so much land and pass so much legislation concerning farms? I'm getting a little off topic because I get passionate about sidebar topics. When people's livelihood related to life, we had far less problems. People were too tired from a hard day on the farm to sit around worrying about what percentage of Republicans did this or how many Democrats did that. They didn't switch careers willy-nilly because they weren't feeling fulfilled. They didn't have public identity crises. They didn't consume excessively. That was probably partly because they were too tired to shop more than necessary and I would imagine the value of every dollar is really driven home when your hands literally manage (through livestock and crops) every cent you can generate. When you are so involved personally in providing for yourself, it would be harder to just blow through all that hard work on a spending spree.

Ultimately, the big point is that I just can't believe how many jobs are not directly necessary to live and thrive as people. Data is one field where this seems like a clear break-off but there are many jobs and industries like this. Sometimes it just blows my mind how we got here from there in a relatively quick amount of time. Life is weird.