Newt Gingrich looked downright presidential in his recent prime-time address to the nation celebrating the achievements of the first 100 Days. To someone who has spent many years in university classrooms teaching quantitative skills, his use of a graph to 'prove' the failure of government spending on welfare was cause for considerable concern. The move toward the representation of increasingly complex issues with summary statistics and simple graphs has created a situation where policy 'battles' are frequently waged between experts churning out 'numbers' to prove their view.

The problem is that this move toward numerical/graphical representations of ideas is happening at a time when my student's grasp of the quantitative skills necessary to correctly interpret the numbers and graphs is decreasing. I am seeing students who can not calculate percentage change, who can not tell me a story that is related to what they are seeing in a graph, and who can not effectively critique the stories of others who use the graphs to 'prove' their views. These students are easy prey for the sophisticated number cruncher.

For a perfect example of the potential risks of graphs we can turn to Newt's speech in which he referred to a cruel welfare system, which by destroying the family, has produced the violence, brutality, child abuse, and drug addiction that we all too often see in our nation's cities. The result of trillions of dollars of welfare spending since 1970 has been a 40 percent increase in poverty among children. The "statistics" used to prove his points were presented in the graph entitled More Illegitimacy.

Upon looking at the 'proof', a graph depicting welfare spending and the percentage of children born outside of marriage, one had to wonder if Dan Quayle was his technical advisor. Newt was using the graph to lead viewers to the obvious conclusion that the two phenomena are related, that increasing moneys spent on welfare produces more illegitimacy which in turn generates an array of social ills. To drive home the point Newt mentioned in the same sentence the 40 percent increase in the poverty rate among children and the trillions of dollars spent on welfare since 1970.

It sounded good. It seemed to explain what we were seeing on TV and many of my students bought into the idea, at least at first. Upon closer inspection, however, many students realized that we have no evidence that welfare spending has been the cause of this increase in 'illegitimacy'. For example, we could just as easily have presented a graph of imports that tracked the growth in illegitimacy as 'statistical' evidence to support the proposition that it has been the loss of manufacturing jobs due to the rise in imports that has produced widespread underemployment in our cities and that this is the cause of the social ills identified by Newt.

As for the growth in poverty among children, it has occurred at the same time that we have seen a significant decrease in poverty among the elderly. Are they related? Have the children lost in a massive transfer of income from the politically powerless young to the politically powerful old? What we do know is that the improvement in the economic status of the elderly can be traced to the growth in government spending on social security. It is not government spending that produced the poverty, but rather poorly designed government programs.

Unfortunately the move to McNews tends to favor those with the simplest views of complex problem, views that are easier to capture with summary graphs. This has certainly played into the hands of the GOP which seemed able to push so many 'hot buttons' with a common simple answer to all problems, get rid of government. The reality is that government spending is neither the solution to all of society's ills nor the cause of society's successes. Government has been heavily involved in America's past economic growth just as foreign governments remain heavily involved in the economies of the emerging Asian economic powers, our competitors of the next 21st century. The time has come to seriously rethink what the government should be doing and how it should be doing it.