They are the three kinds of lies – that is, lies, damned lies, and statistics. I don’t know who actually said it (Mark Twain claimed it was British PM Benjamine Disraeli, but evidence points to Sir Charles Wentworth), but my dad used to put it another way: Figures don’t lie, but liars figure. You see, it’s fairly easy to take some raw data, analyze it, and get it to support your hypothesis. And that brings us to the latest work of the grandiose-sounding group, The Institute for Economics and Peace (who could be against that, huh?), and their fresh off the printing presses “U.S. Peace Index.”
