I could delete this blog OR I can leave it in and talk about not jumping to unwarranted conclusions even if such conclusions support a preferred narrative. Please stay with me until the end. Here’s how my original blog started:

I get a daily 70-word blog from an economist. Most of what he writes I don’t care anything about, but it’s only 70 words… Anyway, on Fridays he writes something of random interest. Here’s how the one from Friday, October 20, 2023 starts:

The Friday File: During the decade ending 2019, 20,091,410 boys were born and 19,184,303 girls were born in the U.S. [He goes on to talk about popular names.] – Elliott Eisenberg

Forget the names. Did you see the numbers?

• Boys: 20,091,410
• Girls: 19,184,303
• Total: 39,275,713

If the probability of a girl is 0.5, we should have had 19,637,856 girls, but we had only 19,184,303 girls, a shortage of over 450,000 girls. Or, looked at another way, over 900,000 more boys were born than girls. Trust me, that difference is WAY out of the bounds of statistical variation. In other words, the difference is not random, it’s caused.

PAUSE.

The previous paragraph starts “If the probability of a girl is 0.5…” It turns out that it’s not. I wrote to Dr. Eisenberg asking if he’d noticed the apparent overage of boys. He kindly responded, “The probability of a boy is 51%.” Really? I looked it up, and several disparate sources confirmed that over the centuries the odds of a boy over a girl at birth are 105 to 100, or the probability of boy is 0.512. In the data above, 51.15% of the births were boys – nearly exactly as predicted.

I hope that I don’t often come this close to publishing a falsehood or drawing a false conclusion. I don’t republish or quote anything without checking. For example, a friend posted a provocative story about a new pastor masquerading as a homeless person. It turns out that that particular story had no basis in fact. So I’m careful.

But I wasn’t careful in this case. I assumed a probability that wasn’t true. Thankfully, I scheduled the blog for a couple days ahead (as I normally do), and I have time to change it.

I talked in the introduction about my original conclusion supporting a “preferred narrative.” We know that the disastrous, now discontinued, one-child policy in China has resulted in a massive shortage of women in China. I assumed that gender-selective abortions in this country were moving us in the same direction. That might be true, but the data Dr. Eisenberg cited don’t support that conclusion.

Therefore, having put away falsehood, let each one of you speak the truth with his neighbor, for we are members one of another. (Ephesians 4.25, ESV)

You shall not steal; you shall not deal falsely; you shall not lie to one another. (Leviticus 19.11, ESV)