Tragedies and statistics

History's law of large numbers

In 1925 a German writer attributed a maxim to a French diplomat. Translated into English, it read: “The death of one man; that is a catastrophe. A hundred thousand deaths; that is a statistic.” The writer, Kurt Tucholsky, sometimes wrote satire. He might have been joking here. Or perhaps the French diplomat was the joker. Maybe both were serious.

The saying was recycled two decades later, and placed in the mouth of Joseph Stalin. World War II had devalued lives; the version attributed to Stalin was: “One death is a tragedy, a million deaths a statistic.” The Soviet dictator wasn’t known for his humor. Coming from him, amid the tensions that were producing the Cold War, the attributed sentiment reeked of brutality.

Whether intended flippantly or in dead earnest, the adage captures something fundamental about human nature—and something crucial to understanding life in the modern age. Our species evolved in small groups. Without special effort, we can remember the names and identifying information of no more than a couple hundred people. We can empathize with those we know or who are much like us. But beyond that, humanity dissolves into a blur. Certain peoples of the world—Aborigines in Australia, the Piraha of Amazonia—had words for “one” and “two,” but beyond that was simply “many.”

Every culture has its own ceiling of countable comprehension. Scientists appeared to have broken the ceiling with exponential notation; ten to the hundredth power is as easy to write as ten to the second power—even if Larry Page couldn’t spell “googol” when he chose it for the name of the company he and Sergey Brin created. But no one has a feel for numbers anywhere near that large. The Fifty-first Congress, in the days of Benjamin Harrison, was the first to approve a budget of one billion dollars. Democrats, in the minority, railed against the Republican “billion-dollar Congress.” House speaker Thomas Reed rejoined, “This is a billion-dollar country.” In fact America was closer to a trillion-dollar country at the time, but the order-of-magnitude difference was lost on Democrats and Republicans alike.

This is why presidents and other politicians personalize the effects of their favorite programs. Ronald Reagan wasn't the first, but he might have been the most effective in highlighting individuals whose stories he told in State of the Union and other important speeches to exemplify how policies played out in individual lives. Historians often recount big events like wars by focusing on individual soldiers and their experiences. Novelists and playwrights do the like as a matter of course. Their protagonists personalize enduring themes applicable broadly.

Focusing on individuals can be a political or literary choice; treating large numbers of people as a statistic is often a psychological necessity. In modern times, the decisions of national leaders can affect millions of people. If the leaders tried to imagine all the life stories, they’d never be able to act. The informational load would be prohibitive; more important, the emotional load would be unbearable. Abraham Lincoln almost broke beneath the strain of responsibility for the deaths his decision to resist secession produced. Harry Truman had to treat as collateral damage the more than one hundred thousand civilians killed by his order to use the atom bomb against Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And in doing so he weighed that statistic against the statistical estimate of deaths likely in an invasion of the Japanese home islands.

Even Stalin—who in youth was a gifted and earnest seminarian—probably took comfort in the anonymity of large numbers. Autocrats are often perceived as cynics who will say whatever promotes their cause. But the subclass of revolutionary autocrats are more likely to be true believers. If the kulaks had to be liquidated by the millions, the price was worth paying so that millions more could achieve socialism.

We might think Stalin mistaken. Socialism wasn’t worth the cost. But as we praise Lincoln for trading hundreds of thousands of soldier deaths for the freedom of four million slaves and the preservation of the Union, we should recognize that a similar mechanism was at work. When people live in large groups, sooner or later they become statistics.