Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported on the exaggerations and assumptions required to make the claim that Michael Jackson sold 750 million albums. He sold a lot of albums, but probably nowhere near 750 million, and not just because of those meddling kids with their cassette dubs and their file sharing. It’s simply that fuzzy numbers are everywhere. They’re a function of good-faith estimation, spotty data, and outright lies.
Numbers frighten people, but they really shouldn’t — they’re just as subjective as anything else. They look like they’re the result of precise calculation, but often they’re invented as a way to put an aura of precision on someone’s opinion.
Sometimes a number comes from deduction rather than data collection, with a result that’s reasonable, logical — and completely made up. There’s a type of job-interview question commonly used by consulting firms called the case interview, where the interviewer throws the candidate a question to see how he or she approaches the problem. A simple example might be something like “How many pencils are purchased in the United States each year?” The candidate is expected to deduce an answer: “Well, there are 330 million people, and let’s assume that everyone uses at least one pencil a year. But some people go through more. Elementary school children only use pencils, and let’s say they make up 10 percent of the population and use 12 pencils a year. Some adults prefer to use only pencils, too — let’s make that another 10 percent. Then we’ll assume that 5 percent of the population either bowls or plays golf and uses those little half pencils, so we’ll say another 12 per year. So that’s 25 percent of 330 million using 12 per year, and 75 percent using only 1 per year, so the answer is: 990,000,000 + 247,500,000 = 1,237,500,000 pencils.”
Simple, yes?
It’s Tony from 
(2009)
(2009)
(2007)
(1986)
(1990)
(1994)
(1982)
(2000)
(1989)
(1994)
(1998)
(1999)
Perhaps the white people who’ve asked Lee that question also wondered why black people across the United States celebrated the 1995 acquittal of O.J. Simpson, a famous black football player accused of murdering his white wife. As Todd Boyd, a professor of popular culture at the University of Southern California, noted in the HBO documentary O.J.: A Study in Black and White (2002), the gut reaction boiled down to psychological payback. In other words, for every black man in this country who’s been beaten, lynched, shot, or thrown behind bars for a crime he didn’t commit, you didn’t get this one.
It was impossible to recall all the memories as I was listening. Since I was born in ‘76 I don’t remember much from Off the Wall, but the images of the sidewalk lighting up in the “Billie Jean” video and the spectacular 14-minute, John Landis-directed video for “Thriller” stick in my mind as if I saw them for the first time yesterday.
It is, of course, Jackson performing “Billie Jean” on the Motown 25 television special. We’ve all seen it hundreds of times, but I encourage you to look at it again, with fresh eyes. The lithe movements. The authoritative swagger. The absolute command of the stage. Look at the angular motion, the way his legs appear to operate independent of everything from the waist up. Look at how sexy those motions are — yes, sexy. This is the boy next door, all grown up and on his own. The spangled space suit from the “Rock with You” video was kid stuff; it has been replaced with stage chic: the sparkly jacket, the high-water pants, the white socks. This is a man, singing about an adult situation, and he knows he has everyone watching in the palm of his gloved hand.