SOCIAL HYPOCHONDRIA -- OUR PROBLEM IS OUR OBSESSION WITH PROBLEMS

Something called the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse
put out a study last week noting with alarm that a quarter of all the
alcohol sold in America is consumed by teenagers.

The New York Times reported on Wednesday that the study was "wrong"
because it "had not applied the standard statistical techniques in
deriving that number." This makes it sound like the error was arcane
and maybe a matter of interpretation, but the Times writer, Tamar
Lewin, goes on to explain it quite clearly: Forty percent of the
survey sample was teenagers, but teenagers are less than 20 percent
of the general population. Correcting for this flat-out mistake
produces a figure more like 11 percent of alcohol consumption that is
by teenagers.

But this raises other questions -- or it ought to, but didn't among
news organizations that publicized the original number.

Shouldn't you want to know what percentage of the population is
teenagers before you decide how alarming it is that they consume 25
percent of the alcohol?

Yet the Associated Press, CNN and others passed along the 25 percent
figure -- and the alarm about it -- without even raising this crucial
issue.

It is not obviously alarming that teenagers consume 11 percent of the
booze if they are 20 percent of the population. But then it would not
be obviously alarming that they consumed 25 percent of the booze if
they were 40 percent of the population. In other words, the alarm
would be dubious even if the original statistic was correct.

Now, maybe you believe that teenage drinking is a problem anyway, and
maybe you're right. But a news release announcing, "Study Concludes
Teenagers Drink Less Than Half as Much as General Population" is not
going to rally many new troops to the cause.

In a revised statement on its Web site, the Center (which is
associated with Columbia University) concedes ungraciously that 11
percent "sets the lower range of estimates." But it goes on to insist
that due to a variety of other factors, the teenage share of alcohol
consumption may be as high as 30 percent.

So where were these other factors when they published the 25 percent figure?

It could have been jacked up to 50 or 60 percent!

Would Joe Califano, the undoubtedly well-meaning Distinguished Former
who runs the Center, have thought at that point, "Wait a minute, even
I don't believe this!"?

This little episode illustrates more than just our national
innumeracy -- ignorance about math -- or the specific credulity of
the media about overheated statistics. It is an example of social
hypochondria. As a society, we always seem to be obsessing about some
problem like teenage drinking or child abuse or immigration or
cloning, convinced that it will destroy the country or the world
unless it is eliminated. The hypochondria analogy isn't perfect:
These diseases tend to be real, not wholly imagined.

But (a) their perils are exaggerated -- at least until they are put
aside to make room for other perils; and (b) the hope of ever curing
them is also exaggerated.

America is not, as it sometimes seems, a society lurching from one
acute social crisis to the next. It is a basically healthy society
with lots of chronic problems that exist simultaneously, can and
should be ameliorated, but will never go away. Nevertheless, a
variety of social forces make it hard to see things that way.

One factor is politics.

Both major political parties have evolved from collections of people
who share a general philosophical framework for looking at the world,
into coalitions of convenience among people who each feel strongly
about one or two particular issues.

Direct-mail fundraising, on which both parties rely (and will rely
even more if campaign finance reform succeeds in reducing the role of
large donors) works by finding "hot button" issues and exaggerating
both their importance and what can be done about them. Special
interest groups have actually replaced the parties as the main
loyalty of most politically active people.

These groups are monomaniacal by definition, and they depend even
more on hot-button direct mail.

The media have an obvious vested interest in sowing serial social
panic, and that certainly seems to be more true than ever before,
though I'm not sure why. What is new is the fad of corporations
adopting social issues, then spending millions on them and zillions
on bragging about the millions.

Also fairly new is the development of social issues -- or rather, one
good social issue -- as a necessary adornment for celebrities, from
movie stars to first ladies.

In fact, issues themselves have become celebrities: each one
blindingly famous for 15 minutes, seen dating Tom Brokaw or Dan
Rather, and then brutally dumped and forgotten.

And then there are the lawyers.

Suing is our national sport. (Professionals of other sports are among
its most enthusiastic practitioners.) If there were an Olympic gold
medal for litigation, no other country would have a prayer.

Under modern rules such as those for class actions, lawsuits are
almost an industrial process.

Finding or fabricating a social grievance and using it to get the
culture of publicity working on your behalf are routine steps.

According to a recent study by the respected National Center for
Credulity and Alarm, Americans are twice as likely to swallow a phony
statistic about a social issue, and almost 2.7 times more likely to
find it alarming, as citizens of either the European Union or the
former Soviet bloc.

Can you believe that?