These days, people are trying to let statistics do the talking.

Before the election, this op-ed in the Boston Globe claimed that Massachusetts and the Northeast were leading the nation in family values, in this case because of Massachusetts’ lowest-in-the-nation divorce rate. This is thanks to the predominantly Catholic population and the higher-than-average level of education.

Then we have a newsbrief in the Globe that says New England is the wealthiest region in the United States, but ranks the lowest in terms of rate of charitable giving. Yep, we’re a bunch of filthy-rich scrooges. Would other states continue to give at the same rate if they were making as much money as New Englanders?

Finally, there is the infamous list of states ranked by average IQ, with the Presidential candidate they voted for. It “showed” overwhelmingly that the states with the highest IQs tended to vote for Kerry. That chart was based on data from this page which now notes that some people have debunked the chart, and that a journal that originally published the chart issued a retraction. This page claims to debunk the original chart by using more balanced data. The results are all so subject to error it’s not even funny. I blame both sides for trying to gauge the intelligence of a state’s voters by the results of standardized tests that not every voting-age citizen has taken.