Who Can Really Say?

Innumeracy

NYT Public Editor Daniel Okrent takes on innumeracy in today's column. (For those who don't know what innumeracy means, it's a word that describes those who don't know what numbers mean.)

One of the appealing things about the complaints I receive about innumeracy at The Times is their ecumenical origin; when it comes to how it handles numbers, The Times is an equal opportunity offender. Like a bad cough that spreads its germs indiscriminately, numbers misapplied and ill-explained irritate the sensibilities of the right and the left, the drug company official and the animal rights activist, the art collector and the Jets fan.

Number fumbling arises, I believe, not from mendacity but from laziness, carelessness or lack of comprehension. I'll put myself in the latter category (as some readers no doubt will as well, after they've read through my representation of the numbers that follow). Most of the journalists I know who enter the profession comfortable with numbers write about sports, where debate about the meaning of statistics is a daily competition, or economics, a field in which interpretation of numbers will no more likely produce inarguable results than will finger painting.

Okrent's just getting started, but I'll interrupt here to note that most "comfortable with numbers" sports writers couldn't count their way out of a paper bag. See James, Bill.

So it is left to the rest of us who write for the paper to stumble through numbers, scatter them on the page and hope that readers understand. Does it matter if many of these figures are meaningless symbols serving the interests of the parties that issue them? Take a variety of reports on some recent lawsuits: A man is suing the city for $20 million arising from charges, eventually dismissed, brought against him for kidnapping and sexual abuse. The mother of the football player Derrick Thomas, who died in 2000, is suing General Motors for $75 million. Villagers on an Indonesian island are suing Newmont Mining Corporation for $543 million. Not one of these numbers is grounded in anything more substantial than the imagination of a plaintiff's lawyer, but each is given the authority of print.

No different, really, was Wednesday's assertion that Bernard J. Ebbers, if convicted of all charges in the MCI-WorldCom accounting scandal, "could be sentenced to as much as 85 years," a formulation that bears no relationship to any conceivable outcome yet serves the prosecutor's public case very nicely.

Numbers issued by those measuring criminal enterprise ("In Mexico, drug trafficking is a $250-billion-a-year industry") or the economic impact of a new stadium ("Bloomberg said that he expected the arena to generate about $400 million a year through various economic activities") don't deserve to be published without challenge; it doesn't serve agencies who want to fight drug trafficking to underestimate the problem, nor can any politician support a development project without hyping its potential benefit.

Still, The Times persists. In November, when New York City Comptroller William Thompson released a study purporting to show that New Yorkers purchase more than $23 billion in counterfeit goods each year, The Times repeated the analysis as if it were credible. Quick arithmetic would have demonstrated that $23 billion would work out to roughly $8,000 per city household, a number ludicrous on its face. (In the Web version of this column, I've linked to an excellent dissection of Thompson's report, by freelance journalist Felix Salmon.)

Last Sunday, an article on the city's proposed $1.1 billion investment in three stadium projects cited the assertion by the president of the city's Economic Development Corporation that "for every dollar invested by the city in the three projects, taxpayers would get a return of $3.50 to $4.50 over 30 years." It didn't say that the same $1.1 billion invested in a 30-year Treasury bond would return $4 for every dollar invested, and a lot more reliably, too. (Credit where it's due: reporter Charles V. Bagli did note that the $1.1 billion could pay for 25 schools housing 600 students each.)

Sometimes the absence of a number is as deflating to an article's credibility as the presence of a deceptive one. Few articles noting that President Bush received more votes than any candidate in history also mentioned that more people voted against him than any candidate in history. Quoting Michael Moore's assertion that standing ovations in Greensboro, N.C., proved that "Fahrenheit 9/11" is "a red state movie" disregards the fact that metropolitan Greensboro has over 1.2 million people; you could probably find in a population that large enough people to give a standing O for a reading of the bylaws of the American Dental Association.

Of course both Moore and the reporter who wrote that piece operate in the movie business, where records are about as meaningful as promises. "Shrek 2" is not, as an article in The Times Magazine had it in November, "the third-highest-grossing movie of all time"; if you consider inflation, it's not even in the Top 10 (and "Titanic" is far from No. 1). This record-mania has spread everywhere. "Record-high gas prices" summoned up last year weren't even close; at its summer peak, gas cost 80 cents a gallon less than it did in 1981. Says economics reporter David Leonhardt, "Treating 2004 dollars the same as 1981 dollars isn't much different from treating dollars the same as rupees. The fact that 10 is a bigger number than 9 doesn't make 10 rupees worth more than $9; nor does it make $10 from 2004 worth more than $9 from 1981." Inflation isn't the only culprit stalking the record books: "Record deficits" may not be records when they're expressed as a percentage of gross domestic product, a far more reasonable measure than any raw number.

Okrent has NYT links to many of these examples, but it's obviously a problem that goes far beyond just one newspaper. At least, that's what four out of five dentists told me.

Posted by Peter at January 23, 2005 09:04 AM