Big Numbers in the News

[Bill (Smithville NJ)]

(06-05-2014 08:58 PM)Mark Hardman Wrote:  A good read on the issue:

Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences

Mark,

Thanks for link. I knew there was a book on it that I had read some time ago, but couldn't remember the title.

A few years ago, during the U.S. housing crisis, Congress passed a bill to help the people underwater with their mortgages. I forget the actual numbers now. The newspapers reported that the bill would provide xxx millions of dollars and that it would help yyyy number of people. When you divided the two numbers, it averaged out to $750,000 per person helped. Assuming 10% overhead to administrate the program, meant that the average mortgage helped was $675,000. That seemed very high to me since a lot of mortgages that should be helped would be lower than that.

I emailed a bunch of the financial reporters that had blindly reported the numbers, including National Public Radio (NPR), Philadelphia Inquirer, the New York Times and the Washington Post.

NPR replied with a canned email message thanking me for my support of NPR and giving me a link so I could make a donation. So much for NPR - very disappointing.

The New York Times and Washington Post reporters both responded personally by email and we had a very nice email discussion about it.

Since I used my full name, address and phone number in these emails, I received a personal phone call from the Philadelphia Inquirer reporter. We discussed it at length over several phone calls. He followed up with calls to his congressional contacts and finally reported that while Congress may allocate that amount of money they calculate that only a small amount of it will ever be used. This would mean the average amount per person helped would be a lot lower. They like showing that a large amount of money is allocated. Looks better than a small amount.

Bill