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Everyone gets numbers wrong, even the New York Times
- johnklos 5y agoIndeed! It's amazing how often people just simply don't care. Trader Joe's, for instance, makes signs for their produce with crazy prices. Five bananas for a penny! Yes, you read that right! They either don't understand decimal places, or they don't realize that it's not legal to advertise incorrect prices. Their signs clearly say .19¢. I pointed it out to them, and they looked at me like I'm crazy. Perhaps they'll care when I insist they sell them to me for that price, then complain to the county's Office of Consumer Affairs if they don't.
- usrn 5y agoThose are usually price per unit mass. (though the "/lb" might be very small.)
- paulcole 5y ago> Perhaps they'll care when I insist they sell them to me for that price, then complain to the county's Office of Consumer Affairs if they don't. Did you actually do either of these things?
- johnklos 5y agoI contacted Trader Joe's corporate just today. If they don't do anything, I'll contact the Office of Consumer Affairs. Ignorance of math is a bad thing!
- legalcorrection 5y agoYou are a bad person for doing this. For using the law for personal whimsy instead of remedying or preventing real harm to people. Grow up. Life isn't an internet joke.
- dang 5y agoPlease don't cross into personal attack. If there was one way to make this subthread even worse, that would be it.
- paulcole 5y agoI think that intentional ignorance of intent is pretty awful as well. You know full well that bananas aren’t being sold for 0.19 cents each.
- johnklos 4y agoThat's an interesting take. So the implied intent is more important than their actions, even after (or particularly after ) they're told they've made a mistake and asked to fix it?
- dec0dedab0de 5y agoIf it's just a mistake then they are not bound to sell it for that price. Especially if everyone else can easily recognize it as a simple mistake of where the decimal is.
- civilized 5y agoSome states have laws [1] to this effect: > The store must honor the price in the advertisement, even if it is wrong, until they correct the misrepresentation using the same advertising medium and/or by corrective signs in the store. > Items sold in a grocery store must ring up at the lowest displayed price. Food stores that are in the waiver program must offer consumers one of the items free if it scans higher than the lowest advertised price. [1] https://www.mass.gov/guides/a-massachusetts-consumer-guide-to-shopping-rights https://www.mass.gov/guides/a-massachusetts-consumer-guide-t...
- orangepanda 5y agoHow does that work with sales tax not being included in the displayed price?
- civilized 5y agoThe website is an explanation of the law, not the actual law itself. I'm sure the actual law does not require sales tax to be included in the displayed price.
- stonemetal12 5y agoSince he specifically mentions grocery stores, groceries aren't taxed.
- mminer237 5y agoTIL that's a thing. Illinois has a lower tax rate on groceries but still taxes them. Also, grocery stores sell a lot more than just groceries.
- burlesona 5y agoDo you have a photo of this? I would love to see an example :)
- johnklos 5y agoI should've taken a picture of the bananas, but here's a picture of limes being sold for three for a penny: https://www.klos.com/~john/limes.jpeg https://www.klos.com/~john/limes.jpeg
- nyjah 5y agoWhere does it say 3 limes for a penny? It clearly says 1 lime for $0.29? It says it 3 times in that photo, but I don't see the penny claim anywhere.
- aero-glide2 5y agoIt says .29 cents not dollars :)
- cillian64 5y agoThe painted part says “.29c”
- tsimionescu 5y agoNo, the (painted) sign is saying .29¢, not $.29. It's a hundred times cheaper than $.29.
- kodisha 5y ago$ !== ¢
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- onion2k 5y agoPerhaps they'll care when I insist they sell them to me for that price, then complain to the county's Office of Consumer Affairs if they don't. I don't know about American law, but here in the UK you would lose that complaint. A price label is what is known as an "invite to treat", and a store is under no obligation to sell the item to you at that price. If they say it's a mistake they can and you have no right to say otherwise. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invitation_to_treat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invitation_to_treat
- stonemetal12 5y agoHow far would they have to go before they ran afoul of some sort of false advertising claim?
- tshaddox 5y agoPresumably any legal system would treat the intent as the primary relevancy. In this case it is abundantly clear what the intent was (note that even the person complaining gives an explanation for what the store intended and thus is clearly not at all confused about the intent).
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- peteradio 5y agoThat sounds impossible to deal with. So you pick your groceries based on price presumably and then when you get to the register they can be something totally different? So as they are getting rung up you would have to say "no thanks for that one, please put it back" on every price you are not in agreement on?
- toyg 5y agoConsidering the recent news that online groceries can change prices (even dramatically) after you've ordered them, so supermarkets apply prices on the day of delivery, and you're on the hook for any difference... this doesn't surprise me one bit.
- theseanz 5y agoThis reminds of the internet classic VerizonMath: http://verizonmath.blogspot.com/2006/12/verizon-doesnt-know-dollars-from-cents.html http://verizonmath.blogspot.com/2006/12/verizon-doesnt-know-...
- darknavi 5y agoCan one be nostalgic for articles like this? Every few years I see this linked and I read the whole thing every time.
- theseanz 5y agoVery much so. I can't believe it happened over 15 years ago!
- tmp_cond_trav 5y agoHa, never heard of this before. I had to hunt the audio down (found it at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MShv_74FNWU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MShv_74FNWU) but it was definitely worth it. Very funny! Thank you!
- treeman79 5y agoOh gosh. My dad did that all the time. Lots of bad memories of him keeping at yelling a t them until they agreed.
- forferdet 5y agoThis reminds me of this hysterically funny customer service call to Verizon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MShv_74FNWU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MShv_74FNWU More of the backstory: https://verizonmath.blogspot.com/ https://verizonmath.blogspot.com/
- kowlo 5y ago12 minutes in... what a journey
- bryanrasmussen 5y agook so as I understand it .19¢ must be 19% of a penny, 19 * 5 is 95, so 95% of a penny. If you add sales tax to that, if your state has one, doesn't that come out to 5 for a penny? Are you being facetious or is .19¢ the same as $.19 and my base expectation is wrong?
- mholm 5y agoShops commonly use .19¢ and $.19 interchangably, when they are definitely not. The poster you're replying to also realized this.
- bryanrasmussen 5y agook thanks for clarification!
- tablespoon 5y ago> Shops commonly use .19¢ and $.19 interchangably, when they are definitely not. The poster you're replying to also realized this. Honestly, I think the correct policy is probably just to interpret .19¢ as a syntax error.
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- apeace 5y agoThis left me wondering: if Trader Joe's were forced to stick by their written price, how would they go about charging you the fraction of a cent? Is that even possible?
- darknavi 5y agoAsk gas stations. Every single gas station charges .9 cents at the end of the price.
- bombcar 5y agoCommodities are often quoted down to very small fractions of a cent, depending on what it is; you round using the normal mechanisms or have a separate agreement. Trader Joes could sell for .19 cents and require a minimum purchase of ten pounds, for example.
- veltas 5y agoThat's how many people write 19 cents. For some people a decimal point is the thing that goes between dollars and cents. Yes, not a very rigorous system, not something you'll see in engineering or science, but something I see on shop signs.
- jollybean 5y agoThat's different though. That method of representing price has been normalized. We all know what it means. That's different than miscommunication something. My pet theory, is that putting 30c just 'feels' bigger to people. So a long time ago, everyone started putting .30c.
- simulate-me 5y agoLanguage is an imperfect model for representing ideas. Million is close to billion, linguistically. Certainly not off by a power of 1000 in the space of language. I’m surprised the author is just coming to this realization.
- dec0dedab0de 5y agoThat would be interesting, if we had to use longer words. Like officially change billion to gagillion. Only two extra letters, but it feels bigger Edit: I originally had one extra letter, thanks jrd79
- snewman 5y agoI'm not sure this would help. The error was likely in thinkspace, not a literal typo. The real problem is when people toss around numbers without deeply understanding them. I don't think there's any simple fix for that. You simply can't reliably funnel information through a channel as narrow as a single number, nor the equivalent short phrase of number words.
- jrd79 5y agoTwo extra letters. Numbers matter :).
- kbutler 5y agoOne extra? Maybe bbillion pronounced b-billion would be better. And to add confusion, note that UK English had 1e6 million 1e9 thousand million 1e12 billion (million million) I think this has mostly consolidated to the US usage now
- neither_color 5y agoIn Spanish you literally say "thousand million" to mean billion so it's very unambiguous.
- eequah9L 5y agoIn languages that use short scale, you say "milliard" to mean "billion". You say "billion" to mean "trillion". It's very confusing and a frequent source of errors in translation. Every time I see the Czech word for "billion", I have to think about whether they mean 10^9 or 10^12.
- jbj 5y agoreporting news from english sources in continental Europe, it happens that billion is incorrectly translated to billion instead of milliard, causing a factor 1000 to appear out of nowhere. (do your own math for trillions) The one in the example may be a brain fart, but so many other errors could be prevented by standardizing a few things ... decimals and thousand sepatators is another one
- beaconstudios 5y agoDoes Anybody actually use milliard? Here in the UK million is a thousand thousand, billion a thousand million etc. I always assumed that was the same for our mainland cousins.
- alternatetwo 5y agoWe Germans do. It gets very confusing when I switch languages.
- rvwaveren 5y agoIn Dutch too. Many mistakes are made when translating English sources.
- Symbiote 5y agoThe UK used to use milliard, and officially switched to billion for 10⁹ in 1974. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scale (there's a map of current usage, most of Europe uses milliard etc.)
- casta 5y agoI think this might be the difference between long and short scale: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scale
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- PaulKeeble 5y agoEven the direction the number suggests can be completely wrong too. A lot of news is just propaganda at this stage, very little enlightenment comes from reading it. As has been argued quite a lot here on Hacker News its also not very valuable either, not knowing the news doesn't cause you much in the way of life problems since you will find out about the big things another way.
- em500 5y agoHear, hear. I keep being amazed how little sanity check is done when it comes to numbers. I developed a rule of thumb over the years: if you can't Fermi estimate some metric or quantity within an order of magnitude, you probably don't understand the metric very well. If you can't estimate it within two order of magnitudes, you probably don't understand it at all.
- yesenadam 5y agoAnd not just numbers. The overwhelming majority of the times I look up a reference cited in a wikipedia article, it turns out to not at all support the wikipedia text. Very often, when the wikipedia text seems murky, whoever cited the reference didn't understand the source document at all. I guess numbers never seem murky like that, so you don't get those same warning signs as with vague prose.
- marcosdumay 5y ago> The overwhelming majority of the times I look up a reference cited in a wikipedia article, it turns out to not at all support the wikipedia text. That happens disturbingly often in scientific articles too. Mostly because people don't read many of their references at all.
- yonaguska 5y ago*Especially the New York times. I believe their mistakes are equally likely to be intentional as they are to be simple mistakes. Especially when it comes to topics where there is an agenda at play.
- Cthulhu_ 5y agoThat's exactly something to look out for. As I mentioned in another comment, they aren't spreading falsehoods per se, they're just underrepresenting them; safe from lawsuits AND downplaying the pandemic. But even factually correct numbers, presented neutrally, can still fuel an agenda. For example, most corona related articles focus on the number of deaths, but don't mention the number of cases nor the amount of people with long-term effects, nor the long term effects of e.g. the organ scarring that the 'rona can cause. It's deception - or downplaying - via omission.
- InitialLastName 5y agoTo use the case in the example, what is the agenda for under-reporting, by an excruciatingly obvious 3 orders of magnitude, the number of Covid infections?
- tablespoon 5y ago>> *Especially the New York times. >> I believe their mistakes are equally likely to be intentional as they are to be simple mistakes. Especially when it comes to topics where there is an agenda at play. > To use the case in the example, what is the agenda for under-reporting, by an excruciatingly obvious 3 orders of magnitude, the number of Covid infections? It's the NYT's agenda to downplay COVID, obviously. /s IMHO, misinterpreting mistakes as intentional lying is a common tactic to justify ignoring evidence and sources that contradict preconceived beliefs. It's true that pretty much every kind of media is biased in some way, but I think a lot of people let the perfect be the enemy of the good and overreact to that fact by disengaging with certain reliable sources or with the media entirely. The ironic thing is that often results in relying on even more on biased and unreliable stuff, not less.
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- jerf 5y agoThe "Latency Numbers Every Programmer Should Know" is posted here periodically: https://gist.github.com/jboner/2841832 https://gist.github.com/jboner/2841832 One of the fringe benefits of being a programmer is that if you try, you can start developing an intuition for how things across a huge span of orders of magnitude add together. That chart alone covers 8-and-a-bit orders of magnitude differences for simple operations, and then we may want to perform those operations thousands or billions or quadrillions of times. I don't do super-high-performance systems, but I still encounter coworkers in our normal routines who are off in the mental models by multiple orders of magnitude w.r.t. to how much something should cost. I see overestimation more often than underestimation. (My opinion on that is that if you "think" a database query should take 50ms, when it actually does you don't worry about it and dig into why. When the answer is, you're missing an index and doing a table scan for something that ought to be 5 microseconds, a full 4 orders of magnitude difference, it's easy to not notice, because in absolute, human terms, 50ms is still pretty fast. Make a dozen or two of those mistakes, even in otherwise very large systems running lots of code with a lot more than a dozen things going on, and it's easy for overestimates to become self-fulfilling prophecies and to accidentally build systems bleeding out orders (plural!) of magnitude performance without realizing it. Underestimates are much more likely to slap you in the face and get resolved one way or another.) Another example: I'm a fan of time-tested wisdom of all sorts, but sometimes time does move on and invalidate things. "It all adds up" used to be true when everything we humans dealt with was in the same rough orders of magnitude, but it's not always true anymore. It doesn't always all add up. If I've got a 500ms process, do you have any idea how many nanosecond things it takes to even bump that by 1%, let alone add up to anything significant? If your "1ns"-range code has effectively no loops, or is O(n) on some small chunk of data or something, it's inconsequential. There's plenty of other places in the modern world, which spans more orders of magnitude than the world used to, where this time-tested wisdom can be false, and it in fact does not "all add up". This is one of the reason you must always profile your code if you want to improve performance. People have always not always been perfect at finding bottlenecks even when our machines didn't casually span 12 orders of magnitude, but any developer no matter how experienced can be tempted to blame the complicated code dealing in microseconds but miss the simple-looking code hiding milliseconds. This covers mostly the first bit of the article, but if you practice this sort of sense can start helping with a lot of the other innumeracy issues encountered too. We have good practice grounds for this in our discipline.
- mherdeg 5y agoMy version of this "any number is a warning sign" is: if someone is writing an article about a court case and doesn't include the docket number (so you can look up the history and new filings yourself) and PDFs of the documents (so you can see for yourself), assume you are being misinformed. Same with any reporting about a police report that doesn't include a ... copy of the police report.
- kingcharles 4y agoI hate this. Sometimes I have to spend an hour tracking down the actual case in PACER or something so I can read the actual opinion rather than the summary that is in the article.
- Cthulhu_ 5y agoLies, damned lies and statistics? Seems like an example of that. I mean the "at least half a million" figure is not factually incorrect, it's just... misinformation? Downplaying, either intentionally or accidentally? Same as the "probably more" line, it's downplaying a fact by adding a bit of insecurity. It's an ass covering opening paragraph.
- axg11 5y agoI'm not a journalist but I do sympathize with these types of mistakes in the media. Journalists have two essential parts to their roles: (1) understand the topic, (2) communicate the topic. The issue that comes up again and again is that journalists are not really qualified to do (1). Many issues and topics that journalists report on require expertise, a PhD, or just years of investigation to deeply understand. Compounding the difficulty is that journalists report to non-experts in two ways. Their direct bosses are other journalists. Their indirect bosses are the consumers of media, 99.99% are non-experts. If 99.99% of your customers don't know or care about the details you will naturally put less attention towards the details. We need to stop pretending that reading/watching/listening to the news is somehow informative or educational. Every piece of journalism is, at some level, fiction trying to masquerade as non-fiction. One way to fix this is to encourage more experts to directly communicate with the public. This has the opposite problem, since most experts are not skilled at communicating their expertise to a wide audience. Ultimately a healthy society requires a balance of the two. I'm firmly in the camp that we currently have too many non-experts trying to communicate expertise.
- mdavis6890 5y agoThis is a great point! I still don't think this excuses it though. I think a journalist has a responsibility to at least know the limits of their understanding and not try to exceed that with numbers they don't understand. The author of the mask example about New Zealand could have stopped with the headline, as that's the only news-worthy part: Masks are required for two more weeks on public transit.
- smaryjerry 5y agoThis is spot on because if anyone here is an expert in any field or had first hand knowledge of an event, then they have seen the complete misunderstandings pushed to non experts via articles.
- listless 5y agoThe sad thing is people I know would tell you the COVID number is _overcounted_ because anyone dying while having COVID is counted as a COVID death. That is true, but not enough to change the numbers and certainly not enough to make up for the uncounted cases. But when these media outlets get the numbers wrong, it bolsters these ideological positions built around “they’re lying to you”.
- macinjosh 5y agoIt is entirely plausible that cases are under counted and deaths are over counted. The thinking goes that if someone is just a little sick they aren't going through the hassle of getting an official test and being counted. If someone is nearing deaths door they are going to take action and go to the hospital or clinic so you're likely to have a very high percentage of cases leading to death being reported. Add on to that the fact that people who died in a car accident and happened to have a non-symptomatic case of covid was added to the death numbers. That might not be a huge number but it will have an effect at some level. I don't see how it could not unless you completely ignore them. Inaccuracies in data can cut in all directions. In this case though, over counting deaths and under counting cases (a deliberate choice made by the CDC) made the virus seem more deadly than it likely was at the time. Is there a plausible argument for an under count of deaths? If so, I have not had the pleasure of hearing it.
- couchand 5y agoSomething I find wonderful about the OP is that the emphasis is on the humanity. It's not that the news outlet is lying, it's that they are human and making a very human mistake. The OP's argument is that, even when the human working with numbers has the best intentions and plenty of relevant experience, it's really easy to fall victim to the "numbers are objective reality" fallacy.
- efitz 5y agoYou kinda triggered me here. > That is true, but not enough to change the numbers By definition, if the counting methodology is wrong (in the misleading sense), then they necessarily DO “change the numbers” > and certainly not enough to make up for the uncounted cases The uncounted cases aren’t deaths. Therefore it’s not a question of “making up for” those cases. In fact, if anything, that makes it worse. Using a singular value “total number of deaths” is generally misleading when trying to justify public health policy on large populations. A global population of 7-8 billion means that even huge numbers can be insignificant, eg 1 million over 8 billion is only 0.0125%. (Disclaimer: Numbers chose at random; this example does not represent any actual statistic around COVID). If the cases are being overestimated then it drives the overall impact down. Numbers and methodology both matter intensely when we’re talking about using the numbers to justify public policy changes.
- natch 5y agoThe word "even" here in the title indicates a fundamental lack of understanding of just how bad the New York Times is. If you are ever very close to the subject of a story, to the point where you know the important details, and then you see that subject get covered by the New York Times, you will see just how bad they are. Exceedingly, horrendously, tragically bad with facts, and trying to put an ideological spin on everything. But I'll grant that it's often less bad than some of the others.
- dumpsterlid 5y agoI agree the New York Times really isn't that great.
- snewman 5y agoOP here. I agree that there are a lot of problems with the Times' coverage; I deploy a heavy skepticism filter and I subscribe to various newsletters for perspective, analysis, and deeper coverage of topics I'm interested in. That said: do you know of a better source for general national (US) / world news? I haven't found anything that really strikes me as less problematic. I tried to leave after the Slate Star Codex mess, and failed.
- leephillips 5y agoIt’s called Gell-Mann amnesia: https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2021/01/18/gell-mann-amnesia/ https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2021/01/18/gell-mann-amnesia/
- natch 4y agoThanks, good link! I had heard of Gell-Mann amnesia but did not know what it was.
- leephillips 4y agoSomewhat hilariously, it has little to do with Gell-Mann himself. Chrichton just thought that sounded cool.
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- irrational 5y agoUnder the title “Serious Professionals Get It Wrong All The Time” there is a picture of a misaligned road/bridge. Does anyone know if this is a real picture? If so, what is the story and how did they fix it?
- readthenotes1 5y agoI have a cartoon printed in the 1980s with the caption of "do I get partial credit?" Showing a similar bridge so I doubt it is real. Funny if it were!
- snake_doc 5y agoConsidering that the NYT doesn’t hire copy editors anymore, it’s not surprising. They stopped in 2017.
- nkozyra 5y agoHeadlines are very bad places for truth. They're often written by rushed editors with less real-world reporting experience. Because newspapers still often have to fit for space and are less likely to write multiple headlines for digital and print, there are constraints that often lead to rapid iterations and are far more likely to be out of sync with the article itself.
- macinjosh 5y agoI'd argue this applies to all information, not just numbers. It is easier to point out incorrect numerical values than an esoteric and hard to communicate set of facts or circumstances. When it comes to modern journalism I see many problems: 1. Traditionally, editors write the headlines and sub heads. The editor knows even less about the subject than the writer so what are the chances they will get it right especially when their goal is not accuracy but attracting readers. 2. Twitter, the water cooler for all journalists, has put on public display and has quantified journalist relevance, popularity, and influence. Blogs did this to a certain extent but Twitter really put the gas to the pedal. Some news orgs force their journalists to use social media. This means that there are very real personal and career incentives to make the story fit the in-group narrative or be lambasted for it. This means that finding an angle on a story that highlights a specific narrative is the goal. To be clear the narrative is usually some worse case scenario that scares people and gets them to click. It doesn't have to be some sort of script handed down by a conspiracy. 3. Most people only read headlines and maybe the first few graffs. Often clarifying or information countering the headline is mentioned at the end of a piece. I often will read the end of an article first before subjecting myself to the manipulation found at the beginning of articles. 4. When success is about having clicks and shares there is a _strong_ incentive to publish stories before anyone else which is antithetical to carefully ensuring accuracy, integrity, and reason. All in all, journalism is simply organized hearsay and I never automatically believe anything I am being told. That is not say it is useless, but it is important to understand its nature before consuming it.
- RandomWorker 5y agoOne source is not evidence. This is the core rule I learned as a researcher. More often than not, reputable journalists will get it more right than wrong on aggregate. On average, the numbers published by reputable journalists will be right and not misleading. These are some interesting examples, however, the core rule: "One source is not evidence" is probably more important here to remember. Read a variety of sources and articles. I often find that sometimes in the same paper they will contradict numbers. Then I know, the editor missed it.
- PaulKeeble 5y agoThere are quite a lot of hidden singular sources and you have to be very wary of them. One such fake source is anything that gets leaked or comes out of government, it could be the very same person/source going to multiple news sites presenting multiple pieces of fabricated information. Its not uncommon for a lot of political news to be singular source, just because its on every news site citing multiple sources doesn't make it true. The other possibility is a chain where manipulation can take place in a non obvious way. For example reviews of PC hardware like CPUs on release day. It might appear as if you are reading many different sites with differing review methods but in practice all of them were likely provided a CPU and motherboard by the same manufacturer chain. Both AMD and Intel have been caught in the past providing golden samples for reviews and motherboard manufacturers auto overclocking boards. SSD manufacturers providing MLC for review and then switching to TLC NAND once it hits retail. There are so many scandals that involve this sort of thing that its very hard to trust reviews that aren't retail sourced and recently too. Reading multiple sources of news isn't enough, you have to analyse where it comes from and how it could have been manipulated and falsified based on where the chain of custody of the news item comes from, a much harder problem and largely impossible given how the news hides its sources.
- RandomWorker 4y agoTrue, you need to have a bit of a critical eye, good memory and reason from experience. It seems every hardware release promises the best and greatest. Such statements will be short lived because once many consumers start submitting their benchmark scores those tactics will be revealed.
- dekhn 5y agoI saw an article yesterday saying the US was giving $800B in aid to Ukraine, and I had to think several times about whether that was conceivable.
- skybrian 5y agoA more subtle example: the Washington Post gets COVID statistics from John Hopkins, which uses "date reported" for COVID cases instead of "episode date." This means percentage increase (or decrease) since a week ago can be wildly wrong when states backfill data, as they often do. I haven't traced it but the New York Times and Google seem to have similar problems. Usually it's better to look at the state's website or the CDC, but they have different dashboards that often don't calculate the same useful metrics for you. Or at least, they'd be useful if they were right.
- smaryjerry 5y agoThis reminds me of a example that happened just a couple days ago. The White House tweet that 70 percent of the inflation in March was due to Putin. That makes you think Putin is causing a lot of the March 2022 over March 2021 inflation number reported, which was 8.5%. However the inflation number they compared was March 2022 over February 2022, which was only 1.2% inflation of which 70% is a small much smaller effect and also was a relatively short term jump because markets thought the sanctions were going to be much stricter and bid up the prices in March and prices of many Russia produced goods have lowered some already after that expectation was reversed. This type of confusion is cause us to wrongly assess what is causing inflation or at least what is causing the biggest impact and our only hope is that the policy makers are actually reading these things correctly and able to make decisions but simply informing the public in unclear ways.
- guilhas 5y agoThe problem is not that numbers can be wrong, is that they have been presented with such arrogance that everyone doubting or debating the numbers, and their actual wider impact, has to be banned and labeled a anti-science conspiracy lunatic