August 9, 2002
From the desk of Jane Galt:Annals of Innumeracy Another reader
Annals of Innumeracy
Another reader of Volokh's page caught this error in an email he got from a reader, but it's sufficiently funny to pass along.
Can you spot the error in this paragraph?
Our tax burden has grown to the point where it may accurately be described as slavery; I am by no means a wealthy individual but the combined government toll on my small business (10 employees) is 67% of all revenue and 76% on the last dollar of revenue.
Let's think about this. If payroll taxes are 67% of revenue, assuming that the business is breaking even, this means that payrolls are 33% of revenue. This is an implied payroll tax burden of over 100%, and though I think that tax rates are too high, I don't think they're quite that bad yet, although that doesn't say what will happen if Democrats take the House and the Senate next election.
I quote this not to point out what an idiot the reader is, but how easy it is even for someone who presumably knows what he's doing to make simple arithmetical errors (as the reader who caught the error pointed out, he's probably including employee tax withholding in that number, although it's still fairly breathtaking at that), and how easy it is to miss them. Probably if it hadn't been pointed out I would have skimmed right over it. Partly because I agree with the conclusion, and am therefore less predisposed to check it, and partly because I don't read every single thing carefully enough to catch all such errors. Be honest -- how many of you would have caught it if I hadn't started by telling you something was wrong?
My favorite example of this is a doctoral dissertation which contained the fairly amazing statment that child abuse has doubled every year since 1950. If you read that in an article, you'd probably think "How horrible" and then move on. But let's do the math. Assume there was one child abused in 1950. In 1951 there would be 2. In 1952, 4. By 1960, 1,024 children would be abused every year. By 1970, thanks to the miracle of multiplication, we'd have over 1 million cases. By 1979, the number of abused children in the US -- nearly 537 million -- would far surpass the number of citizens and residents of the country. By 1983 it would have surpassed the number of people on the planet, and by 1986, the total number of people who had ever lived. Yet a doctoral student in Sociology put that into their dissertation, and it passed. Now, I realize that sociologists are not quite on the same level of mathematical proficiency as, say, nuclear physicists. But even those who denigrate the field grant to its practicioners the assumed ability to add, subtract, and multiply.
The lesson being that if you hear a juicy statistic -- especially one which confirms your beliefs -- it would be wise to do a little figuring before you pass it along.
Posted by Jane Galt at August 9, 2002 9:42 AM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound links"); ?>