Washington Post editorial board writes an editorial in praise of NAFTA that cites Mexico's rapid growth in nominal terms, which is just silly. I think there's a large problem -- almost entirely unappreciated in this profession -- of journalists completely lacking the quantitative competence necessary to write about the issues that they cover.
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Illiteracy Watch
03 Dec 2007 09:59 am
Comments (5)
Quantitative illiteracy is well documented throughout the press. Nothing is ever adjusted for inflation. Margin of error is never discussed (in neither financial news or political polls). You have people favorably comparing CPI/employment measurements to those of Reagan's era, totally missing the fact that they are completely different measurements (Greenspan changed the methods used to measure CPI several times during his tenure).
Reading economic blogs (from all perspectives: Bull/Bear, Monitorist/Gold Bug) has definitely made it clear to me that, as much as we complain about political reporting, there is nothing more fraudulent and biased than the economic news media.
I read about the opposite problem recently. I saw a criticism of a fairly famous international development study that reported a huge reduction in relative amounts corruption in a program, but failed to mention that the nominal amount of corruption was about the same. They spent 4 times as much money and the amount of money stolen stayed roughly same and they declared corruption eliminated. It took years before any noticed.
I definitely agree the that and mainstream media and especially economic news media are massively out of it when it comes to statical analysis, but I don't think they're the only ones.
the journalism schools really suck at this, they have made no effort to tailor specific courses to their quantitatively challenged students. the send them through a standard issue econ and or stats, and the students learn nothing because those courses are geared toward teaching the concepts in a useful way.
Can't comment on science journalism but I would believe that it's generally the worst: how many physics, biology, chemistry, genetics et al students become journalists? It the English, political science and history majors (though I wonder about the last of those).
A lot of economic journalism is poor. It reminds me of math instruction in US high schools. Math majors are hard to come by -- it's one of the most demanding college majors and those who succeed have other alternatives -- so not many go into teaching. High schools wind up hiring graduates of education schools who have a [supposed] concentration in teaching math. Which of course is not at all the same thing as knowing math. Some do, some don't.
I have the feeling that economics journalism operates the same way: they know how to write about economics, but only some actually know economics. This is most awful on television when the general purpose/politics commentators try to speak about economics. It's uglier than watching sausage being made.
Comments closed December 17, 2007.
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Heads in the Sand
Yeah, in science reporting too, it's really too bad that journalists are so underqualified. I guess that means that journalists are probably scarce and it's really easy to get a job in journalism without any specialized training or anything, right?
Posted by neil | December 3, 2007 10:22 AM