Down for the Count
(Page 2 of 2)
January/February 1996
Jeff Reid, Utne Reader
Math properly employed can help journalists shed light on environmental topics, medical reports, and economists' claims. In the wrong hands, though, it merely clouds the issues. And it seems to be in the wrong hands much of the time. One reason may be widespread misunderstanding of what math is. Paulos cites five major misconceptions: that mathematics is essentially a matter of computation, is strictly hierarchical, is without narrative, is only for the elite, and numbs one to the aesthetic and sensual aspects of life.
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Paulos rightly emphasizes the ultimate responsibility of reporters and their readers to put things in their proper context -- and do the math -- particularly in our increasingly irrational age. Unfortunately, his book isn't always as careful as he wants journalists to be: It's loosely written and here and there carelessly argued, even though he gets the numbers right.
Not knowing enough is one problem. Knowing too much can amount to the same thing -- as demonstrated in Who We Are (Random House, 1995), a revised and updated portrait of America based on the latest U.S. census. New York Times columnist Sam Roberts takes the statistics out for a spin, but the net effect is information overload. To be sure, the clear, broad strokes are there: the population continues to migrate west and south; immigration is booming, swelling the ranks in California, Texas, and Florida; the rich get richer, the poor get poorer, the middle class is contracting, and racial minorities are suffering disproportionately.
Roberts does his best to keep things lively with fun facts -- 'More households owned three vehicles than one' -- and of course facts that are less fun: 'More Americans now work selling goods in wholesale and retail than in actually manufacturing goods... Marriage rates in the U.S. are actually among the world's highest. But so are divorce and remarriage rates... The number of mobile homes grew [in the 1980s] by 60 percent to [constitute] more than one in seven of the nation's residences.' Which goes to show that certain numbers can be startling and eloquent, even in the midst of a statistical avalanche.
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