I know I’ve pitched temper tantrums at commenters here before, so I don’t blame McMegan for losing her shit but for God’s sake, why can’t she correct a basic mathematical error (via Tbogg)?
Megan McArdle sees someone suggest that Bush’s tax cuts for the rich should be eliminated and the money used for better purposes, and she decides that it just wouldn’t make any difference. McArdle’s problems with the argument:
Dylan Matthews at the Washington Post has asked what we might be able to do for the economy if we repealed the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy and spent the money on something else. The result is a nice post full of graphs, but the answer seems to be “not much”–the very best estimate is that we get about $75 billion in added economic activity, or about $25 for every person in the country.
The first two commenters correct her math. “Or $250, whatever,” says the first. The second: “Using current census data, I get $244 per person, but yes let’s call it $250, Megan was off by a factor of 10.” McArdle and math are two ships that pass in the night, never to have contact. Fortunately her commenters are available to do her long division for her.
It’s not a small error — no one would argue that a $25 rebate check (say) per American would help the economy much, but it might be argued that a $250 one would (I have no idea if it really would, but that would be about the same size as the 2008 tax rebate). We all make mistakes, but if you make an order-of-magnitude error that potentially affects your argument, shouldn’t you make a correction and revisit the argument, using the time-honored method of the strike-bar and the update?
This burns me up, whether it’s David Brooks (failed math in high school, no evidence he’s improved) wanking about some graphs he saw on iSteve or claiming that Clinton had an approval rating “in the 20s”, Emily Yoffe critiquing global warming research from a first-grade math level, or McMegan not admitting that $25 and $250 are not the same number, I wish that truly innumerate people would shut the fuck up about everything related to quantitative analysis.
Update. In her very next post:
And we would all of us–not just academics–like to be immune from getting fired for making stupid remarks.
Heh indeedy.
Update. Finally a correction, it’s because the calculator on her computer “won’t go into the billions”. In fairness, I just tested out the calculator on my Mac and if I try to enter 75 billion, it just stops at 750 million.
Anyway, as I said, everyone makes mistakes. I guess maybe it would have been a good idea to notice that the first few commenters pointed out the error rather than just screaming at them and calling them idiots.
Jude
Son, you’ve got no future on the wingnut welfare circuit if you’re that attached to accuracy and honest accounting.
Hugin & Munin
I know, crack on the social sciences, that’ll convince people!
Tonal Crow
That’s pretty bad, but at least much of the public knows enough math to detect the error. With statistics and probability, however, things are quite different. Which is, in part, why we haven’t been able to do diddly about climate change.
peach flavored shampoo
Ya know, the reason Obama’s stimulus didn’t work was because he spent 7 trillion and it all went to waste. Also, the reason I cant afford that Jeep Liberty is cuz the damn thing appears to cost $210,000.
Factorz of 10 are hawrd.
DougJ
@Hugin & Munin:
Megan McArdle is a social scientist?
beltane
She is Jane Galt. Jane Galt dreams big dreams, and thinks important thoughts. Jane Galt has no need for plebeian concerns like mathematics. Why are you treading on Jane Galt’s freedoms by chaining her to facts?
flounder
This thread needs a pick me up from America’s Concern Troll:
Face
I’d love to ask this modern-day Euler for a $2000 loan, then watch as she accepts my $200 repayment.
DougJ
@flounder:
Honestly, comparing McMegan and Bobo to him is unfair to McMegan and Bobo, as awful as they are.
arguingwithsignposts
Except when she continues to make them over and over and over and over and over again.
RSA
A glibertarain screed against tenure. How unexpected. Yawn.
That's Master of Accountancy to You, Pal (JMN)
Odd, then, that when I point out people’s (like, say, the site owner’s) math oopsies, I get treated to the exact same response McMegan gave.
Punchy
ZMOG TOO MENY XEROS TO SUBTRACKD!
silentbeep
I actually do blame McMegan for her losing her shit, because her attitude has contributed to a really nasty atmosphere over there. Either she says absolutely nothing when people talk to others like that commenter talked to her, or she blows up – it’s a weird, schizophrenic mod persona she has and it makes for really unpleasant reading.
Fleas correct the era
The thing is, she is immune. How rare are not-stupid McMeganisms? All of her ilk are immune. Who gets fired these days? People that the people-who-make-stupid-remarks make stupid remarks about.
catclub
“I wish that truly innumerate people would shut the fuck up about everything related to quantitative analysis.”
you had me after everything.
Trentrunner
Keep reading McArdle’s response in the comments.
She has an EPIC meltdown, essentially claiming that because she (McArdle) grew up in a family of academics (a lie, btw), she’s making a better argument.
It’s stunning. She’s a douche.
Dave C
@flounder:
Sweet Jesus, what a douche. As somebody who got A’s in two semesters of college-level calculus and still doesn’t consider himself particularly talented at math, I literally cannot understand how somebody whose opinion I’m allegedly supposed to take seriously could be that incompetent at so important a subject.
Edit: to make sound less stupid-like.
Shinobi
I mean, not really. If I say something incredibly stupid and then insist that I never have to acknowledge that I was wrong, even I would say I probably deserve to be fired for being incapable of acknowledging actual fact.
People who inhabit a fantasy world do not deserve to remain employed when there are people who exist on this plane of reality desperate for work.
I mean, this IS a meritocracy, isn’t it?
Tonal Crow
@Dave C: Ya. Without basic math — *including basic probability and statistics* — a person can’t understand many vital public policy issues.
Dork
Cant to math OR grammar, really? Would it pain her to write in f#ckin English?
Ash Can
LOL! It’s not ugly, it’s hilarious. That Hunting of the Snark link is priceless, including (and especially) the five-star comment by aimai. When the cleaning staff get to McArdle’s office this evening they’re going to wonder what the hell happened, and why broken shit and ripped-up papers are strewn everywhere. Too, too funny.
Hugin & Munin
No, but everybody has a sacred cow. Your is obviously maths, but I have a hard time getting excited about it.
Sentient Puddle
What the fuck? Setting aside the idiotic division error, I can’t even figure out why she’s trying to use that as a statistic. Here was the original article from Dylan Matthews, and where the $75 billion figure comes from:
Which is to say, even miscalculating the fact that everybody in the country gets a $25 check missed the entire point. The suggestion was unemployment benefits, which don’t go to the entire population.
And if you want to dig deeper into the point of the article, the graph shows other forms of stimulus that you can put the money toward. Say, if you do all you want to do with the $75 billion for unemployment benefits but still want to get more stimulus, or if you want to redirect the new revenue from the tax cut lapse into other forms of stimulus. In this case, I guess the statistic Megan uses kinda sorta makes a bit of sense, but (a) you’re still not cutting a $25 check, and (b) the estimated multiplier is greater than 1, so the actual economic impact is greater than $250 per person.
So yeah, she obviously sucks at math, but I think there’s a much bigger fail going on here.
Garrigus Carraig
I’ll wait while you come up with the last wingnut to acknowledge & correct his/her own error.
Take your time.
Ann B. Nonymous
I’m still waiting for Andrew “what are the odds of that ever happening to me?” Sullivan to recant The Bell Curve.
No hope.
Tonal Crow
@Hugin & Munin: Well, if an argument purports to be based on math, and the math is badly wrong, doesn’t that invalidate the argument?
DougJ
@Hugin & Munin:
On what basis do you think, say, economic decisions, should be made if not on the basis of numbers?
Do you believe in faith-based economics or faith-based science?
DougJ
@Sentient Puddle:
Good point.
flounder
Heh indeedy ’bout sums it up.
Hugin & Munin
Rather not the point. McCardle’s a known fool and people make complicated decisions about stuff they know nothing about all of the time.
This is about DougJ’s ox getting gored.
DougJ
@Hugin & Munin:
You didn’t answer my question.
EDIT: I can’t keep track — are you TZ or Church Lady?
Bella Q
As shortstop noted a poster in a thread a day or two ago (roughly):
At the time I thought that was a pretty good description not only of the poster in question, but also the most recent former governor of Alaska, whom I like to think of as the Great Northern GOP Grifter. It also describes McMegan. Impressive hat trick there, shortstop. Oops, it appears I may have mixed sports metaphors. But appearances and all that…
Redshirt
Aggressively stupid is the new Black.
dms
Aw, come on. This is a sideshow. Who, among the heartland, knows the stupid Megan?
Let’s focus on how the left didn’t come to the defense of Shirley Sherrod.
Are you some kind of numbers, self-absorbed twat?
Sentient Puddle
So…she updated the original post, along with this addendum:
Is she typing out that blog on a freakin’ 386 or something?
kb
McArdle habitually and consistently get things wrong.
To be fair if she’s referring to the USA then she’s usually wrong.
If she’s talking about foreign issues, then she is always and without exception wrong. And horribly and pathetically wrong.
Seriously as a non-american i’ve never come across a blogger who so consistently makes assertions that 30 seconds with google would prove to be not true.
I have issues with Baltimore
This is the first time I’ve ever looked at anything by McMegan, and, whoa, is she being outclassed in the comments. There’s a commenter on that post, zosima, who’s laying down the law (wait, what? they use div, grad, and curl in economics? well, shit!). In fact, he tells her (wish I knew how to link to this):
Her response is an intergalactic meltdown:
My eyes just rolled right out of my head.
burnspbesq
@Ann B. Nonymous:
Just curious, and not specifically directed at you, but I wonder how many people who think “The Bell Curve” is The Worstest Book of All Time actually read it.
arguingwithsignposts
@Sentient Puddle:
Wow. Just wow.
Hugin & Munin
If you think that innumeracy is the biggest problem facing this country, you’re probably in a math department.
DougJ
@Hugin & Munin:
And your point is?
silentbeep
@Trentrunner:
yeah I was wondering, who are these academics? Extended family? Cause her father wasn’t an academic.
I mean it was a really weird meltdown that boiled down to “I know ’cause of my family and who the hell are you? stfu” That whole this is unseemly. She needs to pull herself together, quit the hysterics and get a coherent, logical argument, not fall back on the mere existence of academics that she only knows ’cause she’s related to them. Just a weirdo is what she came across as, she’s getting as batty as most of her commenters.
arguingwithsignposts
@Hugin & Munin:
Unfortunately, it is a huge problem, although not likely the “biggest” problem. And I’m not in the math department. But I see sooooooo many examples of journalists abusing numbers it’s almost sick.
Germane Jackson
Yawn. MM’s an idiot, conservatives fail upwards, water’s wet, etc.
Tonal Crow
@arguingwithsignposts: And what computer is she using? I sense a lie. Windows XP here, and the builtin calculator can represent at least 10^31. Mac users? Linux users? Let’s do some journalism!
Bella Q
I rarely read McArdle unless I’m feeling my blood pressure getting a little low. But calling her outclassed by the commenters in that thread is being kind. And mostly, they seemed to be trying to be polite. The meltdown was Chernobyl level. How anyone could have any professional respect for someone who interacts that way is beyond me. Clearly she’s not an at will employee.
Corner Stone
@That’s Master of Accountancy to You, Pal (JMN):
That’s because nobody likes you either. Douchebag.
arguingwithsignposts
@Tonal Crow:
at least x,000,000,000,000,000 on my Mac with Snow Leopard. And that’s the built-in calc. WTF, McMeghan?
Sentient Puddle
Don’t have my Mac on me at the moment, but I’m guessing the Dashboard calculator? I might be misremembering, but doesn’t that one at least show commas? Seems to me that seeing 750 before the first comma should’ve been a tip-off (if she was using a Mac). That and her math should’ve given her $2.50 in this case.
Brachiator
Fairness? You have got to be kidding. She regularly writes about countries with budgets in the trillions of dollars and she is going to claim that a bad calculator ate her decimal places?
In the olden days, when people used slide rules, they had to use their brains to keep track of decimal places.
Corner Stone
@Bella Q:
I hope we can keep this “at will” bit running a little while longer.
It was completely irrelevant to the other thread, but I like where this is going otherwise.
brad
But in Megan’s world being wrong makes you a bigger expert than someone who understood the situation in question accurately initially. That means every mistake she makes just proves how much smarter she is than you, or will be once she gets around to learning why she was wrong, a process which currently has a… she’s 37 and stuck in a Galtian intellectual adolescence, so let’s say about a 25 year backlog.
Seriously tho, she’s actually made that argument about what her many mistakes demonstrate.
arguingwithsignposts
@Sentient Puddle:
I was using the Calculator application. WTF uses the dashboard calculator, anyway?
Germane Jackson
I blame the NAACP for this
SiubhanDuinne
@arguingwithsignposts:
Remind me not to be riding in her car with her when the odometer rolls over from 99,999 to 0.
Sentient Puddle
@arguingwithsignposts: I do, mostly because I need it really infrequently, and it’s more convenient for me to pull up the Dashboard than launch another application. I suppose I could just leave it open the whole time, but I’m sort of a stickler about keeping my dock tidy.
Midnight Marauder
@silentbeep:
You are asking for something that, literally, can never be.
This is exactly who she is.
Schad
Pointing out that you require a calculator to figure out that tricky equation is even worse. Quick hint for next time Megan, if you…know how many zeros are in each number (please, tell me you do, Megan) and master the tricky 75/30 bit at the same time, you can work it out all by your lonesome without breaking out the technology.
Learned that in grade three, I believe. Then again, I come from a long line of intellectuals…four generations of astronauts, to be exact.
arguingwithsignposts
10000000000000000 – as far as Calculator goes. But there are free apps that have higher numbers.
SiubhanDuinne
@thread:
We could have some fun with her by tossing some currency conversions her way.
The metric system, also too.
Corner Stone
J-Mike!!
Davis X. Machina
@SiubhanDuinne: Then the car moves backwards, I believe.
Corner Stone
Oh, sorry. Thought this was my Astro’s thread.
arguingwithsignposts
@Sentient Puddle:
Quicksilver is your friend. :)
ETA: While I can see the argument for using the dashboard calculator for some basic calculations (mileage, perhaps?) when you’re supposedly doing *real journalism* one would thing you should use a real calculator.
Nath3an
Members of the editorial staff at The Atlantic use Mac computers. Members of the web staff are probably using the same thing.
On the most recent version of Mac OS X, there are two calculators that are part of the standard install.
The Dashboard Widget has the limitation described by our host: it can only display 9 digits. If you attempt to type in a number with more than 9 digits, it will ignore all digits entered after the ninth.
The Calculator application, which is installed in the Applications folder, displays 17 digits.
Silver
Maybe when the Atlantic publisher pays off the ponies he bought for one of his other writers, he can get Megan a big-boy calculator?
Tonal Crow
Wow. I wonder how many important errors THAT calculator helped generate. Earth to Steve Jobs: that limitation is tres stupid.
Hugin & Munin
Sure, education could be improved across the board, including in the maths, but what I’m not feeling is DougJ’s personal sense of outrage. It’s too easy.
Althought the hurt defensiveness is kinda cute.
KevinNYC
Her Math is really bad. Like jump off the page bad. This wasn’t a difficult equation she was doing. You just had to know the answer to this:
How many people are in the United States?
A. 3 billion
B. 300 million
RSA
@Sentient Puddle:
Just tried it; that’s exactly the case. (As others have said, though, this is something someone should be able to do in their head.)
Midnight Marauder
@Brachiator:
Amen. This is like a long licensed doctor telling you they made the wrong diagnosis because they were flipping through one of their med. school books in a hurry and matched the wrong illness to your symptoms. You’re acting like the problem was their specific action in this circumstance (my calculator doesn’t have enough digits/I read the wrong diagnosis in the guide book) as opposed to the inherent idiocy of their respective failures (McMegan is utterly incompetent in all discussions involving specifics, especially math/the doctor is an abject failure as a medical professional).
Both should seek careers in other areas.
silentbeep
o.k. trying to quantitative analysis on your mac is not really going to cut it. if she wants to do that kind of analysis, fabulous, she should go quit the atlantic blog and go become a social scientist and learn how to do statistics properly. Hey i don’t know my shit either, but that’s why I don’t dare blog about public policy in such detail because I know I simply don’t have the chops. McMegan’s arrogance and pomposity has no basis in reality.
arguingwithsignposts
@silentbeep:
SPSS has a Mac version. Also, VMWare. Honestly, the problem isn’t that it’s a Mac, but that developers haven’t written the software.
nick
Just tried out the Calculator (gcalctool) in my Ubuntu 10.04 desktop (64-bit Linux). It managed to add 7,000,000,000,000,000 + 1 as 7,000,000,000,000,001 just fine. I figure after billion-trillions (is that the right way? And is there a proper word for this level?), it could handle this calculation just fine…
Mayur
The woman has an IQ of about 80.
In the ideal libertarian paradise she extols, she’d be eating out of garbage cans and people who actually have the ability to divide $75b by 300m in their heads (I know I can, and I’m sure most of you can) would have a shot at her (rather plum) job.
Seriously, she angers me about 1000x as much as the Limbaughs or Becks of the world. They’re at least, to a certain extent, honest bigots.
aimai
Its not the math that bugs me–though of course this error is nothing compared to whatever that other great Megan Quote was “trivially true but…” or “it was a hypothetical.” What bugs me about Megan’s writing is that the entire thing, essentially, is bad faith. From the get go. She never takes up any subject which might lead a sane person to conclude that
1) legislation is good
2) regulation is good
3) taxes are good
4) poor people shouldn’t just starve and die
without beginning her argument by pointing into the distance and starting a fake discussion about something tangential. Her intellectual method, if we can call it that, is identical to that of the frightened squid: see something frightening, shoot out cloud of black ink, hide until dangerous moment has passed by. But for Megan the frightening thing is always the moral implications of her argument, and she is safe the moment her commenters join her in (to mix my metaphors) spiraling down the rabbit hole of her non sequiteurs, vapid observations, and meandering thought processes. She is blithely unaware of other human beings, their histories, their lives, their needs. And she is blithely unaware of her own life since she relentlessly fails to practise what she preaches, or even acknowledge the contradictions (as in the famous set of threads, limned or hymned or pilloried by Susan of Texas somewhere) where she describes her outrage that other renters availed themselves of the same rent protections which she used and reported on using, when she was a renter. She is the very definition of a glibertarian. And deserves no mercy.
aimai
arguingwithsignposts
@arguingwithsignposts: Am I wrong in my understanding that the number I posted above from Calculator is more than 1 billion.
Germane Jackson
Numbers in the billions are technically true but collectively nonsense, if you ask me.
DougJ
@Hugin & Munin:
If you’re hoping to provoke a McMegan-style freakout, no dice — I’ve already had a drink.
But if you’re TZ or Church Lady, I can try to fire one up for old times’ sake.
silentbeep
@Midnight Marauder:
yes you are probably right. in my mind, even if she were right that it was just 25 dollars extra aka “a pizza party’ I thought to myself “for some people that’s a phone bill that can get paid, an extra pair of pants for their kids, another dinner bought at the grocery store, end” I don’t have the kind of privilege that she has, and grown up with, to think an exra 25 bucks is for a “pizza party.” But whatever, I know she’s in her own private idaho. sigh.
Bullsmith
Why should someone who blogs on the economy for a major magazine need to know how to use a calculator? It’s class warfare.
General Stuck
@DougJ: sounds more like fuckhead with a dictionary.
silentbeep
@arguingwithsignposts:
obviously she didn’t know that. doing it on a mac, without the knowledge of the right software isn’t going to cut it. the point being: she still needs to learn a thing or two about quantitative analysis and how to do it properly, including the right software IF she still wants to go to the MAC route. My central point still stands.
Corner Stone
@DougJ:
What’s on tap for tonight?
demimondian
@Hugin & Munin: I’d like to see you get a degree in any of the social sciences without passing prob and stat, and without having a basic grasp of regression analysis.
But, hey, it’s fun to talk about areas you don’t know about, isn’t it? Just ask Richard Cohen, Bobo, or McMegan.
DougJ
@Sentient Puddle:
That’s right, but I do believe her story. I just think that it would have been better to double check immediately after being corrected instead of waiting 9 hours and threatening to ban the people who corrected you.
Mnemosyne
You know, I suck at math, too, but I don’t claim to be an economics blogger.
Scamp Dog
@Sentient Puddle: No, a Pentium!
Ok, you whipper-snappers, back in the ’90s, Intel made this chip with a bug in its floating point unit…oh never mind, just get off my lawn.
Cris
I agree wholeheartedly. You could make this same argument for almost any expenditure.
For example: I live in a county with about 90,000 people. If you took $18 million and divided it up, you’d give everybody $200. People would buy a few meals, or make their car payment for a month, or fill their car with gas a couple times. Okay. Nothing wrong with that.
But if you took that same amount of money and gave it to a single recipient, we would have a performing arts center, infrastructure that would benefit the community for years to come.
The two don’t compare. It’s a nonsense argument.
DougJ
@General Stuck:
I’ll pass then. I’ll flame with TZ, out of respect, but not fuckhead.
Slocum
The “my calculator don’t have ’nuff zeros” thing is getting me more and more pissed the more I think about it. It’s called “factoring” you ignorant ding-dong.
Business degress are worthless and business education is intellectual poison.
Arclite
She shows up in posts so much that I think that McMegan needs her own tag.
Can anyone come up with something clever?
Comrade Scrutinizer
—
Fuck the zeroes. Learn how exponents work, and use them.
Slocum
Her Math is really bad. Like jump off the page bad. This wasn’t a difficult equation she was doing. You just had to know the answer to this:
How many people are in the United States?
A. 3 billion
B. 300 million
@KevinNYC: It’s obviously the second. More zeroes, duh.
KevinNYC
Um, you don’t need a calculator for that math.
It’s $75 billion distributed by the number of people in the US which is roughly 300 million. 75 is divisible by 3 which makes the whole thing pretty easy.
75,000,000,000 divided by
300,000,000
Toss out the unnecessary zeros and it’s 750 divided by 3. If your job is to cover economics and you can’t do that math in your head, you suck at your job.
Sentient Puddle
@arguingwithsignposts: Of course I use Quicksilver! After I first got a Mac, I showed it off to my Mac-obsessed friend, and the first thing he did was hit control-space, then stared blankly at the screen for a moment. “Why the fuck don’t you have Quicksilver installed?!” he almost screamed.
@DougJ: Yeah, I don’t know where I was going with all that. Some weird geek-out over 32-bit integers, maybe. How she got to that wrong number isn’t as important as the fact that she did and then freaked out.
Arclite
Of course the Windows calculator has gone into the trillions for a decade now. Just sayin’.
Llelldorin
Are you sure? I just tested it in the Mac calculator, and it worked fine.
arguingwithsignposts
@Sentient Puddle:
LOL. When I first got Quicksilver, I didn’t see its utility. Now, I do the same thing. I can’t for the life of me understand why Apple hasn’t integrated it into the system.
demimondian
@Arclite: And bc has done true infinite precision math since the Epoch. That doesn’t mean that it’s anything other than vile.
Midnight Marauder
@DougJ:
You are also a frequent reader of Politico.
I do not think this is a mistake.
Corner Stone
Ok, since DougJ doesn’t want to answer me, what is anyone else queuing up tonight for a little libational respite from the pervasive heatwave?
Midnight Marauder
@Arclite:
This is maybe my favorite line from her entire meltdown:
Pure, unadulterated hilarity right there.
Jason Baur
It works fine on a Mac if you have your calculator in scientific mode, which there’s no excuse for not doing if you plan on using big numbers. Or any thing beyond basic arithmetic. The display holds 35 digits.
Llelldorin
Oh, I see–she must have used the Dashboard calculator, which is really nothing more than a toy, and not the actual Calculator application.
mnpundit
Huh. The calculator ON MY PC goes MUCH HIGHER THAN 75,000,000,000.
Go figure.
arguingwithsignposts
@Jason Baur:
Wow, didn’t know that (re: scientific mode). thanks.
Sentient Puddle
@arguingwithsignposts: Right, I was like that for at least a few months after first installing it. I think my moment of epiphany came when I was on my sister’s Mac and discovered the hard way she didn’t have it installed. Having to navigate through the Finder, then Quicksilver made total sense, and now I have a similar thing installed on my Windows machines.
chowkster
Do you need a computer to divide 75 billion by 300 million? Seriously? This is 2nd grade math!
merelycurious
Are you sure you didn’t use the calculator widget? The actual calculator in your applications folder easily handles this range of numbers and exponents (and has scientific and programmer modes)
The dashboard widget when you hit F-12 is just a super basic calculator.
chowkster
75000000000/300000000 = 750/3 = 250.
Why do you need a calculator for this? This is astounding.
arguingwithsignposts
While I believe her story, it’s only more evidence that she doesn’t know what the hell she’s doing. She can’t even use a basic calculator and yet she’s the economics blogger for the Atlantic and American Public Media puts her on all the time as an “expert” on Marketplace.
head/desk.
Tonal Crow
@chowkster: Not only do rightist pundits need a calculator for that, they don’t notice when the calculator doesn’t work, they don’t bother checking their results, and, to cap it off, they insult the people who point out their errors and then brag about their supposedly-illustrious pedigrees.
Just Some Fuckhead
@DougJ: If it was me, I’d point out your post titles should be capitalized and half yer front page posts should be comments in someone else’s thread.
Tonal Crow
@Just Some Fuckhead: Hey! Welcome back, fuckhead! I’ve been missin’ ya!
DickSpudCouchPotatoDetective
@DougJ:
You’re only saying that because I still owe you money.
And on that subject, shouldn’t we go double or nothing on the upcoming election?
DickSpudCouchPotatoDetective
@chowkster:
Duh, because we don’t have 750 fingers?
Corner Stone
@Corner Stone: I’m having bourbon. The rest of you can go to hell. You go to hell and you die!
SiubhanDuinne
@Mayur:
Or 8. Or 800. Whatever.
RSA
@demimondian:
Your memory probably goes back to dc as well, which I think predates bc, and is even more vile. Being reverse polish. With no feedback unless you request it, if I remember correctly:
$ dc
75000000000
300000000
/
p
250
J.W. Hamner
I honestly don’t care that much about the error itself… everybody makes those… yes, even people with advanced mathematics degrees have misplaced a decimal point or two.
It’s refusing to admit the mistake and totally losing her mind over a simple error that is a complete train wreck.
Mayur
@SiubhanDuinne: I didn’t mean to invoke matoko_chan; my point is that she’s a numbnuts. It’s pretty well demonstrated by, well, ALL her writing.
On a related note: What’s the beef with just owning up to the fact that some (many?) among the punditocracy are just dumbasses? They don’t all have to be some combination of misunderstood intellectual/evil genius. I have a resume that’s more than equal to McMegan’s and I don’t consider myself a Nobel Prize candidate; I know a lot of folks who are in the same boat whom I’d consider utter idiots. At some point or another, we just need to recognize how vapid these people are.
Jimmy
My mac Calculator can display 15 digits, which I think is 1 less than a quadrillion. Also, it does Scientific notation above this, so any decent “academic” can add numbers up to a googol without much problem. Also, since we’re using approximate values, how hard is it to take 75,000 and divide by 300? Or 750 / 3.
You would think a highly trained academic economist could do simple math, without using a calculator?
Anonymous37
If Megan’s calculator won’t go into the billions, and therefore she entered 750 million when she meant to enter 75 billion, wouldn’t she have come up with $2.50 as the answer?
I’m going to go out on a limb here: I’m willing to say that it’s no big deal that she screwed up the math, or at least it’s a forgiveable mistake. Her problem, as far as I’m concerned, is that she kept compounding it. She should have had the sense to be embarrassed when she admitted that she used a calculator and still fucked it up. And then she should have shut the fuck up about how the $75 billion amounted to one pizza party per person, because either that means that she thinks pizza parties cost $250 apiece, or she somehow managed to fuck up the math a second time.
By the way, did anyone else have a TARP flashback? Remember all those people who were somehow convinced that $700 billion was equivalent to more than $100,000 per American?
Good times, good times.
Don K
Okay, maybe it’s because I’m an old fogey who grew up in the era of slide rules, but I got used to the idea of always checking order of magnitude before going with a result. And I held to that during a college Econ major as well as a career in business (trust me, your boss thinks you’re an idiot if you’re off by a factor of ten).
Anyway, the easy check is 300 million times 10 is 3 billion (oops, too small). Try 300 million times 100: 30 billion (that’s better). Now what’s 75 billion divided by 30 billion – 2.5. Okay then, 2.5 times 100 =250 = 75 billion divided by 300 million.
Alternatively, 75 divided by 300 = 0.25. And 1 billion divided by 1 million = 1000. So 75 billion divided by 300 million = 0.25 times 1000 = 250. See? Easy. You can do it in your head, without aid of a calculator.
Slocum
@J.W. Hamner:
No. You are wrong. The error itself making it on to the website is reason enough to weld her into an iron box and drop it in the Mariana Trench. Twice.
Anonymous37
Dammit, how did J.W. Hammer beat me to the punch? Great minds and all that.
Tom
Folks, if you want a calculator, just type the math into google like so: 75000000000/300000000
Just Some Fuckhead
@Slocum: We can tell her it’s only 3600 feet deep.
Ann B. Nonymous
@burnspbesq: I thought it was unbelievably and self-evidently shoddy when it first came out. The do-it-yourself appendices! Like learning constitutional law from Glen Beck.
Murray is not someone I would consider a terribly reputable social scientist–he has a clear track record of choosing the most tendentiously retrograde interpretation of data in the face of further evidence.
Keynes–a very bright man–famously said, “When the facts change, I change my mind.” Then, because he was something of an asshole as well, he added, “What do you do?” But the greater asshole is the person who sticks with something he knows is wrong to serve his ego or his ideology. Most likely in Sullivan and Murray’s case, both.
(According to one of the theologies I grew up with, Sullivan is sinning against the Holy Ghost. He can’t plead ignorance, because he’s been informed of the truth, but he resists merely for the sake of resisting.)
Midnight Marauder
@Anonymous37:
The problem with this analysis is that it fails to account for the fact that she does this on an incredibly regular basis. These aren’t some rare, “once in a blue moon” kind of instances; this is her standard operating procedure. So when you excuse the math being inherently flawed, what you are really doing is affording her more credibility that she actually deserves. I think aimai nailed it when she said this:
But the faulty math is the tool that allows her to put such patently illogical thoughts into some kind of obtuse, convoluted notion that is supposed to resemble a “point.” Instead, she just spits out obviously incorrect math and resorts to composing the written equivalent of a total massacre of whatever “logic” she was attempting to convey.
Anonymous37
@ Midnight Marauder:
Look, if you’re going to sit there and argue that McArdle is a completely useless blogger and it’s an embarrassment that she covers the business and economics beat for The Atlantic, you’re not going to get any disagreement from me.
gwangung
What? Megan doesn’t have Excel????
Midnight Marauder
@Anonymous37:
Well then…touche.
Arclite
@Midnight Marauder:
I see, so it’s like the movie Twins. She ended up with all the bad DNA…
Mark S.
My life has been much fuller since I began ignoring McArdle. SHE HAS A FUCKING MBA. SHE DOESN’T ACTUALLY KNOW VERY MUCH ABOUT ECONOMICS. SHE DOESN’T ACTUALLY KNOW VERY MUCH ABOUT ANYTHING.
Sorry, but I’ve found getting pissed off at how this ignoramus got a gig at the Atlantic wasn’t doing me any good, so I just make it a point to ignore her.
Uriel
@flounder:
And that, in a nutshell, explains 90% of passes for “journalism” in this country, and 100% of Richard Cohen’s career.
gordonsowner
Many good comments here on why you should be able to do this math in your head correctly or, lacking that, to within an order of magnitude.
Failing that (emphasis on ‘fail’), you can go to Google and search ‘online calculator’, this is the second link that comes up is: http://www.metacalc.com/ . This goes to 75 billion.
Now, I don’t mean to sound like a ‘in my day’ griper, but my Grandpa went to school until 8th grade in a one-room schoolhouse, and was a farmer who did many calcs with acreages and yields. He never dealt with billions, but he taught me the ‘zeros cancellation’ trick to make problems simpler, along with some other math-in-the-head tricks.
I hope that the next time she goes off on school vouchers and the failure of the public school system, someone points out what sort of mad math skillz a private education got her.
Anonymous37
@ Midnight Marauder:
Yeah, I was going to write a second sentence, then I realized that if we argue about Megan McArdle, our IQs drop a few points and the terrorists win. Let us then, in our separate locations, raise our alcoholic beverages and drink a toast to McArdle’s stupidity: the one constant in our ever-changing world.
DougJ
@aimai:
The quality of mercy is not strained.
DougJ
@DickSpudCouchPotatoDetective:
Sure, what’s the bet?
DougJ
@SiubhanDuinne:
Win.
Midnight Marauder
@Anonymous37:
It is done.
+1
Anne Laurie
@burnspbesq:
I read Andrew Sullivan’s original excerpt in the New Republic, and then I read the book to see if it was just a “really bad editing” problem. That book really is a top ten contender for “Worst Supposedly Science-Based Work Ever Published”. I am the opposite of mathmatically adept — had to take second-year high school trigonometry three times — but even *I* could tell the authors were screwing around with the numbers.
Nylund
I don’t see why a calculator was even needed.
75,000,000,000
300,000,000
cancel out the zeros:
75,0
00,000,0003
00,000,000750 divided by 3.
That is quite doable in your head, or at least, it should be for someone with an MBA from U. of Chicago.
Hugin & Munin
What, I can’t be my own?
The point is that “MM is wrong” ain’t heavy lifting, and “math prof decries innumeracy” is kinda tame, too.
And Church Lady? Really?? Well, then, fuck you, too!
Anne Laurie
@silentbeep:
Megan gets paid to post her
stupidopinions andinaccuratemath for all to read. You (and I, and DougJ) are sitting here mocking her for free. By her Objectivist standards, this makes her “objectively” smarter than the three of us put together. C.R.E.A.M. is not just a slogan for McArdle, it’s a guiding philosophy.Nylund
I think Megan must hold the world record for how much time is wasted by people pointing out her mistakes.
Any other idiot would just get ignored, but she has an uncanny ability to sucker smart people into wasting their time to prove her wrong.
She’s like a siren, and the world would be better off if , like Odysseus, we could all learn to tie ourselves to the mast and resist the urge to fix her.
In part, I blame the circle-jerk atmosphere of the Atlantic. It makes it hard to ignore her when a dozen people link to her as if she knows what the heck she is talking about.
You’d think by now that the other writers at the Atlantic would be upset by how badly her mistakes tarnish the Atlantic as a whole. Or maybe, by setting the bar so low, she makes them all look smarter in comparison.
DickSpudCouchPotatoDetective
@DougJ:
I dunno. I was thinking in terms of House seats.
How many will Dems lose/ Reps gain?
Now, I am already into you for $100. So the double down has to be rigged in my favor, because I am not made of money, for crying out loud.
I am not sure how to do that and get away with it. I was hoping you could help me out with that.
So to start, how about you spot me 10 seats and I bet you that the Dems don’t lose the House?
( crosses fingers )
liberal
@Brachiator:
That’s what I don’t understand. Given the topics I assume she typically discusses, is she really so boneheaded that she had to type all the zeros in both the numerator and denominator, instead of cancelling all or most of them out in her head first?
DougJ
@DickSpudCouchPotatoDetective:
I don’t think they’ll lose the House either, though. I’ll go double or nothing on anything you can think of where we disagree though. And we can keep going until we’re back to nothing in any case.
J.W. Hamner
@liberal:
Honestly, I do “quantitative analysis” for a living, and I’m not above typing extraordinarily simple arithmetic into an open Matlab window. While I’m not old enough to have used slide rules, I was (barely) before they allowed calculators for the SAT… though my college engineering program required you to purchase a graphing one. It was probably in college where I came to think of “doing math in your head” as basically a parlor trick with no real relevance to anything… and just stopped worrying about it.
Chris
@RSA: Yes, dc predates bc. In fact, originally bc was a wrapper for dc. (Mac bc is a modern GNU-based bc that does not invoke dc as a back end.)
Nonetheless, I actually like bc, and use it for a lot of things. Or I fire up python and use its interpreter to do arithmetic. But if you are stuck with only a browser, as others have noted up-thread, you can do arithmetic with google. Furthermore, google will handle units correctly for you. (For instance, try “2 gallons / 4 quarts”.)
DickSpudCouchPotatoDetective
@DougJ:
Okay, I shall ponder upon it.
Hob
@liberal:
Yes.
Easy money: “Hey Megan, I bet you $500 that I can do this math problem faster than you, and you can use your computer and I’ll use a pencil taped to my foot. OK? OK, it’s 200 million billion trillion divided by 20 million billion trillion.”
Megan (typing): two, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero…
Better yet: “I bet you I can figure out 200 schmazillion divided by 20 schmazillion and I don’t even know what a schmazillion is.”
Jamie
@Nylund:
Yeah.
Adding… If you’re a slightly arrogant
apologist for the ruling classMBA who can’t stop talking about your MBA whenever anyone calls you on your assumptions, and you like to talk about macroeconomics, which, you know, tends to involve big numbers some times, and especially if youare paid by your betters to make shit up in support of the Laffer curvehave opinions on tax policy, it might be a good idea to see how high your calculator can count.Heck, maybe one of her friends who make shit for a living can teach her scientific notation – she won’t have to order out for more fingers and toes that way.
matoko_chan
And while i am having a hate-on for the bourgie conservatives, i wanna give a shout out to peter suderman, mcmegans clueless wanker of a husband.
there is NO WAY on god’s green earth that he EVAH was into screamo because he has never heard of Sonny and FFTL.
what a poseur.
hes a MPB ridden 28 yr old wannabe that is married to a stupid cow that has amazingly become the exemplar of female conservative intellect….well not that there is a lot of selection.
jvill
Isn’t she an MBA? An MBA without Excel?
The University of Chicago would be proud.
ScentOfViolets
Yet another take on the innumeracy displayed by this calculation: If you take 75 billion and divide it by the number of people in the U.S., you should know right away that the result has to be bigger than 75, not less. Obviously, since 75 billion divided by 1 billion is 75, and there are less than a billion people living in the U.S.
Iow, if you get a figure like 150 instead of 250, that’s still a fairly big mistake, but you might not recognize it right off. But getting a number less than 75? Not only is that a big mistake, it’s an instantly obvious one as well.
Manidest
@Sentient Puddle:
I just pulled up the dashboard calculator on my Mac. Indeed stops at 900 Million.
mclaren
Well, there you have it. Republicans don’t know or care how much money America is pissing away on tax cuts for the rich or the military-industrial complex because their “calculators don’t into the billions.”
It’s like living on the planet of the apes.
Dayv
I hate the OS X dashboard and it’s tossed-off wdiget. Finding out that the calculator widget is so subpar only adds to this feeling.
Usually, I just do my math through a google search. It’s amazingly useful.
http://www.google.com/search?q=75+billion+%2F+309%2C794%2C000
If you want an actually worthwhile Mac OS X calculator app, get Soulver.
Dayv
@Dayv: Seriously, I can’t get over how much I love google calculator. Check this out:
http://www.google.com/search?q=75+light+years+per+millenium+in+leagues+per+fortnight
I searched on: 75 light years per millenium in leagues per fortnight
I got: 75 (light years per millenium) = 4.89509931 × 10^9 leagues per fortnight
RSA
@Chris:
Thanks, Chris.
On the Google calculator, it’s not without its own faults, or at least it had a few issues in its early release. A couple of years ago I was searching for a university course Web page, with the course abbreviation csc and the number 454. So I typed that into Google, and it came back with the cosecant of 454, which surprised, confused, and then amused me. There was no link to pages containing those phrases. They’ve fixed that now.
grumpy realist
And this woman calls herself an economist?!
I would think the U. of Chicago (or wherever she got her degree from) would yank her degree out of simple embarrassment…..