Ginandtacos missed it too:
The war will certainly cost more than the $60b and change that the President is asking for. But it is not going to run us several trillion dollars (though even if it did, that would work out to less than 0.1% of GDP over the next 20 years.)
When McMegan wrote the article, GDP was 10 trillion. So 2 trillion would come to 1% of 20 years of that, not 0.1%. This would be more excusable if she hadn’t spent half the piece whining about how 2 trillion was 20 percent of GDP.
clone12
Megan McArdle on the Titanic: “Sure there is an iceberg up ahead, but even if it were 3 miles long, the ship is still 10 times bigger. The free market build this ship and the free market will run over that pathetic little ice berg. I AM JANE GALT!”
dmsilev
Maybe she was assuming that under the rule of our forthcoming Glibertarian overlords, the invisible free hand of the market would inevitably result in a 10x increase of GNP? And that to her, this was so obvious that it didn’t even need to be mentioned?
Or, possibly, she’s a complete innumerate who assumes her conclusions without actually doing the math.
dms
Violet
Gawd, she’s an idiot. How can someone who supposedly writes about the economy and business be so consistently bad with numbers?
Of course this means she’s destined for a column at the New York Times or the Washington Post.
gnomedad
My fave:
Also, too, I didn’t know “consumer confidence” took the definite article, but IANAE.
PeakVT
Basically every number McAddled uses is a hypothetical.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Megan McArdle is the business and economics editor for The Atlantic.
Somewhere, Emerson and Longfellow are probably very sad, but I bet Mark Twain finds it pretty funny.
SpotWeld
@Violet: Becuase she only checks the math when it disagrees with her assumptions. It’s societial pressure that hold back the truely talented that force people to recheck numbers that agree with your pre-existing mindsets.
Mark S.
@Violet:
That would be funny if it weren’t true. I could see her replacing Krugman someday.
arguingwithsignposts
I think someone needs to do a calculator intervention.
Brachiator
Bad decimal point! Bad! Bad!
DougJ
@Mark S.:
I doubt it, but she may replace Robert Samuelson.
Ash Can
The people in charge of The Atlantic aren’t embarrassed easily, are they?
superking
Incidentally, GDP is about $14 trillion. I know this because I took the 20 seconds required to research this fact.
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/us.html
ellaesther
I’m sorry, you know I don’t usually do this, but:
OT ALERT OT ALERT!
Per TPM: “CIA Finds Interrogation Tapes… Under A Desk At Langley”
http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/08/cia_interrogation_tapes_found_under_desk.php?ref=fpa
(“Gov’t Twice Told A Judge Such Tapes Did Not Exist”)
Because how could I not tell you what I’d found? Indeed, I found TPM right here, under my desk.
Sentient Puddle
I’m beginning to think the problem does not in fact lie within her calculator. If I were bored, I’d peruse her archives to try and find more boneheaded errors like this. But I got a full life ahead of me, and have no reason to inflict something as such upon myself at such a young age.
Downpuppy
Sure you can do math & stuff, but McArdle is still better than you. She said so herself.
So there.
Larry Signor
Ed didn’t really miss this.
Why deconstruct a disaster? When McArdle does math she can’t use her toes lest she lose count of her fingers.
superking
@superking:
I’m an idiot. I thought the piece was about current McArdle post about the ongoing cost of the war in Afghanistan, which, for what it’s worth, is up to about $300 billion and likely to last another decade or four.
Mark S.
@Downpuppy:
Wow, the was really incoherent even by McMegan standards. The people who were right will think they were more prescient than the people who were wrong, which I guess Megan finds objectionable. But then there’s this abomination of a paragraph:
Who is “they”? The people who were right? I thought they had a pretty coherent explanation for why Iraq is fucked up; that was a large part of why they were against the war in the first place. Or is “they” the people who got it wrong? But why would they be flattering themselves?
Ugh! How does this woman write for the Atlantic?
beltane
@Mark S.: If “they” will have to look for a coherent explanation, it will have to be someplace else other than McMegan’s blog. That paragraph is almost Palinesque in its incoherence.
JohnR
@Mark S.:
Because the owners and editors no longer care about thoughtful writing – it’s all about the ideology, baby. Look at the rest of their stable any more. It’s like the NYT – a couple of thinking writers and a bunch of ideological fantasists. The WaPo has taken it a step further; Ezra Klein is just there as the token until he annoys some prominent Important Person beyond endurance.
McArdle is a sad joke – and I agree that Mark Twain would be mordantly amused. He rarely, if ever, underestimated the human ability to be pathetically foolish in pursuit of money and status.
Steve
The math error is even worse when you realize she started out the whole piece by criticizing Eric Alterman for his ridiculous prediction that the war would cost $2 trillion, because that’s 20% of GDP which is obviously way more than we would ever spend on anything.
Later in the same piece, she takes that same number which she just criticized for being 20% of GDP, and concludes that if you stretch it over 20 years it’s only 0.1% of GDP. Anyone can misplace a decimal point, but it seems like it would be really really hard to do in this context.
Stillwater
Kind of piling on here, but for those of you who haven’t clicked through all of Jonathan Schwarz’ (Tiny Revolution) links, there is this simultaneously fascinating, hilarious, yet repulsive effort from McMegan deconstructing herownself. (Read it, really, it’s quick since there are no maths to doublecheck.)
Mark S.
Maybe it was a typo and she meant over 200 years. That’s about when Paul Ryan’s budget gets balanced. Republicans aren’t afraid to look waaaaay into the future.
cursorial
I nominate “to the nearest order of Megantude” as the new benchmark for libertarian projection accuracy.
arguingwithsignposts
@Stillwater:
LOLWUT?
Comrade Dread
The stupid. It burns.
It should be required that anytime one of these wastes of human flesh open their mouths and cheer for war with the latest Hitler of the Day, their previous stupid statements on the last war are put up to the side of them as a nice contrast.
We can call it the shitometer.
Mark S.
@arguingwithsignposts:
Yeah, I’ve noticed a lot of humility in Megan’s writing lately.
mclaren
GDP isn’t 10 trillion either.
No one seems to have noticed that before the global financial crash, U.S. GDP was proudly announced as 13 trillion. So what happened to the extra 3 trillion?
It was never there. It was all accounting tricks, funny money, and it evaporated when the banks took all those writedowns for all those bad loans.
See, the way banks do accounting, an outstanding loan counts as profit…but if the loan goes bust and has to be written off, you have to take that profit off your balance sheet.
The dirty little story here is that a giant commercial real estate crash is waiting in the wings right now. And it’s going to be bigger than the home mortgage meltdown.
So another couple of trillion dollars of bogus nonexistent profits are gonna get written off when the upcoming commerical real estate meltdown hits, and that’ll take U.S. GDP down another notch.
My guess? By the time this whole financial crash winds down and the final accounting gets done, America won’t have a GDP of much more than 7.5 to 8 trillion dollars. The rest will all be funny-money creative accounting, Enron bullshit, phantom profits from liar loans that evaporate in the cold light of day.
2 trillion out of an 8 trillion dollar GDP is 25%. And you can bet your ass the Iraq war will cost more than 2 trillion. Stiglitz, the Nobel laureate former head of the World Bank, estimates the Iraq war’s cost at 3 trillion do far, and still climbing. But he didn’t factor in that whopping 750 million dollars for the U.S. embassy in Baghdad (the world’s largest American embassy, essentially a mini-fortress with its own armory, its own generating plant and water supply, its own army barracks…it dwarfs Saddam’s presidential palaces).
Figure at least 4 trillion for the total cost of the Iraq war before we’re done. That’s 50% of our likely GDP (as mentioned, current estimates of U.S. GDP are based on fantasy Enron accounting — the bad loans are still unwinding, and once they all shake out, I’d be damn surprised if U.S. GDP is more than 8 trillion).
20 years of 8 trillion = 160 trillion, 4 trillion is 1/40 of that, or 2.5% of the total. And 4 trillion is likely low for the total cost of the Iraq war since we’re in for the long term. American forces won’t have drawn down significantly for another 6 to 10 years, at least.
Stillwater
@arguingwithsignposts: LOLWUT?
Exactly. Lolwut. Just remarkable. I don’t even know how to concisely convey how fucked up she is. Or how fucked up it is that she can unselfconsciously admit how fucked up she is and yet retain the belief that her writing ought to be taken seriously.
MikeJ
Another McMegan Math fun fact: She claims $60 billion total for the war.
It costs roughly $1 million per soldier per year[1] to deploy American troops to Iraq. Obama has taken us from 150k to 50k in Iraq, saving $100,000,000,000 per year. The 50k troops left will cost $50,000,000,000 per year. In other words, the minimal deployment left in Iraq costs as much per year as she claimed the entire war would cost.
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/25/weekinreview/25bumiller.html?_r=1 says 1.1 million, although I found an article from 2008 that said $775,000. So let’s just use the nice round $1m.
Rock
I personally enjoy her “hippies can’t do math” condescending attitude coupled with her own massive mathematical mistakes which are then followed by her absolving herself because “any set of facts can tell two stories” or “it was a hypothetical, not a statistic”. It’s like performance art meant to show how screwed up the country is. It’s Misinfotainment.
PeakVT
@mclaren: Lighten up,
Francismclaren.PS: you don’t know what you’re talking about any more than McAddled. GDP data.
Brachiator
OT (but related) and WTF: Keeping in mind that the GOP keeps insisting that deregulation, low taxes for the rich, and getting out of the way of bidnisses doing their bidniss is all it takes to get the economy jumping, we have this (Banking execs say gov’t needs to back mortgages):
Apparently, banks don’t want to be in the lending business. They want to be in the profits and bonuses business.
Bill Arnold
Monty Python, paraphrased: No one expects an order of magnitude error.
Suffern ACE
Actually, was astounded by the things that I had forgotten about the start of this war. Good lord. It was only supposed to be six weeks long and cost a few hundred lives. Sure the powers that be knew that the occupation would be longer, but I honestly think it was the intention to plan this endeavor in six week increments.
So when the powers that be start talking about their planned “limited war” with Iran, why on Earth shouldn’t we just start beating them with sticks?
trollhattan
@cursorial:
Win! It will bookend nicely with the Friedman Unit.
trollhattan
Has McMegan recommended anybody be clubbed with a 2×4 lately, or is she now recommending a beatdown with either a toothpick or a telephone pole?
Rounding error.
Fargus
To be fair, 0.1% of GDP and 1% of GDP aren’t too different, and both are inconsequential, so what I said was technically nonsense, but collectively true.
[/facepalm]
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Brachiator:
There’s your problem right there. In an industry where special pleading and dishonestly talking up your book is regarded as a form of high art, Bill Gross is Picasso, Matisse and Leonardo Da Vinci all rolled up into one big enchilada of mendacious econo-trollery. Even banksters don’t believe a word that comes out of that man’s mouth.
Stefan
When McMegan wrote the article, GDP was 10 trillion. So 2 trillion would come to 1% of 20 years of that, not 0.1%.
It’s not a calculation, it’s a hypothetical.
DonkeyKong
Somewhere Larry Summers is chuckling to himself..
Brachiator
@trollhattan:
Fixed for McMegan Order of Decimal Ineptitude.
Robert Waldmann
The amazing thing isn’t that she can’t handle arithmetic. I understand that lots and lots of people are innumerate. The amazing thing is that she repeatedly attempts to wow her readers with her command of arithmetic — and fails.
How has she managed to fail to understand that she doesn’t have a grasp of big numbers ? I’d like to try whatever drug she’s on once or twice (when in a padded cell of course).
Phoenician in a time of Romans
When McMegan wrote the article, GDP was 10 trillion. So 2 trillion would come to 1% of 20 years of that, not 0.1%. This would be more excusable if she hadn’t spent half the piece whining about how 2 trillion was 20 percent of GDP.
And you’ll note that if you were able to come up with an economic policy that could consistently raise the rate of growth of GDP by 1% for 20 years, you’d be a friggin’ hero.
asiangrrlMN
@Stillwater: Oh my god. Just when I thought she could not irritate me more, you link to this. I read the first four and then stopped because it was pissing me off too much.
Batocchio
You missed it because McBargle works in volume. She slings so much BS because she’s hoping something will hit its target, or that she’ll simply wear her opponents down, like a 5-year old nagging at her mother incessantly for a John Galt action figure.
It can be hard to check every single thing she says, because fact-checking requires time, and McBargle is a prolific bullshitter who never stops for that. Plus, she packs in more bullshit per paragraph and sentence than even Bill Kristol. Pretty soon, you’re writing three paragraphs to dissect all the errors in one of hers. But to get even that far, you need to find the shred of an argument first beneath her crappy logic and incoherent writing. It’s really a pretty ingenious trap, in a Let’s-Destroy-All-of-Civilization-for-the-Glory-of-Ayn-Rand-and-Goldman-Sachs sorta way.
Stillwater
@Batocchio: …John Galt action figure.
This may damn me to hell, but I fucking want one!
mclaren
@Stillwater:
You can’t have one. It’s missing!