Heroes and zeros: Mike Brooks urges the management accounting profession to enlist for the front line in the war against innumeracy and--arguably an even deadlier enemy--"dishonest numeracy".
| Author | Brooks, Mike |
| Position | Opinion |
It doesn't take much to get my attention.
All you have to do is imply that England have a reasonable chance of winning the World CuD (in any sport) or that my house is losing its value, and my antennae will immediately twitch. Which is why I sat up and paid attention recently when I saw a headline that read: "House price falls worry homeowners".
I shouldn't have bothered. When I read the offending article in more detail I was reassured to discover that the real story was not that house prices were plummeting but that the rate of house price inflation was easing off. So, I was not after all. about to be plunged into negative equity. Instead. I am simply getting richer at a slower rate than before. Phew.
Once my pulse returned to normal. started thinking about the nature and extent of the innumeracy that seems to pervade the media and, worse, appears to go largely unremarked upon. It occurred to me that it's somewhat odd that. in a society where traditional educational values now seem to count for so little, one is still more likely to incur the contempt of one's fellow citizens for misquoting Jane Austen than for mangling the figures.
I know. of course, that innumeracy is alive and well out there in the real world, and that only the anoraks are really concerned about whether the words and the figures tie up, It's not so long ago that a trade union leader was able to say how insufferable it was that nearly half the UK population was expected to struggle along on below average earnings without his numerical howler incurring the scorn of anyone who heard him. Sadly, most of his audience thought that his outrage was justified. Some still do, no doubt.
It's not only the popular end of the media spectrum that tolerates this disregard for the sanctity of the written number. I have seen many mathematical outrages in even the best of what used to style itself as "the quality press". Some of the more egregious examples include the following:
* Claims that the incidence of an event has decreased by five times.
* Failures to distinguish between percentage changes and changes in percentage,
* Graphs where the zero s suppressed in order to make a curve appear steeper than it really is.
* The statement that a value has increased by 20 per cent in one year and decreased by 20 per cent the following year, implying that this represents no change over the two years.
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The list goes on and on. I am sure that FM's readers can offer many more...
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