A Wordsmith’s Plea for Numeracy

They announce on the radio that “three million people” have fled Venezuela.

Is that a lot?

Sounds like it; it has the word “million” in it after all.

But — quick; no Googling! — what’s the total population of Venezuela?

Perhaps you knew off the top of your head; I did not.

Turns out, it’s just over 30 million.

So . . . three million fleeing, total population of 30 million — ten percent of the population on the lam — yeah, that is a lot!

As with so many numbers that bombard us on a daily basis, however, delivered without context, without the information necessary for us to make a genuinely informed judgment about what the number really means, “three million” doesn’t tell us much on its own.

That sort of use — or misuse — of numbers is epidemic in the infosphere, and it distorts “what we know” and “how we view things.”

It is rare, for example, to hear daily stock market movement expressed as a percentage. We will instead be breathlessly told that “the market plunged (or soared) more than a thousand points today!”

Okay . . .

I was born in 1962; the Dow Jones Industrial Average didn’t rise above 1000 until I was twenty; at this writing, it…