Math is hard...

[ducky19]

Ran across this little number tonight. Not a terrible article, but I was a little surprised at this part - both in the math and the fact that literally no one caught it before they published it!

"Let's compare. Say you have a balance of $5,000. With a 0.06% rate of return, you'd earn around 25 cents over the course of a year.

But with a 0.5% APY, you'd earn around $2 a year. Again, it's not a huge amount, but it's still eight times as much."

I daily get the feeling that the movie "Idiocracy" is coming to fruition.

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/28/earn-8-times-as-much-interest-with-a-high-yield-savings-account.html

[maizefolk]

My guess is they mixed up yearly and monthly interest?

0.5% of 5,000 would be $25 so each month that's "about" $2.

[fuzzy math]

Math... its what plants crave

[minority_finance_mo]

Man... That's just... Soul-crushingly bad. Especially coming from a "business news source." 🤦🏾

[WhiteTrashCash]

Back in my day, we cared whose ass it was and why it was farting!

[PDXTabs]

I like money.

[joe189man]

Math... its what plants crave

LOL

it sorta feels like we are in a slow motion train wreck with the end result a mix of Idiocracy and Atlas Shrugged

[dougules]

An alternate more optimistic theory is that we're maximizing use of talents in the labor force, so the people that are good at math are employed somewhere other than writing news articles.  Or maybe we're just all starting sliding off into a braindead dystopia.

[MoneyTree]

if you think that is atrociously bad, do you guys remember this gem?

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/mar/06/msnbc/bad-math-msnbc-bloombergs-ad-spending-wasnt-enough/

The tl;dr is that Michael Bloomberg spent $500 million on his campaign. Someone noted on Twitter that the US population was 327 million, and so concluded that Bloomberg could have given every American 1 million dollars.

Some news outlet picked this up and shared it, and even had a discussion on how incredible this was.

I still can't believe that this was picked up by a news outlet and spread around, did no one bother to say something?

[Monocle Money Mouth]

if you think that is atrociously bad, do you guys remember this gem?

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/mar/06/msnbc/bad-math-msnbc-bloombergs-ad-spending-wasnt-enough/

The tl;dr is that Michael Bloomberg spent $500 million on his campaign. Someone noted on Twitter that the US population was 327 million, and so concluded that Bloomberg could have given every American 1 million dollars.

Some news outlet picked this up and shared it, and even had a discussion on how incredible this was.

I still can't believe that this was picked up by a news outlet and spread around, did no one bother to say something?

Sell the sizzle, not the steak. That sounds more compelling than giving every citizen $1.53.

[Ron Scott]

I believe the British government once spent a lot of money to improve the diet of school children based on the statistical finding that half of them were below average in weight.

[maizefolk]

I believe the British government once spent a lot of money to improve the diet of school children based on the statistical finding that half of them were below average in weight.

One of my colleagues illustrated the challenge of childhood obesity by explaining that in the-state-I-live-in, more than 30% of children were above the 90th percentile of body mass index.

[ender]

I believe the British government once spent a lot of money to improve the diet of school children based on the statistical finding that half of them were below average in weight.

One of my colleagues illustrated the challenge of childhood obesity by explaining that in the-state-I-live-in, more than 30% of children were above the 90th percentile of body mass index.

This could be the case if the 90th percentile was calculated nationally.

[maizefolk]

That's a good point, and yes I agree that could have explained the statement. In fact the issue was a similar one of using a different reference population to define the percentiles.

Based on my memory of some follow up discussions and a little googling this morning, the CDC uses a criteria called BMI-for-age for childhood obesity. Within this metric "obesity is defined as a BMI at or above the 95th percentile for children and teens of the same age and sex." It certainly be rather hard to end childhood obesity if the top 5% of children are always going to be defined as obese. 

In fact, I later learned that all the percentiles they use are defined relative to a reference population of "US children who participated in national surveys from 1963-65 to 1988-94". Which is a reasonable sounding approach. The problem is no one talks about the reference population, hence the statements that, at first glance, appear mathematically self contradictory.