Math Is Hard: David Ignatius Edition

As we all know, the folks at the Washington Post have some trouble with arithmetic. Back in 2007 a lead editorial on NAFTA told readers that Mexico's GDP had quadrupled from 1988 to 2007. The actual increase was a bit more than 83 percent.

In the same vein, columnist David Ignatius sang the praises of Turkey's economy in the paper today. He told readers:

"its economy has grown an annual average of 5.3 percent since 2002, the fastest rate of any country in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development; gross domestic product has more than tripled."

Let's see, 5.2 percent growth for a decade? That translates into an increase of 66.0 percent in my neighborhood. If we go directly to the IMF's site we find that Turkey's GDP has increased by 61.8 percent over this period. That's pretty good (much better than Mexico), but quite far from tripling.

So chalk up another big arithmetic error in the measurement of developing country GDP in the WAPO. Math is so hard.

TyPo?
written by David, June 08, 2012 5:24

Maybe Ignatius mistyped: " ... gross domestic product has more than trifled."

Don't they cover compound interest, doubling times etc. in business math?

...
written by ltr, June 08, 2012 6:08

The Davos of the Middle East, however, is above all another chance for Turkey to showcase itself and promote itself as the model for a changing Arab world, in which Islamists are the rising power. In the opening session Mr Erdogan listed the achievements of his socially conservative government over the past decade, including average yearly growth of 5.3 per cent, the tripling of per capita income in dollar terms, and foreign direct investment which reached $16bn in 2011.

[Here is the Financial Times quote.]

ltr
written by fairleft, June 09, 2012 5:10

I'm not sure what your point is. Ignatius changed what Erdogan apparently said and/or didn't fact check. But, just looking at the dual assertions by Ignatius/Erdogan, you have to fact check that stuff. The exchange rate with the dollar is irrelevant, btw: the Turkish lira was revalued in 2004, but taking that into account now has a slightly weaker exchange rate, vis a vis the U.S. dollar, than it did in 2001.

kea
written by kea, June 09, 2012 5:25

It's worse. Errors like this show that, not only can Ignatius and the Washington Post not add, but that they have no feel for numbers at all. To anyone who does, that error sticks out like a sore thumb. You never see grammatical errors so gross.

give em a break
written by ezra abrams, June 09, 2012 7:33

two math errors in 5 years ?
you try putting out a paper every single day, it ain't as easy as it looks
if all they have are two math erros, thats probably batting like 0.99999
instead of aquick, snarky local blog post, how about someone get some a college class to go thru the paper and look at , say, 1000 numbers

Polymathism is Hard
written by Bart, June 09, 2012 8:34

He writes pretty decent thrillers and has an in at the CIA. He shouldn't try to master too many disciplines.

Snarky?
written by David, June 09, 2012 2:19

Ezra, Dr. Baker has a Ph.D. So do I. I hope that counts as having 'some college'? Mistakes are inevitable, sure. But the worst mistake it's to allow a mistake to remain unnoticed and, thereby be repeated. Glaring errors like this should be ridiculed, as otherwise they are repeated. This is not a round off error, it's a 500% error. 500%. Why look at 1000 articles? Anybody who truly understands statistics, a sample of 25 to 50 would be plenty. But, to me, the size of Ignatius' error indicates ignorance, not just an arithmetic error.

...
written by Ciaran , June 09, 2012 4:29

@ezra , There are mistakes and then there are mistakes. Everyone mispells things , gets confused etc . But that's such a howler it suggests a real degree of ignorance.

retiredeconomist
written by Mitchell Harwitz, June 11, 2012 8:58

Based on the two errors described, maybe WAPO editorial writers and David Ignatius should just ask their copy editors to divide descriptors like "tripled" or "quadrupled" by five. That would get them in the ballpark.

Math Is Hard: David Ignatius Edition

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