{"id":2152,"date":"2008-12-05T20:45:25","date_gmt":"2008-12-05T19:45:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/english.martinvarsavsky.net\/?p=2152"},"modified":"2008-12-05T20:49:31","modified_gmt":"2008-12-05T19:49:31","slug":"the-problem-with-absolute-numbers-and-crisis-journalism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/english.martinvarsavsky.net\/?p=2152","title":{"rendered":"The problem with absolute numbers and crisis journalism"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I just read this headline &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/news.yahoo.com\/s\/nm\/20081205\/bs_nm\/us_usa_economy_jobs_10\">Us Job Losses Worst since 1974<\/a>&#8220;.  Knowing that unemployment in the States is still way below the high of 11% in 1981 I checked the article and I see that the journalist chose to measure losses in absolute numbers and then compare.  But the overall number of people employed has grown so much since 1974 that absolute numbers are confusing.  I find this type of use of statistics misleading. I see it frequently in US journalism lately.  Let\u00b4s remember that mass psychology plays a big role in recessions.  Why push things?<\/p>\n<div id=\"mainphotoarea\"><\/div><div class=\"theme-buttons\"><div class=\"fb-like\" data-href=\"https:\/\/english.martinvarsavsky.net\/?p=2152\" data-send=\"false\" data-layout=\"box_count\" data-width=\"71\" data-show-faces=\"false\" data-font=\"arial\" data-locale=\"en_US\"><\/div><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I just read this headline &#8220;Us Job Losses Worst since 1974&#8220;. Knowing that unemployment in the States is still way below the high of 11% in 1981 I checked the article and I see that the journalist chose to measure losses in absolute numbers and then compare. But the overall number of people employed has [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[70],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/english.martinvarsavsky.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2152"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/english.martinvarsavsky.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/english.martinvarsavsky.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/english.martinvarsavsky.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/english.martinvarsavsky.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2152"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/english.martinvarsavsky.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2152\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/english.martinvarsavsky.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2152"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/english.martinvarsavsky.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2152"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/english.martinvarsavsky.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2152"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}