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Great moments in mathematics

Michael Bloomberg spent $500 million on his campaign. The US population is 327 million. How much does that work out to per person? Brian Williams and his guest on MSNBC seem to be working with pundit math rather than the mathematics that ordinary people use.

What is astonishing is that this was not an off-the-cuff mistake that anyone can make, though one would have thought that the figure was so outlandish that it would have given them pause before saying it on air. This had been thought of before the broadcast aired, as can be seen by the fact that they had prepared a graphic of it. So the many people involved in putting these shows on also did not notice the glaring error.

Some progressive down ballot candidates to watch » « Samantha Bee’s thoughts on Super Tuesday

Comments

  1. johnson catman says

    It looks like they just divided $500,000,000 by 327 instead of 327,000,000. Even people bad at math should have been able to detect such horrible division. (Math is HARD!) Even if you take Bloomberg’s total worth of $58 billion ($58,000,000,000) and divide it by 327,000,000, each US citizen would still only get $177. I hope these idiots are not in charge of their own finances.

  4. Cementer 2000 says

    Come on, you guys! What difference does a few zeros (just 6) make, when you have a powerful point about how rich he is and how the money he spent could have been donated to a good cause. The deeper political truth is more important than mere arithmetic, and a **slight** exaggeration to dramatize that truth is not a “mistake,” rather, it’s “effective” rhetoric. 😉

  6. consciousness razor says

    And the virus is spreading around the world, and the WHO still won’t declare a pandemic

    It’s no joke, and dragging our feet (and lying) like Trump’s people are doing is horribly irresponsible. Within a few months, picture filled hospital beds all over the US, not enough basic supplies to go around for doctors and nurses, etc.

    Maybe I don’t get what your point is. Am I supposed to conclude anything in particular from your “math”? (You actually just mentioned several numbers.)

  7. file thirteen says

    Oh it absolutely is a joke. People are scared stupid over what might happen and not what is happening.

    80,000 cases of covid-19 in China, population 1386 million. 3000 deaths.

    You don’t have to be a maths whiz to work out that’s less than one infection per ten thousand and less than three deaths per million.

    15,000,000 cases of influenza in the US, population 329 million. 8000 deaths.

    That’s more than one infection per twenty(!) people and more than one death per fifty thousand.

    New strains of influenza crop up every year. So how can people insist the WHO declare a covid-19 pandemic when it hasn’t declared the world as being already in the grip of an influenza pandemic?

  8. consciousness razor says

    Where did you get your numbers?
    LA Times, today: What is the fatality rate for the new coronavirus, and why does it keep changing? (with my emphasis):

    The 2% figure seemed stable on Feb. 24, when a massive study of nearly 45,000 Chinese patients whose infections had been confirmed with laboratory tests reported a case fatality rate of 2.3%.
    Later that week, on Feb. 28, a study of nearly 1,100 Chinese patients suggested a lower death rate, of 1.4%.
    Four days later, on March 3, the World Health Organization said the global mortality rate was 3.4%.
    […]
    Fauci agreed that the death rate could end up being as low as 1%. But even if that’s the case, he said, it would still be 10 times worse than the average death rate for the seasonal flu.

    So don’t compare it to the flu like this. Because it’s not the flu.
    Also, the total population of China is just … a wacky number to bring up here. Why not the world population? Why not the population of Wuhan? Garbage in, garbage out.

  9. file thirteen says

    Where did you get your numbers?

    Oh come on. Really?

    I already gave you a link to a page talking about flu in the US. Pardon me for not being bothered enough to paste excerpts of it with bolded highlights, but it’s academic because you made it clear you don’t want me to compare covid-19 to the flu anyway. Although that was my point, that if covid-19 should be called a pandemic then the flu sure as hell is, but somehow I’m wrong to make that comparison because influenza doesn’t kill anybody influenza has killed less people in the last year than covid-19 covid-19 is opined to end up killing more people than influenza, or something.

    I compared the US, a country and the major subject of this blog, with China, also a country, but if you want to compare apples to oranges we can compare to the number of covid-19 cases in the world if you like. But you don’t like.

    On the off-chance google is broken for you, this is a good resource for fretting over the spread of covid-19.

    We’re done here.

  12. file thirteen says

    For those that care, the last link worked and is the one you should follow. Don’t know why the others didn’t.

  13. consciousness razor says

    I already gave you a link to a page talking about flu in the US.

    I wasn’t questioning that part, since I did check your link. I meant “80,000 cases of covid-19 in China” and “3000 deaths” The Johns Hopkins link does work for me. Thanks.
    What I think is that we should let epidemiologists do their own work, since this isn’t amateur hour.

    Although that was my point, that if covid-19 should be called a pandemic then the flu sure as hell is, but somehow I’m wrong to make that comparison because influenza doesn’t kill anybody influenza has killed less people in the last year than covid-19 covid-19 is opined to end up killing more people than influenza, or something.

    This is about how the word “pandemic” should be used, or what our situation in the current moment or near-future should be called. It’s not about epic math fails. Please understand that I’m not being dismissive about that, only noting that these are different things.
    The wiki entry for pandemic:

    A pandemic (from Greek πᾶν pan “all” and δῆμος demos “people”) is an epidemic of disease that has spread across a large region; for instance multiple continents, or worldwide. A widespread endemic disease that is stable in terms of how many people are getting sick from it is not a pandemic. Further, flu pandemics generally exclude recurrences of seasonal flu.
    […]
    A pandemic is an epidemic occurring on a scale which crosses international boundaries, usually affecting a large number of people.[1] Pandemics can also occur in important agricultural organisms (livestock, crop plants, fish, tree species) or in other organisms.

    The page’s [1] link refers to Dictionary of Epidemiology, from the Oxford University Press. I, for one, cannot argue with that. Can you?
    Going further down the rabbit hole from the previous article, to the wiki entry for influenza pandemic:

    An influenza pandemic is an epidemic of an influenza virus that spreads on a worldwide scale and infects a large proportion of the world population. In contrast to the regular seasonal epidemics of influenza, these pandemics occur irregularly – there have been about nine influenza pandemics during the last 300 years. Pandemics can cause high levels of mortality, with the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic being the worst in recorded history; this pandemic was estimated to be responsible for the deaths of approximately 50–100 million people. There have been about three influenza pandemics in each century for the last 300 years, the most recent one being the 2009 flu pandemic.[1]

    That one in 2009 is the H1N1 influenza virus, or “swine flu.” Is that good enough for you?

  14. sonofrojblake says

    “there’s too much money in politics”

    Yeah, and not enough in basic education, obviously.

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