The headline of the article (emphasis mine) -
99.999999999999 percent of Arizonans choose not to protest spending cuts
Ummm...the federal government (the USDA, to be specific) estimated AZ's 2007 population at 6,338,755.
Some basic math -
If, as the Goldwater Institute claims, 99.999999999999% of Arizonans didn't protest the cuts to education, that would mean that 0.000000000001% of Arizonans *did* protest them.
Based on their mathematical calculations, that would mean that out of over 6 million Arizonans, all of 0.000006338755 people showed up to protest the cuts at the legislature last week.
As the pictures of that rally show, significantly more than six millionths of a person were there.
I suggest that the authors of the article, Matthew Ladner and Byron Schlomach, look into registering for MAT082 at any Maricopa County community college (MAT082 - "Basic Arithmetic - Primary emphasis placed on fundamental operations with whole numbers, fractions, decimals, integers, and rational numbers; proportions, and percentages. Other topics include representations of data, geometric figures, and measurement. Prerequisites: None. ")
That is, if the education cuts that they've championed haven't necessitated cancellation of that class.
Note: at the end of the article, the authors state that the article itself "celebrates the long history of satire in American politics". If that is the case, then they do satire as well as they do math.
Later!
2 comments:
I have emailed a Guaranteed Research claim on the article for the erroneous math.
Mr. Ladner got back to me and states "When I put the population of Arizona minus the 1000 and divide it the population of Arizona into my Microsoft Excel knockoff spreadsheet, it gives me an answer of 1, so 99.99999999999 sounds close enough to me."
I rather think that something must be off with Mr. Ladner's MS Excel.
I think my copy of calc says 99.983333333... is the percent who stayed home.
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