\n
How to Lie with Percentages<\/h3>\nIt\u2019s easy to make something seem big or small, depending on how you present the numbers.<\/h2>\n
\u2014 A man\u2019s assets are only 0.2% of U.S. wealth.<\/p>\n
\u2014 A regulation costs only 0.004% of U.S. GDP per year.<\/p>\n
\u2014\u00a0 A disease kills 0.1% of the population annually.<\/p>\n
That all sounds pretty minor, doesn\u2019t it?\u00a0 But \u2026.<\/p>\n
\u2014 The man \u2013 Elon Musk \u2013 is worth over $246 billion.<\/p>\n
\u2014 The regulation costs a billion dollars per year.<\/p>\n
\u2014 The disease \u2013 breast cancer \u2013 kills 42,000 American per year.<\/p>\n
The deceptiveness of percentages arises from the fact that a very small percent of a very big number is still a big number.<\/p>\n
You often see this problem with climate change.\u00a0 We\u2019re told that a given policy will only reduce U.S. emissions by something like 1%, which sounds trivial. But total U.S. carbon emissions are 4.8 billion tons.\u00a0 One percent of that is 48 million tons, which is a lot of carbon.\u00a0 At the current estimate of the social cost of carbon, reducing U.S. emissions by 1% would prevent over $900 billion of harm over time. Even using the ridiculously low estimate of the social cost of carbon\u00a0 adopted by the Trump Administration, you\u2019d still be talking about $33 billion, which isn\u2019t negligible.<\/span><\/p>\nOn the other hand, a big percentage of a small number is an even smaller number, which can also produce misleading results.\u00a0 Suppose we\u2019re told that a regulation will cost 25% of West Virginia coal miners their jobs.\u00a0 You might be tempted to think that would be a hammer blow to West Virginia\u2019s economy.\u00a0 In fact, there are 715,000 non-farm workers in West Virginia, and about 12,000 coal miners. A loss of a quarter of the coal working jobs, assuming none<\/em> of them got a new job, would reduce non-farm employment from 715,000 to 712,000- not good, but not catastrophic.<\/span><\/p>\nTo take another example, suppose someone \u2014 maybe Elon Musk \u2014 has the idea that you can fix the U.S. budget by cutting EPA\u2019s budget by 85%. Sounds draconian, but if it can fix the deficit, some people might find it appealing. The EPA budget is around $12 billion, so you\u2019d be saving around $10 billion \u2014 a lot of money. But the deficit is $1.7 trillion. If you do the math, in exchange for giving polluters free rein, you would cut the deficit by 0.6%.\u00a0 Maybe not such a good idea after all,<\/p>\n
The moral of the story: When you\u2019re told something in percentage terms, you should always ask: percentage of what<\/em>? And that\u2019s especially true with environmental policy.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
Climate Politics<\/a>, deceptive information<\/a>, environmental politics<\/a>, policy analysis<\/a><\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"How to Lie with Percentages It\u2019s easy to make something seem big or small, depending on how you present the numbers. \u2014 A man\u2019s assets are only 0.2% of U.S. wealth. \u2014 A regulation costs only 0.004% of U.S. GDP per year. \u2014\u00a0 A disease kills 0.1% of the population annually. That all sounds pretty […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":116594,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[97],"tags":[38406,51647,38408,4131,41427,51648],"dealstore":[],"offerexpiration":[],"class_list":["post-116593","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-legal","tag-climate-politics","tag-deceptive-information","tag-environmental-politics","tag-lie","tag-percentages","tag-policy-analysis"],"yoast_head":"\n
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