Journalists don't know math

Here's my standard for believability of a business venture: If you can't demonstate "the math" with a simple one-page spreadsheet, and without using complex formulas, then the venture is *clearly* too complex to be viable and sustainable in the long run.

My definition of "complex formula": anything that an average journalist can't *completely* comprehend.

I would simply note that using my standard, none of the disasters with LTCM, Enron, or WorldCom, et al would ever have happened.

[Speaking of paragraphs... how come your blogging software likes to take mine and jam them all into one paragraph even though I *carefully* place blank lines between them? Please ask your resident software rocket scientists to "re-do the math."]

-- Jack Krupansky

I appreciate simplicity as much as anyone, especially where math is concerned. But a lot of business ventures--even ones simple enough to spell out on one page--benefit from affordable finance thanks to innovations cooked up by math whizzes over the past 30 years. This is now our economic underpinning. Trouble is, many of us have trouble distinguishing between brilliant finance and shell games. Witness the crash of LongTerm Capital. (I'm bothered by the smushed paragraphs too)

The way I read Michael Lewis' New New Thing was that the reason for Healtheon's successful (2nd) ipo is because of two companies, Silicon Graphics, and Netscape. And with th ipo Jim Clark was trying to settle a score with Wall Street, that geeks with the ideas were being cannabalized by people with money. The rich was getting richer on the backs of people with ideas.

I agree with the second poster that if more math classes for journalists can help us identify the shell schemes or pyramid schemes then I'm all for it. But I doubt that more Algebra II will accomplish that.

I think the best use of blogs media/forum is in discussing companies/stocks, like the one Yahoo hosts. For a good example of lively discussion and education of how money managers/big money works in manipulating a company stock now, see Amylin (AMLN).

Great post, Steve. For as long as I've been blogging, I've ranted on this topic. ( samples - http://www.google.com/custom?q=reporters+math&sa=Google+Search&domains=www.rexblog.com&sitesearch=www.rexblog.com ) My favorite post on the topic is one about students at the Medill School who are opposed to a J-school requirement for a statistics course ( http://www.rexblog.com/2004/10/26#a4238 ) . Bottomline: Few reporters (and readers, for that matter) get math. The much ballyhoo'd book Freakonomics is packed with examples of how not just reporters, but the experts, have missed the point even when the math is provided. Reading the Wall Street Journals new weekly column, The Math Guy, displays how the topic of numbers and how they are mis-interpreted makes for good reading -- even for the math challenged.

you should check out "Anatomy of a hoax" (http://www.pcij.org/blog/?p=73). a journalist-blogger investigates the truth behind a mathematician's claim that andrew wiles' proof for fermat's last theorem is erroneous.

i am 12 and a news reporter and made the highesr grade on my math journalism test

The course is 65 million square inches.
The little hole is 15 square inches.
What can you do?
Play the ball as it lies.
Play the course as you find it.
If you can't do either, do what is fair.

Private dotcom funded rocket ship $100 million.
Dotcom do-do bird stock $450.00 a share.
USAF satellite priceless.
For everything else there's MatherCard.

The regret on our side is, they used to say years ago, we are reading about you in science class. Now they say, we are reading about you in history class.
— Neil Armstrong, July 1999.
You do the math! We'll do the history. It all will work out because it always has, despite the fraud, fools and fraudsters. The miracles of science never cease.

what in the world does math have to do with journalism??? i need to no hurry