More NY Times economic and mathematical illiteracy

I'm beginning to think that Times reporters simply don't know anything at all about what they write about, which is an improvement, I suppose, over my earlier thoughts that they were part of a vast conspiracy designed to feed off the stupidity of their readers. Here's the latest example, this time confusing just about everything, from the square footage of houses to the delinquency rate of second mortgages. Sure, it could be that the Times deliberately chooses not to give hard numbers of an actual increase in loans gone bad because readers would then realize what a non-story it was and perhaps hate Bush a little less, for just a few seconds, but I prefer to believe that these guys are just dumb as a sack of rocks and simply don't realize what they're saying.

The comments below the linked article are well worth reading, especially this one that quotes Michael Crichton:

"Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward, reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.

In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know."