How Many Is A Brazilian?
Since numbers keep getting bigger, so do mistakes.
My great grandfather got the contract to build a new school, discovered later that his estimate had been hundreds of dollars too low, and he went bankrupt. Today, a few hundred dollars on a construction project isn’t even a respectable rounding error.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics routinely revises the employment figures it issued a month or two earlier – often gaining or losing tens of thousands of jobs.
Under two Bush administrations, all the projected federal deficits were off by hundreds of billions of dollars because they didn’t bother to budget for two wars.
In an anomalous countertrend, congressional IQs plummeted from 132 to 12.
And until last week, the U.S. Geologic Survey was estimating that the Marcellus Shale under Pennsylvania held 2 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. This week they revised their figure from 2 trillion to 84 trillion. Meanwhile, the U.S. Energy Information Administration figured the real number was 410 trillion, but this week they cut that estimate by 80%.
That’s a 20,000% mistake by somebody or other.
All we know for sure is that our nation has energy reserves comparable to those of Saudi Arabia or of Fiji – flip a coin.
Fortunately, personal numbers are more reliable. If you’re average height and weight and you order some clothes online, you’re reasonably sure that you won’t be 200 times taller or heavier when they arrive.
Nor will your shoe size catapult from 6 to 16.
As far as employment is concerned, you know you have exactly one job, maybe two – or none. That’s how you know whether to get up at 7 a.m., not 20,000% later than that, which would be two months from now and your billions of friends wouldn’t like you anymore.