On the merits of perspective

Me, over in Stuff, with a few helpful numbers that can provide perspective. Perspective is important. If you know a few basic figures about the size of the country, the economy, and government spending, you'll have a better nose for detecting and dismissing nonsense claims. 

I lead off with the silly claims about the volume of litter:

That extrapolation generated big big numbers – 10 billion littered cigarette butts around the country, almost 395 million litres of littered disposable nappies, and the like.

Anyone with a sense of perspective would have known those numbers were fishy.

The government collects just under $2 billion in tobacco excise per year, and excise on a cigarette is just under a dollar per stick, so it's likely around 2 billion cigarettes are smoked in the country per year. Is it likely that a country that smokes about 2 billion cigarettes per year has 10 billion littered cigarette butts strewn about?

Similarly, is it likely that a country where about 60,000 kids are born annually can generate that volume of littered nappies? Suppose a littered nappy is about a litre, and that a baby uses eight nappies per day in its first year. That gives us just over 175 million nappies used by the country's newborns every year. How then is the volume of littered nappies more than double that figure?

Nobody reporting on these figures seems to have a sense of perspective. Fortunately, Keep New Zealand Beautiful has, after no small amount of prodding from me, pulled the dodgy stats from its website and from its report – but has issued no formal correction or retraction. The numbers will live forever in uncorrected newspaper accounts and be cited in uncountable school essays and newspaper articles to come. 

Uncorrected accounts, as of 21 September, include:

• Jamie Morton at the Herald
• Amber-Leigh Woolf at Stuff 
• Anan Zaki at RNZ (and here) (and here at NZ Geographic)
• Emily van Velthooven at One News
• Virginia Larson at North & South

I have prodded Morton more than a few times on Twitter on this one, because I expected better of a science reporter. It seems hopeless.

Here are a few more numbers worth memorising. They help in providing a sense of perspective. You can use them when benchmarking claims to see whether they make a lick of sense.

New Zealand has about 5 million people. When you see a big number for the country as a whole, dividing it by the population can help check whether the number seems plausible.

New Zealand's Gross Domestic Product (GDP), by the expenditure measure, was just under $300 billion for the year to March 2019. A 5 million population gives us a per capita GDP of about $60,000.

The government's budget for 2019/2020 was just under $111b – the government spends about $22,000 per person. Just over $24 billion is spent on benefits through the Ministry of Social Development, with $15.5b of that going to NZ Super. The total health budget is about $18b. Police get just under $2b. Pharmac is about $1b.

So when you hear claims that alcohol costs $7.8b per year, it becomes immediately obvious the figure isn't a measure of costs to the public health system or police – unless you're happy to believe that alcohol can be blamed for 40 per cent of total government spending in those areas. Rather, the number includes a lot of private costs like spending on alcohol – and as I've previously shown, counts some of those things twice.

New Zealand is a big place: just under 27 million hectares. As of 2012, urban land comprised about 228,000 hectares: only about 0.85 per cent of the country is urban land. So we are in no danger of urban sprawl, or landfills, taking over the whole country.

A moderate, healthy sense of perspective is far from dangerous.

It is vital? Yes, especially when journalists seem to err on the side of having none whatsoever.

Perhaps our newspapers, news magazines, and news broadcasts should come with a health warning label.