When Knowing A Little Math Helps

I often joke that my non-AP statistics students are future "poets and journalists"; if they aspired to STEM majors they'd be taking calculus.  This week we saw another data point to support my claim:

If someone had simply stopped and double-checked some math, they might have saved MSNBC’s Brian Williams and New York Times editorial board member Mara Gay some embarrassment and an apology Thursday night.

Instead, both Williams and Gay marveled on air in reaction to a Twitter user’s post about Mike Bloomberg’s campaign spending.

Trouble is, the post had gotten the math all wrong – yet neither Williams nor Gay seemed to notice.

The Super Tuesday evening post, now deleted, said: “Bloomberg spent $500 million on ads. The U.S. population is 327 million. He could have given each American $1 million and still have money left over, I feel like a $1 million check would be life-changing for people. Yet he wasted it all on ads and STILL LOST.”

Only off by six orders of magnitude.