January 12, 2012
One of the simplest ways in which the media could improve their reporting is by reporting numbers in ways that make sense to their readers. When the Washington Post told readers that Germany’s economy shrank by 0.25 percent in the 4th quarter, I would suspect that more 99 percent of readers thought this was an annual rate of decline, which is way numbers are always reported for the United States.
In fact, this is a quarterly rate of decline, which is the standard practice in Europe and much of the rest of the world. It is not hard to convert quarterly growth numbers to an annual rate. For small numbers, multiplying by four will do the trick. (For larger numbers it is necessary to take the growth figure to the 4th power, but that still is not hard.)
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