Mixing Up The Numbers

Listen carefully. The news media and advertising agencies who make political ads have been doing this for years.

Which would you rather have, 25% or even 50% of $1,000 or 10% or even 1% of 10 million dollars.  The number, in communication, is the big thing or key element.  The media or speaker doesn't want you to focus on the element % or raw number.  If I want you to think it's no big deal I put in a modifier, like "only" or "as many as", or "over".  These are just clever communication/propaganda linguistic techniques. "Only" 1% of the population reads at least one book a year. Or, "Did you know that over 3 million people read a book a year or more in the United States"?  Fact: if that were actually  true that wouldn't be that many people when you consider the a total population of 307,000,000+.  But how about this:  "Only" 1% of the U.S. population reads at least one book a year compared to Canada where the rate is 3%"  With a population of "Just" 34,000,000 that means only 340,000 Canadians read 1 or more books a year.

So, the point is this: to really make ANY sense of media numbers, you need to have some idea what the raw number is or the base that the percent refers to*, and you have to listen carefully when the media presenters mix raw numbers and percent because when they do that you are being intellectually manipulated.

(* "...to which the percent refers.", for those of you who prefer correct grammar).