Numbers

By Melissa August, Amanda Bower, Beau Briese, Rhett Butler, Ellin Martens, Sora Song, Kadesha Thomas and Josh Tyrangiel

MISUSED STATS In his new book The Sum of Our Discontent (Texere), David Boyle suggests that our demand for precision often leads to misleading or silly numbers. For example:

$100,000 What Dartmouth says a good marriage is worth per year. (It's calculated from the money we would spend on other things to be equally happy without marrying. What's love got to do with it?)

$245 billion How much world imports exceed world exports. (Calculated by adding every nation's stats together. But barring extraplanetary trade, the difference should be zero.)

$800,000,000 How much Los Angeles drivers contribute to the GDP by burning gas in traffic jams. (So what's the point? We spend too much time in traffic--or thanks, drivers, for beefing up the U.S. bottom line?)

$20 "Greenhouse damage" per extra ton of carbon we add to the sky. (The figure, from economist David Pearce, is not the cost to clean the air, nor the benefit of cars, nor the toll of rising seas. It's just how much people say they'd pay for cleaner air when asked in surveys, divided by tons of carbon.)