Blatantly bad reporting

Saw this article on the New York Times, and the first reaction I got from reading the headlines was "duh". (Lower Gas Prices Don't make Americans Feel Rich)

The average price of gas in the country has gone down by about $2. For whatever reason, annual mileage per car is usually estimated at 12,000 miles. That means 12,000 miles/20mpg = 600 gallons of gas each year. (Okay, maybe 20mpg is too high an estimate. But poor people need to be smarter about buying their cars. The cheaper and smaller Ford cars do get ~20 mpg.) That translates to spending $1200 more each year for gas. Yes, it is a lot of money. But people are overreacting to this.

For instance, one lady talks about how she took on an extra 10 hour of work each week. Assuming she was going to work 40 weeks in a year, that is an extra 400 hours to get the extra $1200. She was probably overestimating the impact of the gas price hike, or driving a lot more than the average person.

And of course the farmers Ritchie are not going to spend "tens of thousands of dollars to furnish and landscape their new house" -- this reporter has ridiculous expectations. I do think that they may spend more on fuel related products coz they own a farm, but off the hat, I don't know if tens of thousands of dollars is too high an estimate.

The thing about gas is that we have been using it in a wasteful manner, even though most people need to get their tanks filled each week. They get used to paying $25 a week, and suddenly it goes up to $50. It feels painful, but we're overestimating the pain coz we're focused on this particular 100% price hike. Prices of other things have gone up, but not doubled. People need to realize that $25 a week was too much to begin with.

This is a poorly conceived article that tried to make a story about lower gas prices but failed. I am feeling the effects of reading Nassim Taleb's The Black Swan already. (He warns about how newspapers often try to impose a narrative on facts to get a story, but really just mess up.)

Fine, I'm magnifying the effects on his book on my judgment.v (^_^)