The NYT Makes Silly Mistakes Because It is Determined to Use Numbers Without Any Context

Newspapers should be in the business of informing their readers, but not the New York Times. Last fall I had raised the issue of putting large numbers in some context so that readers would be able to understand their significance. I was primarily thinking of budget numbers. Almost no readers have any idea what the billions or trillion mean, but they would immediately be able to understand a number expressed as a percent of the budget. The latter takes no additional research, it takes one seco...