It just sounds better

From an ad for my senator: "... We make more than a half million guitar strings a day ..."

They say "a half million". But I hear "uh half million" and it sounds so dumb.

Anyway, the units are not half-millions. The units are millions. So you don't say "a half million". You say "half a million". That way the units are right.

Besides it just sounds better:

"... We make more than half a million guitar strings a day ..."

Easy to fix

Reading How high debt leads to income inequality by Atif Mian and Amir Sufi. I thought I'd be interested in the economics. Instead I focus on this:

Money can’t make up for the loss of one’s home, but it ensures that a family can begin rebuilding their lives during such a desperate time.

"A family" is singular. "Their lives" is plural. How can I assume that Mian and Sufi's economic logic is sound when between the two authors they cannot tell one from more than one?

It's easy to fix. Just change "a family" to "families".

Economics is all about having the best story. Good stories need good sentences. Bad sentences are distracting.

Don't ask me why it's "economics is".

Heart and Mind

Sentences in development:

I'm something of a monetarist at heart. To my mind, even if monetary balances are not the cause of recessions, they must nonetheless be evidence.

That doesn't work. Maybe this:

I'm something of a monetarist at heart. Even if monetary balances are not the cause of recessions, they must nonetheless be evidence.

Moving on.

Literacy skills

Found this in the new 70-page PDF from the Harvard Business School Survey on U.S. Competitiveness, Problems Unsolved and a Nation Divided:

Younger cohorts of U.S. workers have higher literacy scores than older cohorts in absolute terms, reflecting U.S. skills improvement over time. But workers elsewhere have improved even faster. American workers from earlier generations are more literate than their international peers of the same age, but younger U.S. workers are less literate than their peers.

Younger Americans are more literate than older Americans? That depends on your standard of literacy.

If you say you "over-exaggerated"...

If you say you "over-exaggerated" it means you still think you should have exaggerated, but not quite so much.

Not for its economics

From The Economist:

David Ricardo showed in 1817 that a country could benefit from trade even if it did everything better than its neighbours. A country that is better at everything will still be “most better”, so to speak, at something. It should concentrate on that, Ricardo showed, importing what its neighbours do “least worse”.

If bad grammar is not enough to make the point, an old analogy might...

I thought that was nicely written -- or at least a nice escape from some fairly crude terminology.

Use over time

Not quite at random, "use over time" graphs from Google: