Get It Right

The New York Times, earlier this week, listed the grosses of Bruce Willis movies. The Sixth Sense made over $300 million, Die Hard made over $100 million, Pulp Fiction made $144 million. All these numbers are wrong. They should have made clear these numbers were domestic grosses adjusted for inflation.

Columbus Guy says: This might be a touch trickier than you suggest. While I agree that it'd be great practice to include a parenthetical, "nominal dollars" or "(constant 2006 dollars)", etc., it doesn't seem all that great a sin not to (a mistake, yes, a bad practice, yes, but not egregious.

The question then becomes, what is more representative, nominal or constant, and as a general matter it's probably best to go constant. Now, in the case of movie tickets, maybe it'd be different, I don't know, because of the number of tickets sold, etc. In any case, I'm not so sure that this is as bad as LAGuy seems to suggest (and if this ticks you off so much, how do you feel about margin of error? That seems egregiously misleading to me, but it's SOP).

LAGuy ripostes: It is common practice, when reporting grosses, to use unadjusted domestic figures. To use anything else requires notice. Inflation-adjusted figures are particularly confusing and, arguably, misleading. (A more common mistake is to list rentals instead of grosses, but that is not as confusing as inflation-adjustment, since everything is likely to stay in the same relative ranking.)

Imagine if a reporter wrote a story about 1970, and mentioned prices then--but used inflation-adjusted numbers without explaining. That would be a mistake, and not a minor one.

I will discuss margin of error tangentially tomorrow. It's as if Columbusguy read my mind.

Columbus Guy says: Close. Jedi Mind Trick.