That can’t be right.
In response to my call for examples of dubious published numbers that might obey Curmudgeon’s Law of Numerical Fiction, frequent commenter GPR suggested a real gem. The artists Christo and his wife Jeanne-
Claude want to construct one of their larger works of art over a river in Colorado. This will, we are told, add just shy of $200 million to the local economy.
Although it will take two years to build Over The River, and several months to take it down, the artwork will exist in all its glory for only two weeks. During this time, OTR will attract, the artists claim, 380,000 visitors, 62% of them from out of state. Another 180,000 will show up to see it being built and torn down. This will generate $195.5 million in economic activity, $78.3 million of which will be spent in the Denver metro area.
Denver is about two hours from the base of the site, assuming normal traffic, which seems unlikely.
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The latest hot topic on the identity theft front is a paper published on Monday in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Science by two professors at Carnegie Mellon on how easy it is to guess a person’s social security number.
That day Ars Technica reported on it. Also, the authors of the paper started a blog on it. The AP picked it up Tuesday. CrunchGear blogged on it then too. And Wednesday brought posts from Wise Bread and Wallet Pop.
This is a great story. It combines several of my favorite themes. There’s the ever amusing hysteria over identity theft, which apparently renders a person incapable of rational thought and perspective. There are the unintended consequences of seemed-like-a-good-idea-at-the-time government policies. And there is the recurring phenomenon of folks who report and comment on academic papers without reading and/or understanding them.
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There is an article, and I use that term loosely, in the current issue of Rolling Stone on Goldman Sachs. It’s certainly not a publication I normally read, in fact I think this may be the first copy I have ever owned, but the the Goldman 
piece has gotten a little buzz going and one of my commenters told me to read it. (The full thing is not available on-line in authorized form. Google and you can find bootlegs. Legal excerpts here.)
Admittedly, I expected little from an issue whose cover story was "Boys to Men: Inside the World of the Jonas Brothers." But Matt Taibbi’s Goldman diatribe, "The Bailout: How Goldman Sachs Runs Washington" is truly nauseatingly horrible.
The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it is everywhere. The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money. In fact, the history of the recent financial crisis, which doubles as a history of the rapid decline and fall of the suddenly swindled-dry American empire, reads like a Who’s Who of Goldman Sachs graduates.
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Regular readers of Bad Money Advice will not be surprised to hear that I prefer numbers to words. (Allegations that I prefer computers to people, however, are greatly exaggerated.) I think this is a natural inclination. Any halfway thoughtful 
person favors evidence over feeling, and numbers have the appearance of being hard facts.
But not all published numbers are factual, even when widely repeated in respectable places. Which presents a difficulty for us lovers of digits. How can we separate the real from the realish? Not to worry, because today I am revealing for the first time my Law of Numerical Fiction which will help identify the imposters.
To be successful, that is, repeated widely as if it were true, a fake number must satisfy three criteria.
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Yesterday’s New York Times had an article about the simmering controversy over target funds headlined Target-Date Mutual Funds May Miss Their Mark. (Get it? It’s a pun.)
Target date funds have been around for a long time. They are a sub-species of asset allocation funds, mutual funds that, in effect, own other mutual funds in order to create a diversified one-stop-shop for the investor either too busy or too intimidated to pick his own. I’m not a big fan. I think you can do better making your own asset allocations, but that has little to do with the current round of hand wringing in Washington.
To understand what has caused the present consternation, you have to go back a few years.
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Claude want to construct one of their larger works of art over a river in Colorado. This will, we are told, add just shy of $200 million to the local economy.
Government, Media | Frank Curmudgeon | 
July 10, 2009 12:15 pm | 
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