{"id":950,"date":"2008-11-03T11:48:33","date_gmt":"2008-11-03T19:48:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/?p=950"},"modified":"2012-09-09T02:19:58","modified_gmt":"2012-09-09T10:19:58","slug":"distinctions-and-equations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/?p=950","title":{"rendered":"Equations and Differentiations"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A couple of things to note about this story: <div style=\"padding: 1em ;\"><a href=\"http:\/\/news.bbc.co.uk\/2\/hi\/business\/7705835.stm\"><q>Eurozone is on verge of recession<\/q> from <abbr title=\"British Broadcasting Corporation\">BBC<\/abbr><\/a> <blockquote style=\"padding-bottom: 0em ; font-size: smaller ;\">The eurozone is on the brink of recession with economic growth falling 0.2% in the second quarter, the European Commission has announced.<\/blockquote><\/div><\/p> <p>First, we yet again have the <abbr title=\"British Broadcasting Corporation\">BBC<\/abbr> confusing a rate of change with the thing changing,  <a href=\"?p=109\">The last time that I took note of such confusion from them<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/news.bbc.co.uk\/2\/hi\/business\/7372438.stm\">they were confusing the growth rate of <abbr title=\"gross domestic product\">GDP<\/abbr> (&Delta;<var>Y<\/var>\/&Delta;<var>t<\/var>) with the change in that growth rate (&Delta;<sup>2<\/sup><var>Y<\/var>\/&Delta;<var>t<\/var><sup>2<\/sup>).<\/a>  This time, they've turned around to confuse the growth rate of <abbr title=\"gross domestic product\">GDP<\/abbr> (&Delta;<var>Y<\/var>\/&Delta;<var>t<\/var>) with <abbr title=\"gross domestic product\">GDP<\/abbr> (<var>Y<\/var>) itself. (If they maintain the earlier confusion, then by transitivity they confuse <var>Y<\/var> with &Delta;<sup>2<\/sup><var>Y<\/var>\/&Delta;<var>t<\/var><sup>2<\/sup>.)<\/p> <p>The Eurozone economy isn't growing 0.2% more slowly than before; its production is <em>shrinking<\/em> at a rate of 0.2%. (<abbr title=\"gross domestic product\">GDP<\/abbr> is not itself a growth rate of under-lying <em>wealth<\/em>, because the vast majority of what is produced is <em>consumed<\/em>, rather than <em>saved<\/em>.)<\/p> <p>A second thing to note is that the <abbr title=\"British Broadcasting Corporation\">BBC<\/abbr> is referring to the Eurozone as <q>on the verge<\/q> of a recession, while America <a href=\"http:\/\/news.bbc.co.uk\/2\/hi\/business\/1407245.stm\"><q>may already be in recession<\/q><\/a>.  The brute fact is essentially the same across these two economies &mdash; one quarter in which production declined &mdash; but the Eurozone is made to seem <em>on the cusp<\/em> while America is presented as perhaps <em>already well-in<\/em>.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A couple of things to note about this story: Eurozone is on verge of recession from BBC The eurozone is on the brink of recession with economic growth falling 0.2% in the second quarter, the European Commission has announced. First, we yet again have the BBC confusing a rate of change with the thing changing, [&hellip;]","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_topic_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_reply_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,36,4],"tags":[181,182,144],"class_list":["post-950","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-commentary","category-economics","category-public","tag-bbc","tag-journalism","tag-recession"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/950","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=950"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/950\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=950"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=950"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=950"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}