6 Comments

Dear Prof Krugman, please join the resistance: Whatever the data are, they sometimes suggest; they often indicate; and they even sometimes prove beyond a shadow of a doubt; they do all that, though never at once. It's not too late; the criteria for credibility used to include proper English, and those halcyon days when data were taken seriously, by any criterion, may yet return. good words to you, SBR

Expand full comment

I’m not sure if this comment is intended to be self-referential, but I find its idealized aristocratic nature — not unlike, yet still short of, President Washington’s first inaugural address (https://www.refractmagazine.com/read/2021/12/13/the-decrease-in-length-of-english-sentences) — more alluring than annoying.

What if we brought it back, along with all the modifications we’ve made to the language in the centuries since? None of us can be insufferable if all of us are insufferable!

Expand full comment

Hear. hear! But the old usage of agenda (plural - things to be done) is lost, and I'm happy with Jane Austin's use of nice, rather than the very old and very not-nice meaning. But do lets hold out for proper use of criteria, media, and even data, and their singular forms.

Expand full comment

True. I acknowledge that we have lost little in forgetting that "data", etc, were commonly used in the plural not long ago. But, for example, in using "media" in the singular, the speaker/writer suggests that the extremely plural media are actually one uniform thing, a simplification that is not solved by the neologism "mainstream media", which, themselves, are certainly not uniform. I myself was surprised to hear "criteria" used in the singular - meaning a group of criteria - in 1972 and at Columbia Business School (!!). But then Mr. O'Shaunesey (for that was the prof's name) was a good teacher and fellow. You may already know this -

https://blog.adw.org/2015/11/the-not-so-nice-origins-and-meanings-of-the-word-nice/

Expand full comment

https://www.themarshallproject.org/2023/07/13/fbi-crime-rates-data-gap-nibrs

50% of the population including LA SF NY Oakland did not report

Expand full comment
author

The Marshall Project was incorrect when they labeled agencies not reporting Q4 data as not reporting at all in 2022 (though they note under the sourcing that agencies still had time to report). They were also incorrect because when this was published (July 2023) they were unaware that the FBI was allowing non-NIBRS agencies to report in 2022. Each of LA, SF, NY and Oakland reported crime data to the FBI in 2022 which is plainly evident in the FBI's query tool https://cde.ucr.cjis.gov/LATEST/webapp/#/pages/explorer/crime/query.

Expand full comment