Do your homework!

I haven't had a rant about the incompetence/laziness of business journalists for a while.  Time to correct that.  This article from today's Toronto Star, headlined "Toronto leads new housing starts in August", contains a statistical error so blindingly obvious that you would think a grade school student would catch it.

The author is one Michael Lewis*, described as a "business reporter", so this is kind of story is his everyday bread and butter.  In case the link fails to get you past the Star's increasingly onerous paywall, here's the offending paragraph:

According to the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp., Ontario led the increase with seasonally adjusted starts jumping to 81,457, followed by Quebec at 48,772. Toronto was tops in metropolitan areas with 3,131 starts in August, while Montreal placed second with 2,031.

Let's dig into that for a second. Toronto is by far the biggest city in Ontario. According to World Atlas,  Ontario's population in 2016 was about 13.5 million, with the City of Toronto accounting for about 2.7 million of that.  Note that Lewis refers to the "metropolitan area"; if you add in the various groupings commonly cited -- in increasing order, the Greater Toronto Area (GTA), Greater Toronto-Hamilton Area (GTHA) and Greater Golden Horseshoe (whatever), you can easily come up with a population for the metropolitan area that's more than half of the Provincial total.

But we don't have to do that to spot Lewis's error.  Using the numbers he quotes, it seems as if Toronto (population 2.7 million) had 3,131 housing starts in August, while the rest of the Province (population 10.8 million) had over 78,000!  You'd think a reporter sitting in a Toronto newsroom and writing about business stories every day might have twigged to the fact that that's wildly implausible.

What happened here is perfectly simple.  After using the seasonally adjusted and annualized data for the province, Lewis switched seamlessly, incorrectly and quite possibly unwittingly to the raw monthly numbers when referring to the individual cities.  The source data can all be found in the original report from Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation.  In case you actually care, in Table 1 we find that housing starts in Ontario in August totalled 7,316 (not annualized or adjusted), with Toronto accounting for 3,131 of those. 

This isn't rocket science.  It isn't even economics in any real sense.  It's just the sort of fact-checking that's supposedly the job of every journalist.  Sadly, as I've often said in the past, if you want accuracy these days, you're probably better off relying on a blogger. 

* Not that one!!