Hacker News Reader

Comment by germandiago | Hacker News Reader

Well explained. Idk for english-speaking countries or your country of origin but the average spanish is an absolute illiterate in economy.

These explanations are very necessary so that people develop an intuition of what is going on.

View on HN

Many Americans are illiterate on numbers and the economy too. I still remember the classic example that a burger chain released a 1/3 pound burger to compete with another chain's 1/4 pound burger, and many people thought the 1/4 pound was bigger...

Edit: there are some people saying it's a myth, or not a complete picture. Looks like we don't have the data. But my point is that we aren't very good with numbers or economics.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fractions-where-i...

https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2018/september/how...

I’ve always thought this was somewhat apocryphal/a myth. Did it actually occur?

It's hard to find contemporaneous evidence, because it was apparently revealed by an internal company focus group, but here's [0] the page from the company themselves with the claim.

It wasn't revealed at all until the founder's memoirs in 2007, and it wasn't reported widely until this [1] 2014 article.

0: https://awrestaurants.com/blog/aw-third-pound-burger-fractio...

1: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/27/magazine/why-do-americans...

Sadly, it is true. The chain was A&W:

https://awrestaurants.com/blog/aw-third-pound-burger-fractio...

this is a 'haha Americans so dumb' myth that's been blown up - it's the result of a NY Times article that outline a private restaurant chain focus group result.

So tldr; some people in a private focus group questioned the value of a 1/3 pound burger over the same priced 1/4 pound burger. It's not indicative of any system numerical illiteracy.

I will add there were no actual data released - it's solely based on an anecdote from a A&W restaurant executive.

https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/28745/did-aw-cu...

I was exposed to this myth in my youth as various European nations described their misadventures in the US of A or encounters with Americans and as a result came to US with wrong expectations. Now that I live here, things a little more clear to me. It is a nation of more than 350 million people ( depending on how and who you count ). Even a small percentage of certifiable idiots will be very well represented in terms of absolute numbers.

I would not say Americans in general are dumb though. I would say that:

1) they are under-educated ( and then we can also get about the quality of education for those that were educated ) 2) they are very heavily propagandized

Even more than that, the accounts we get claim that some of the people in the focus group said the 1/3 pound burger was smaller than the quarter pounder. Even if those claims are accurate, it's possible they were looking at the diameter, since the 1/3 pounder has two smaller patties stacked on top of each other, while the quarter pounder is one large patty.

Most places that report on this say that the third pounder was cheaper and that Americans preferred the taste, but they didn't buy it because of the name and their poor math skills. But its name was changed to "Papa Burger," and it still didn't become the quarter pounder killer it's portrayed as.

Since you bring up the name change... didn't it sell better after the name change?

But of course my point was never about the burger. It was just that many aren't good with numbers and finance (in the edit with the links).

Stupid people exist. It’s happened. In fact, it’s a pretty easy mistake to make if you don’t understand fractions. 4 > 3.

And since we don't know the context they could have shown a closer up burger, or heck, taller burger that is 1/4 and a 1/3 next to each other but further away or stepped on at which point they were asked, what's bigger?

Also, the 1/4 or 1/3 is referring to the raw, uncooked meat only. So in theory you can add 1400 lbs of lettuce to make something larger than my car. (Which is terrible, since lettuce is where you pick up all the disease these days - everyone here should order all their food without any lettuce)

>Many Americans are illiterate on numbers and the economy too

Many more pretend to be less literate than they are for ideological reasons.

>still remember the classic example that a burger chain released a 1/3 pound burger to compete with another chain's 1/4 pound burger, and many people thought the 1/4 pound was bigger.

This trope needs to be taken out back and shot. It wasn't that people didn't get it. It's that it was poorly marketed and the difference between 1/3 and 1/4 isn't enough to make people go to a burger chain that was dying due to low and variable quality when they could just go to McDicks and get a reliable 1/4lb.

There's certainly more than just the number confusion, but I specifically remember the case study we were looking at included a survey where a sizeable number of respondents said 1/4 was bigger than 1/3.

I don't know anything about this particular one, but just because it's a case study in a textbook doesn't mean it's true. There are lots of untruths that get propagated long after they've been debunked.

But they’re citing a survey where people literally didn’t get it. That, if not made up, factually supports the claim that some people really do think 1/3 is less than 1/4.

I really liked the 1/3 pound “thickburgers”. I don’t think it was just some dying chain trying to spread rumors about how stupid people didn't understand their marketing and that’s why they “died” (they’re still very much alive last I checked).

> But they’re citing a survey

Then it should be possible to point to said survey…

If you had the survey in hand you could point to it. Proprietary information is not news and exists even in academia (cf. scihub).

Sure, but there's nothing presented to debunk this so far. So far all the "testimony" shows it to be true, but it could be propaganda.

The larger point is that it does demonstrate what the actual data shows - that the US has a sizable portion not good at math/fractions or finance.

I have a degree in it and I often don't feel that I know anything. For a guy who did a lot of STEM economics is a pretty odd subject in many ways. A mixture of interesting insights, strange models, and a lot of soft talk.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com