In Edward Tufte’s books, he stresses that one should never present a number in isolation. The question that one should answer, as a writer/presenter, is “compared to what?”[...] I just did a Google News search to see how many reporters compared the latest jobs report from the U.S. Labor Department to the U.S. population growth rate. The answer was “none”. This New York times story was typical. It reported that 20,000 jobs were lost in January, but did not say anything about how the number of Americans had changed. [...] The population clock says that there are 308.6 million people living in the U.S. Without leaving Google, one can calculate that 252,000 people were added to the U.S. population in January. So we have 20,000 fewer workers and 252,000 more people. To me that is a much more interesting story than simply “we have 20,000 fewer workers.”