I bought the Sunday NYT this morning at a Safeway grocery store in Tucson. A pleasant clerk, probably in her late thirties and almost surely a native English speaker, asked us, "What is the New York Times?" "Is it just a New York paper?" This surprised me, especially since she could have looked at a NYT on any work day. She had no idea what the NYT was.
Then yesterday or Friday, the NYT had an article that reported on a study that showed that home buyers often enough do not know that a number such as $451,145 is larger than $450,000. And I wondered why my students last term had such a hard time with PPP exchange rates and the diffference between nominal and real wages!
Sometimes it is hard not to despair!
Michael Yates