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Episode #214: Karla Starr
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Karla Starr is a columnist for Medium and write the newsletter The Starr Report on Substack. She has appeared on NPR and CBS Sunday Morning and has written for The Atlantic, Slate, Popular Science, and The Guardian. She won an award for the Best Science/Health story from the Society of...
The post Episode #214: Karla Starr appeared first on PolicyViz.
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Transcript
Introduction and Guest Introduction
00:00:12
Speaker
Welcome back to the Policy Viz Podcast. I'm your host, John Schwabish. On this week's episode of the show, I'm very happy to have author, Carla Starr, co-author with Chip Heath of the new book, Making Numbers Count.
Challenges of Relating Large Numbers
00:00:27
Speaker
This is a topic that's sort of near and dear to my heart because, especially for working in the federal government for a long time,
00:00:34
Speaker
How do we effectively communicate large numbers? Do you have any idea what $27.5 trillion means? Do you have any idea, even if I compared that to stacking Empire State buildings on top of each other, that they would go from here to the moon and back? I don't know if those comparisons are correct,
Strategies for Communicating Numbers
00:00:52
Speaker
by the way. But are those even relatable? Does that even help you?
00:00:55
Speaker
I don't think so. And Carla and Chip have written this great book. It's a really nice, short, easy read. I really highly recommend it about making these better comparisons and how we can all do so. And we talk in the interview about doing this kind of verbally or within our writing, but we also talk a little bit about how we can apply it to our data visualizations, which is not a focal point of the book, but of course, for listeners of this show is particularly
Inspiration and Motivation Behind the Book
00:01:20
Speaker
important.
00:01:20
Speaker
So I'm gonna head off and let you listen to this interview with Carla Starr, co-author of the new book, Making Numbers Count. I hope you'll enjoy it. Hi, Carla, welcome to the show. Great to see you. Hi, thanks so much for having me, John. Great to be here.
00:01:38
Speaker
I'm very excited to chat with you. New book, Making Numbers Count. You and Chipeth, you've got your name right there.
Numbers as a Second Language
00:01:45
Speaker
Oh, look at that. We'll both hold up our copies of the book right on the bottom. It's got a nice big ruler on it. Yeah, I love it. I mean, I think you have hit on a huge problem challenge. I don't know if it's a problem, but a huge challenge in communication. Yeah, it's both. Yeah.
00:02:06
Speaker
So maybe you can give folks like the quick synopsis and more like what I'm interested in, for folks who haven't heard about it or read it, you can maybe give a quick synopsis. But what I'm interested in is like, why did you come to this? Why was this the book that you wanted to write? What was the motivating factor behind it? Well, Chip and I had been discussing books to write together for a while when we've gone through a bunch of different topics. And then he told me that for his class,
00:02:36
Speaker
because teaching at Stanford made the stick, they were talking about, um, you know, the importance of not using numbers for a while. And then during, you know, some of your, and he was teaching it, some person who was in his role in his class, uh, was also, um, in, he was in science and he said, you know, I can't not use numbers, you know, numbers are my world. So he started developing this little module, little class on how they can use numbers within the made the stick framework. Um, and so that was the inspiration, like the basis for the idea.
00:03:05
Speaker
And so when I started doing research, I started, you know, doing all this, like really fascinating research about numbers and communication. And we hit upon the idea that numbers are a foreign language, right? So everybody's second, second language at best. And I think a lot of times people might think that they are bad at math or they're better at numbers. They're just not a numbers person, but really no one is a numbers person.
The Struggle of Comprehending Large Figures
00:03:27
Speaker
You know, our brain evolved to deal with physical concrete things that are right in front of our face.
00:03:32
Speaker
You know, not with the abstract, like, you know, 5%, you know, we're 1 trillion. So because of that, you can tell that number is in a way that people understand them. But you need to really understand how to translate them. And that's why I wrote the book. Yeah.
00:03:49
Speaker
So can you give me an example, like just a quick example, to sort of set the stage for folks, like give me an example of making that, you know, trillion dollars or, you know, five, you know, whatever the debt is now trillions and trillions of dollars making it more understandable and relatable. Yeah, forever. The example in the book is, you know, the US national debt is 27 trillion dollars. I think now it's higher.
00:04:15
Speaker
Yeah, that's a lot of money obviously.
00:04:46
Speaker
Um, where it's just, I mean, our brains cannot process $27, $20. So I just, I do want to say that I think my favorite example in the book is one that I actually remember from PD, from when I was a kid, it was on Earth Day. At some point I was watching some, you know, special online, um, not online. There's no, there's no internet when I was there. No online, yeah. There's no online. No online, yeah.
00:05:15
Speaker
Some people are listening to this like, what do you mean? There's no online. Yeah, there's no online. Where did you do that? So the statistic was 97.5% of the earth's water is salinated. And of the 2.5% that is fresh water, most of it is dirty or trapped in glaciers or underground. Meaning that only 0.01% of that is available for no consumption.
00:05:45
Speaker
So our translation for that, and this is what was shown on TV on Earth Day when I was a kid that I still remember very slowly, there's a woman holding a gallon jug of water. And she said, if you took all the earth's water and put it into the gallon jug, humans would only be able to drink that last drop.
Visualizing Debt and Relatability
00:06:01
Speaker
Wow. Yeah. So
00:06:05
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, and the fact that it's stuck in your head, right? Like, I mean, that's kind of the whole point, right? But do you, to the debt one, because the debt one, having spent a lot of time in government, like the debt one strikes me as very a challenge I always had.
00:06:22
Speaker
boiling it down to like per person, do we lose the sense of the magnitude? Does the magnitude like, is it just so big that it doesn't really matter in the first place? It's like kind of looking at the Grand Canyon. And you're like, I can't fathom that. So it doesn't really matter. Right, right. It's like you're looking, you know, last night, I was like, looking at stars, it was just a beautiful clear night. And I was like, that is very far away, you know, that like, you know, like, yeah, like, yeah, like, yeah,
00:06:48
Speaker
Well, I think you do this for me. And actually, one of the things that I wanted to put in the book was a little example of the USR budget, or at least the debt, but put it into smaller terms. We have this framework at the end about making scale models of things that I really, really like. And I think that that really seems to resonate with people. You take the same numbers, but you just chop off a few zeros. And then you can talk about it maybe in terms of a family's income and their expenditures, a family's budget.
00:07:17
Speaker
And then you would get the sense of, oh, this is how much we are spending per person. This is how unsustainable our spending practices are. So we actually were kind of working with a little example like that, saying, OK, so if the US government was a family, they would spend what half of their income on a security system. Yeah. Right. Right.
00:07:40
Speaker
So then what about this connection or trade-off between accuracy and the more effective communication? Like if something is $1.85 trillion, sometimes that 0.85 is really important. If we said it's about two or if it's $80,000 per person or whatever it is, we sort of lose that accuracy. So how do you think about that trade-off? Right. So there's this principle in the book called user-friendly numbers.
00:08:08
Speaker
Um, so that would be, you know, saying $2 trillion with people and resonate with people and people will be able to just understand that a lot better than 1.85 trillion. Um, you know, if you think about like, you know, your brain is having to store like one unit information versus like, you know, three units of information, I think it was really, this comes down to know your audience so much because I do find that people a lot of times when they're talking within their industry or within their discipline,
00:08:37
Speaker
You know, like I've been talking with other financial advisors lately and they're so used to using, you know, compound interest and interest rates and like all of these different things. Um, and so they can talk
Effective Communication in Finance
00:08:46
Speaker
to each other about it just fine. The problem is when they try to talk to a client or potential clients and then they forget about the fact that, you know, for the client user friendly has a much different definition than to a colony and their framework was much different.
00:09:01
Speaker
Um, so I, I do think it, a lot of this does depend on, you know, know your audience and what would be friendly to that particular user. Um, and then also, I think to your point about, um, you know, sometimes, you know, if you're on the government, you have to use 1.85 trillion instead of 2 trillion. You know, I guess I would push back with why, you know, like why is so important? Is it because everybody in the audience would know that you're rounding and then they would begin to doubt, like the breathier, like the truthfulness of your data.
00:09:31
Speaker
um or do they think that you're trying to like you know advance some sort of agenda you know by grounding something yeah yeah no i think that's i think that's that's right and like you said it depends on who you're trying to communicate with your audience so the financial advisor example is really interesting so when you talk to folks in say the financial industry and you talk about these comparisons and you talk about the because you mentioned like the other words like compound interest i wonder
00:10:02
Speaker
As people you're talking to and working with you get them to start thinking about phrasing numbers in a different way. Do you also do they also start thinking about just the other words that they use like, for example, I can imagine someone saying,
00:10:17
Speaker
1.25% compound interest, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And both of those things might be really difficult for a non-specialist to like understand. So do you find as people start to make the numbers more relatable, they also start thinking about just the other words that they use and how they communicate? I do think that using other words sort of naturally follows if you think about the numbers a little differently. So for example, with the financial planners, I was
00:10:46
Speaker
I use the example recently, I was considering having the floors redone at my home. They're kind of scratched up. And so, you know, I had some people come in and give estimates and it was like $8,000, you know, so I was thinking $8,000. Okay. From the financial planner standpoint and say, okay, so, um, what would that look like? That would look like, you know, in a few decades or 100 many years, it would be like $20,000, you know, or put another way for the savings bill that I have.
00:11:13
Speaker
I would be able to reach my savings goal like maybe eight months faster, right? If I didn't have my hardwood floors done. So then now I'm thinking about time, right? So now like that's my unit of currency. So now I'm thinking about my hardwood floors and that's eight months away and it has nothing to do with compound interest. However, if you take the $8,000 and you put it in the bank account, you know, compound interest, blah, blah, blah.
00:11:39
Speaker
Um, so you don't really even have to talk about that, all the specific things, because now I'm just talking about time and I'm just talking about like, you know, how much work I would have to do in order to stay for the floors or when I would be losing, like what the trade-offs would be for the floors. Right. Yeah. So it's just re sort of re-couching or re-stating or reframing. It's really reframing it. Exactly. You're reframing it in a book, a common vocabulary.
00:12:03
Speaker
Um, so that you don't even really have to talk about like all the nitty gritty specifics about compound interest. I find too, that is one of those things where people, I think we're all slightly scarred from some math class or some math lesson. Let's just sort of step one that we might admit it. So I think sometimes when you just say the word interest, people are like, Oh, you know, but it's about in terms of like,
00:12:27
Speaker
time or a trade-off or any other unit of measurement that just feels more natural than they were, you know, more fulfilling with or say like, oh, you get the hard floors or you wouldn't be able to go on vacation, you know, for how many years? You know, now we're talking about currency that is very important in near and dear to my mental health. Right. But then there's that added piece, I mean, I guess it's separate from the numbers, but the added piece of
00:12:55
Speaker
I'm just looking at my scratched up floors, uh, the utility of having those floors look better for the next X number of years. Like I, I have to retire eight months later, but I have the floors looking nicer for at least part of that time until someone scratches it. Right. Um, exactly. Yeah. So there's always that trade off. So there was one, uh, example, again, we were working with, we didn't put in the book. Um, you know, and it's like, when I moved here, uh, a year and a half ago from New York. So, you know, my furniture, I'm now in Portland, Oregon.
00:13:26
Speaker
I know I actually have a little bit of living space, which I did not have before, but it's pretty sure. And I was, right. I was thinking like all, all of these things, right. But the trade off, like, should I buy like the nice couch, you know, or should I buy like the crappy couch? And I was like, you know, I went with, I think that some of these things really, you can't quantify exactly. Right. Because what is the trade off? Right. If I bought the crappy couch. Okay. So maybe I would reach my savings goal a little bit, you know, sooner. However,
00:13:53
Speaker
I wouldn't really like my living room as much. I wouldn't be as comfortable for the next few decades. And that's very important to me. How can you put a price tag on that?
00:14:02
Speaker
Yeah, no, that's right. That's right. How much, you know, it's, it's consumption investment and all these things are sort of, they're often mixed together. Um, but I think to the core point of, of the book, it's about communicating those numbers. And there's not a lot about the data visualization part in the book, which is, you know, what a lot of listeners of this podcast are primarily interested in. But I would suspect that if, and I'm not going to, but if I were to give you a million dollars to write the make numbers count visual book, the follow-up.
00:14:31
Speaker
We can do it, John. I don't even know. So much for those new floors, let me tell you. But if you were to write the DataViz version of this book, I would assume that the lessons would be basically the same, right? That when you make the bar chart of national debt, you still turn it into per capita numbers or you stretch it out over time and still make those comparisons, right?
00:15:00
Speaker
Yeah. 100%. I think, um, one of the basic like lessons in here, like this, this is a book about communication and where are they always call writers? They always call writers show, don't tell. So I think if there was one takeaway from this book, it would be show, don't tell was turn your numbers into something that is concrete, somebody has tangible, something that we don't have to think about something that we just immediately rock. And I think it is, it's the same thing with visualization.
Using Relatable References
00:15:26
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. Making it obvious as possible.
00:15:30
Speaker
Yeah, there is a really interesting part, and it's kind of halfway through the book, where you talk about a comparison where you're comparing the population of one city to multiple cities. And in that section, you talk about large cities in China, which probably most people in the United States, including myself, like I'm looking at my little notes here because
00:15:52
Speaker
I don't know those cities, but large cities compared to cities in China. And so I guess the question is, how do you think and how do you talk about knowing your audience in their society, their culture, their community, their country is for this whole discussion? Right. So I like to think of it in terms of why I call it the MacGyver principle. So what did MacGyver do whenever he was trying to solve something?
00:16:22
Speaker
He would just look around him and he would just use whatever tools were available to him. I think when you're trying to figure out what would resonate well with your audience, it's the same principle, right? You're using whatever geographical references would resonate with them. You know, you're using, so there's a section here about the social distancing measures and how different places around the world reference those. So I think, you know, in California, you know, some of the public health announcements were, you know, once you're bored,
00:16:50
Speaker
you know, in France it was like, you know, stay two baguettes away. Yeah, I don't know what to handle about that one. Okay, yeah, I got the point. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So I think if you're right, so you could use whatever cities that your, your audience would be familiar with. And I think that if you start talking about something that's beautiful, and it's like, I don't know, I have no idea how big those cities are in China.
00:17:19
Speaker
You know, I know, I know that China is big, you know, kind of like the Grand Canyon, or that it's like, it's just very big. And I do remember hearing those statistics about like, how many cities in China, you know, have more than a million people. And I was like, that's, that's a lot. That's really all I know. And I feel like an idiot because like, I know Beijing, I know Shanghai, I know nothing about China.
00:17:40
Speaker
No, it's just an interesting cultural observation that we know our own experience. You've already talked about it in lots of different ways, but our own experience includes where we've grown up and where we're currently living and those comparisons. They don't necessarily translate globally. I would guess the same is true for units of measurement.
00:18:06
Speaker
Um, you know, meter versus yard, of course, we're like the only ones who do that, but. Right. Which again, just by the way, I think, um, you know, when I wrote the book with Chip, I was in New York and he was in the Bay area. We would also talk about height. So we tried to think of, okay, if you had to explain how tall Mount Everest is, that would be like, you know,
00:18:30
Speaker
If a person was a grain of ice and, you know, the three-story building or a one-story building, or if a person was, I think, as tall as a paperclip, that it would be a three-story building. And I was thinking, like, oh, then they sent to me because I'm in New York. There's plenty, right? For him, he was in the suburbs. He was like, one-story building. You know, so then we were going back and forth about, well, this makes sense to these people. This others make, you know, sounds logistical.
00:18:52
Speaker
So even just that might be something that is much more intuitive to an audience. And I think that is, again, one of the reasons why time works so well, because time is universal. And I think even $1,000 would mean something completely different, you know, from, say, you know, a neurosurgeon, you know, in a major city to like, say, you know, a single mother with kids in Oklahoma, you know, $1,000 is completely different, but five minutes is about five minutes.
Overcoming Abstract Comparisons
00:19:19
Speaker
Right, right. It's also the comparison that I think a lot of us have seen a lot that I never found useful is like, oh, you know, if you put the, I don't know, the dollars in the debt, the physical dollars, like laid them out, it would go from, you know, here to the moon and back. And I'm always like, well, how many times he's like, Oh my gosh, honey, I'm so sorry. Um, I did this, but you know, when I was out buying groceries, there was going to happen to be a sale.
00:19:47
Speaker
you know, at like a sporting store and a store. So I went in and I spent like, you know, two inches worth of dollar bills. Right. Right. Like, what? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's something that happens all the time in government and policy. People try to wow us with, Oh, this seems really big. Right. Or, Oh, it's three enter a single install. Or, Oh, if you took desert debt and you turned it into pennies,
00:20:16
Speaker
those pennies as much as like half of the moon or something. And I'm like, I have no idea what any of those numbers mean. Yeah. Right. It's, I see it's told by wisdom. It's like, we're really just trying to like, wow people with quantity, but there's no, we're always absolutely no idea what that means. It's just completely abstract. And I think people actually get away with using those kind of crappy examples because a lot of people have this
00:20:45
Speaker
Narrative that they're playing like i'm not a numbers person. I'm not I don't know what this means So therefore that must be impressive and I don't want to say anything because I don't want to sound like an idiot So we're really into this should be on the person who's doing communicating and who's you know? To make that not just wow, but wow and I understand that Yeah, yeah, it seems like the the underlying theme is putting everything in personal terms for your audience Yeah
00:21:15
Speaker
Yeah, depending on who that audience is, right? Yeah, or just kind of looking at like, what their typical frames of reference are. Yeah, exactly. What kind of measurements we use on a daily basis, or what kinds of items we use on a daily basis, which I think is like, like, counterintuitively, maybe being small and boring can actually make them very impressive, you know, counterintuitively. So say, if you want to talk about like, how small percentage of something was, you could say, Hey, just 10, you know, if they
00:21:43
Speaker
This entire pen with our budget, you know, the amount that I'm spending is only one line, right? Right, right, right. So that we could say that as a percentage of like, you know, we have this example in here of like the national adult for the art, you know, and if you try to balance the budget by taking away the NEA funding, you know, save $150 million, like that actually sounds like a lot, but in terms of percentages, it's not. So if you try to balance the budget,
00:22:10
Speaker
by removing NEA funding, it's the equivalent of trying to edit, I think, a 60,000 word novel by removing four words.
00:22:18
Speaker
Right. No, I was gonna say, it's kind of like in some ways, that approach is almost the opposite of wowism, right? Like, I like this term wowism, right? Like, it's kind of the opposite of that. It's saying, okay, if a human was the size to what you sort of were playing out with earlier, if a human was the size of a paperclip, then this building would be the size of blah, blah, blah. And same thing here, right? It's if,
00:22:43
Speaker
if you were editing a book, everybody sort of can think of a novel. It's about, you know, editing four words. So it's like, it seems like it's just boiling everything down into something. Yeah, it's the opposite of wowism, which I don't know what that word would be, but yeah.
Simplifying Numbers for Impact
00:22:59
Speaker
Human scale. Human scale. But it doesn't have the same ring as wowism. Yeah. I know. Right. Smallism. I don't know what it is. Smallism, yeah. Yeah.
00:23:12
Speaker
No, Douglas, I think that it is very counterintuitive that you actually get more of this, oh, wow, reaction when you shrink them down. Because again, our brains evolved to deal with concrete things that are right in front of our face. You know, like, probably the first sentence ever said was, yeah, oh, shit, there's a fire. Right, right. Exactly. We have to do something about this right now.
00:23:37
Speaker
Um, you know, not, oh, and that field over there, you know, there are five and a half things. Like we just don't, you know, we have to think about those, like we don't get that immediate, emotional, tangible. Reaction that we want. Um, so I think it is people constantly try to add all these numbers. You're not even going to take them away because they, the thing is once you reach this certain threshold, it's just, you're not going to get that
Engaging Presentations and Teaching
00:24:01
Speaker
reaction. You're not going to have people understand the ratio that you want to talk about. Yeah.
00:24:06
Speaker
Um, well, very good. This is, uh, it's a really fun book. I'll also say like, it was a really nice, easy read. You guys are good, good writers. So that's another reason for people to pick it up. Like just get to it. Um, I wanted to just ask one more question on where people can find you and where they could learn more about
00:24:27
Speaker
because I'm guessing there are lots of people who are like, well, I don't work in the federal budget, but I work in my company and we are serving tens of thousands of people with our product or service, but we have the same fundamental problem. Yeah. So you can find me online. Is that what you mean? That now exists, right. Right. You can find me in my office in Portland, Oregon. That's my dog.
00:24:56
Speaker
More accurately, you can find me online kstar, k-s-t-a-r-r.com. Awesome. That's great. Yeah. It's been a lot of fun talking to different readers and helping people figure out how to use these techniques in their own lives and their work.
Conclusion and Listener Engagement
00:25:15
Speaker
Also working with people, helping them with presentations, which has actually been really fun because I think it's just so clear.
00:25:24
Speaker
So sharp. I did something very tangent, but I was helping somebody understand they were trying to figure out how to teach the importance of budgeting to teenagers. Um, sure. That's not cool. And so we did something I figured is kind of the opposite of the scale model. Actually, it was, um, celebrity bankruptcies. So I think people don't like the idea of budgeting because they think in terms of like small, you know, like, Oh, I have to like take this money out making this for four people.
00:25:52
Speaker
Um, but if you actually round up and you look at no celebrities can go bankrupt too, you know, Nick Cage, like he made $40 million in one year and now we have nothing. It's because he just had this like horrible spending addiction. Yeah. So it's free. So framing it the other way. So that is a little bit of wowism, but just, but again, to the audience, to the audience, right? To teenagers who can really sort of tapped into that. Right. Exactly. Right. Like they can see the importance of it. It's not just for, you know,
00:26:22
Speaker
For people who have no money, it's really something that's important for everybody. Right, right. All right. Well, on that note of teaching kids how to be better with their money, Carla, thanks so much for coming on the show. It's been a great chat with you. Thanks for the book. Appreciate it. Thank you so much for having me, Jonathan. Great.
00:26:38
Speaker
Thanks everyone for tuning into this week's episode of the show. I hope you enjoyed that. I'm going to put links to the book and Carla's website and a couple other resources in the episode notes section of the webpage, so please do check that out. Also, check out all the new opportunities where you can support the podcast. I have my existing Patreon page. I've also started a new paid version of the newsletter. I have the free version. If you just want that, that's great.
00:27:02
Speaker
paid version will give you some behind-the-scenes insights, some sneak peeks at new YouTube videos, and an opportunity to meet with me every once in a while in person to ask questions and have a conversation and just chill out for a little bit. And I've also got the widow app that I started off where I'm shooting out some short little data viz things that I observed via text message if you'd rather get texts rather than emails.
00:27:24
Speaker
So check all those out. They're all listed in the episode notes page of this podcast episode. I hope you enjoyed that interview. I hope you will think carefully about how you communicate your next set of numbers. So until next time, this has been the PolicyViz podcast. Thanks so much for listening.
00:27:41
Speaker
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00:28:02
Speaker
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