Happy Boxing Day! A Twelve Days of Christmas Review!
Look, don't half-ass your "whimsical" exercise
I’ve used PNC’s Christmas Price Index as the basis for a few posts before now, and I’ve actually followed their footnotes, and checked out their numbers… and YET AGAIN found a problem!
The Prior Problem: 12th Day or All the Days?
The last time I put the spreadsheet together with the PNC numbers was 2017: Breaking the 12 Days of Christmas Cost Scandal Wide Open!
The title of that post refers to the fact the PNC Christmas Price Index only totals up the 12th day of Christmas present costs - one run-through of the canonical song:
12 Drummers drumming
11 Pipers piping
10 Lords a-leaping
9 Ladies dancing
8 Maids a-milking
7 Swans a-swimming
6 Geese a-laying
5 Goooooolden Riiiiiiings
4 Calling birds
3 French hens
2 Turtle doves
and a Partridge in a pear tree
Which adds up to 1+2+3+4+5+6+7+8+9+10+11+12 = 78 presents (per se… let’s not quibble over how the various people are presents).
On the 12th day.
But what about the other 11 days?
I made that video waaaaay back in 2009.
Only the last day is 78 presents. The full haul is 364 presents.
Anyway, I made a spreadsheet adjusting the estimated costs - they did split out the partridge (in a pear tree) cost, and that’s given over 12 days - I multiplied that by 12.
The 5 Gooooooolden riiiiings were given 8 days (the 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th, 11th, 12th days) — so I need to multiply their cost 8 times.
I will get back to that in a bit, because I need to get back to something more basic: how good is PNC’s record-keeping?
The Numbers Don’t Add Up
When I realized, from PNC’s own footnotes (oh, isn’t that cute?) that the numbers had changed since 2017….
… I did pull all their components and compared against their historical index.
Here’s the graph.
The red line is the PNC Christmas Price Index. Just ignore 2020. I don’t want to litigate what they did with the 2020 numbers (bah, humbug).
But, what the heck is going on 2010 - 2013? The sum of the components and the index don’t match at all! (I may email them and ask them — what the heck?)
They provide the data that supposedly are behind the index, year-by-year, and the sums are very close, except for those specific years as you can see in that graph.
The main point of this annual exercise is to give something “fun” for kids to do in math classes to learn about inflation and economics.
Maybe they’ll learn something about audit now, too.
A different lesson about audit
This is going to take a very abrupt turn.
When I read I, Claudius recently, I forgot that it was one of a two-parter — the miniseries “I, Claudius” was based on two books by Robert Graves, not that we got to see the system engineering from Claudius as above (my dad was a systems engineer at IBM, just an FYI.)
Claudius the God is part 2, when Claudius is emperor (through his death).
The reason I like reading this, even though I’ve seen the miniseries many times, is due to details like this — a lot of the bureaucratic systems are difficult to dramatize. It’s like Neal Stephenson & his books. I love Anathem, but yeah… that would be difficult to adapt even to a TV series.
Claudius the God is more interesting than I, Claudius of the two books, as Claudius has a more active role, and you get to see his mix of intelligence and lack of guile in so many areas. As a fictional character, he’s very interesting and convincing as a human.
Robert Graves drew on multiple sources, but one must realize almost all the sources are of the Senatorial class, which tended to be pretty tart about the Roman emperors. So you get the TMZ version of emperors’ lives… if you think making fun of their grammatical errors (in addition to their sexual peccadillos) is TMZ fare.
In any case, having an audit trail on execution orders seems like a good idea. That’s serious matter.
Auditing silly stuff
To be sure, the 12 Days of Christmas and their costs are a bit silly.
But if you’re arguing kids can learn important lessons surrounding economics and money through this, then you need to make sure the amounts actually foot (that is, the sums done in one way also match sums done in another way.)
Finding a disparity in these numbers is meaningless — there was probably a small bobble.
Look, if they went to the trouble of putting in a footnote to indicate a change in methodology and restatement in historical amounts, then they probably just had an inadvertent error in some of the elements. I’ll try to email somebody over there.
Let’s see what happens.
