The Implied Assumptions When We Write Or Think

TW: Andrew is a stats professor from Columbia (http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/mlm/). Somewhat like Nate Silver he is good at looking at things from different angles. He dissects a story on Japanese consumption to provide an alternative viewpoint using the exact same facts.

From Gelman's blog:
"On the front page of Sunday's New York Times, the primest of prime real estate, Hiroko Tabuchi writes:

"As recession-wary Americans adapt to a new frugality, Japan offers a peek at how thrift can take lasting hold of a consumer society, to disastrous effect... Today, years after the recovery, even well-off Japanese households use old bath water to do laundry, a popular way to save on utility bills. Sales of whiskey, the favorite drink among moneyed Tokyoites in the booming '80s, have fallen to a fifth of their peak. And the nation is losing interest in cars; sales have fallen by half since 1990."

How is this "disastrous"? Using bath water to do laundry makes sense to me. Unfortunately our apartment is not set up to do this, but why not? Cars are much better made than they used to be, probably most people in Japan who want a car badly enough have one already, so it makes sense that car sales would fall--people can continue driving their dependable old cars. Finally, I have nothing against whiskey, but is it really "disastrous" that sales have fallen to a fifth of their peak? Fads and all that.

Sure, I can see that this is all evidence that Japan's economy is far from booming, but I'm a bit disturbed to see frugality treated as a "disaster" in itself.

What really bothers me, though, is that the assumptions in the article are completely unstated. I'd be happier if the reporter had written something like this:

You might think that it's a good thing that the Japanese have become more energy-efficient and less into trendy conspicuous consumption: even well-off Japanese households use old bath water to do laundry, a popular way to save on utility bills, and sales of whiskey, the favorite drink among moneyed Tokyoites in the booming '80s, have fallen to a fifth of their peak.Even the notorious Japanese tendency to buy new cars and appliances every two years, whether they need it or not, has abated. The nation is losing interest in cars--sales have fallen by half since 1990--and people are sticking with old-fashioned television sets rather than snapping up expensive flat-screen TVs.

But this frugal behavior is having a disastrous effect [or, is
symptomatic of an underlying economic disaster]...

This puts the assumptions front and center, at which point they could quote experts on both sides of the issue or whatever.

P.S. Just to be clear: my point here is not that a newspaper reporter wrote something I might disagree with, but rather that sometimes people seem trapped within their unstated assumptions. (Yes, I'm sure that happens to me too.)"