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Orientalism, it never gets old...
China Abandons The Abacus.
China is raising its interest rates by 0.25 points. The NPR Planet Money blog entry points out that this is the first time that the Chinese central bank has moved interest rates by something that is not a multiple of 0.09. So far, so good. I don't actually have any issue with the two reasons they quoted from Bloomberg News. (I'm not thrilled with the numerology argument but it's plausible.) However, the reason they quoted from the economist with Citigroup is just bizarre:
"The reason is that on the abacus, adding multiples of nine was much easier than adding multiples of 10. So the modern People's Bank of China inherited that special character from the old days."
Abacuses are decimal instruments. The way you add 9 is to add 10 then subtract one. The way you add 10 is... to add 10. e.g. You add 36 by adding pushing up 4 beads in the 10s place then removing 4 beads in the 1s place, dealing with carries as necessary. You add 40 by pushing up 4 beads in the 10s place. Not seeing how adding multiples of 9 is easier given that you have to add a multiple of 10 first then make a correction.
(My dad used to sit me at the abacus and make me add from 1 to 100 over and over again until I came up with the right answer. Looking back, I wish he'd taught me the other basic arithmetic operations.)
The abacus is ultimately a scratchpad made of rods and beads. The same trick for adding 9s works with paper and pencil too. If someone had made the same statement but replaced "on the abacus" with "on paper" and "People's Bank of China" with "Federal Reserve System," I suspect we'd think that person was a raving lunatic.
China is raising its interest rates by 0.25 points. The NPR Planet Money blog entry points out that this is the first time that the Chinese central bank has moved interest rates by something that is not a multiple of 0.09. So far, so good. I don't actually have any issue with the two reasons they quoted from Bloomberg News. (I'm not thrilled with the numerology argument but it's plausible.) However, the reason they quoted from the economist with Citigroup is just bizarre:
"The reason is that on the abacus, adding multiples of nine was much easier than adding multiples of 10. So the modern People's Bank of China inherited that special character from the old days."
Abacuses are decimal instruments. The way you add 9 is to add 10 then subtract one. The way you add 10 is... to add 10. e.g. You add 36 by adding pushing up 4 beads in the 10s place then removing 4 beads in the 1s place, dealing with carries as necessary. You add 40 by pushing up 4 beads in the 10s place. Not seeing how adding multiples of 9 is easier given that you have to add a multiple of 10 first then make a correction.
(My dad used to sit me at the abacus and make me add from 1 to 100 over and over again until I came up with the right answer. Looking back, I wish he'd taught me the other basic arithmetic operations.)
The abacus is ultimately a scratchpad made of rods and beads. The same trick for adding 9s works with paper and pencil too. If someone had made the same statement but replaced "on the abacus" with "on paper" and "People's Bank of China" with "Federal Reserve System," I suspect we'd think that person was a raving lunatic.