Innumeracy in the work of Jonathan Safran Foer

... or, specifically, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close.  I feel like I know this narrator, but then:

Page 40 of the 2005 hardcover states

"More than 9 million people live in New York (a baby is born in New York every 50 seconds)".

Even without looking it up, I know this is obviously wrong.  9 million is very roughly 1/700 of the world population, so if the NYC birthrate is 1/50sec (and roughly equal to the worldwide birthrate), then more than 10 people are being born worldwide every second.  Last I checked, it was more like 1 every 4 seconds or so.

But we can get the right numbers.  See https://a816-healthpsi.nyc.gov/epiquery/Birth/, for example, and we see that there were 122,937 births in NYC in 2002.  That's (122,937/24)/60 = about 14 every hour, or one every 4 minutes and 16 seconds.

I know that the narrator is a child, but a child's mistake (in particular, *this* child's mistake) is to calculate 18 as the number of locks per person in NYC and then assume, as part of their calculations on how quickly he could try every lock in NYC, that 18 new locks come into being every time someone is born in NYC.  *This* child would not make a simple error in arithmetic, or fail to look up readily available facts.

Speaking of that calculation, on the next page it states,

"I figured out that if a baby is born in New York every 50 seconds, and each person has 18 locks, a new lock is created in New York every 2.777 [with a vinculum over the 7s] seconds."  

That is fine as far as it goes, since 50/18=2.777; (hah, turns out it was easy to add the overline with HTML markup) however, it then goes on to say

"So even if all I did was open locks, I'd still be falling behind by .333 [with vinculum] locks every second. [under the experimental evidence that it takes 3 seconds to open a lock]"

But 3-2.777 is .222, not .333.  Again, not a mistake *this* child would make.

This is me becoming increasingly disappointed with the physical world.  I had to stop reading this and go back to Fool Moon last night because I didn't want to lose this page before writing this post, and Fool Moon was the only other book on the bedstand.