Every statistic you encounter is a fragment of a longer arithmetic. Pull that fragment out of context and you’ve changed the math without changing a single digit.
Ninety-three billion dollars. That’s how much the Artemis program has cost through 2025 — a figure you’ve probably seen in a headline, a podcast clip, or an outraged social-media post. It sounds enormous because it is enormous, in isolation. The trouble is that almost no number actually arrives in isolation. We just process it that way.
How denominators disappear
The denominator problem isn’t usually the result of someone trying to deceive you — it’s compression. Reports become articles. Articles become headlines. Headlines become captions on screenshots. At each stage, context falls away, and the first thing to go is always the denominator. Spread across thirteen years, $93B is roughly $7.2B/year — about 0.11% of annual federal spending.
This happens because denominators are boring. “Crime increased 30%” is a story. “Crime increased 30% from a historically anomalous low during a pandemic year in which human movement patterns were radically disrupted” is a research paper. Nobody shares research papers.
Listen to the same claim, restored
The shortest version of the framing problem is best heard aloud. This three-minute briefing walks through the same $93-billion claim, with the denominator restored — and with an explicit note about which baseline year was chosen, and why that choice matters more than the number it produced.
The $93 billion in Artemis funding, with the missing arithmetic restored.
Why your brain can't help itself
The denominator problem exploits a feature of cognition that psychologists call anchoring — our tendency to lean on the first numerical piece of information we encounter. Once “$93 billion” lands, every subsequent claim is evaluated relative to it. The correct denominator would change the anchor, but denominators arrive second, if at all.
This isn’t a failure of intelligence. It’s the design of a brain optimized for fast decisions on incomplete data. We just don’t live in the savanna anymore. We live in an information environment that delivers thousands of numbers per week, each stripped of its denominator and tuned for emotional response.
The cure isn’t skepticism. It’s the habit of asking one question: out of what?
What you can do about it
You can’t audit every number you encounter. What you can do is treat strong emotional responses to numbers as a signal that a denominator is missing. The pause between hearing a number and forming a belief is exactly where the missing arithmetic would have lived, if it had made the journey.
Context exists to restore that denominator automatically, for every claim that crosses your feed. Not to tell you what to think about a number — but to give you the one thing you need to think about it well: the rest of the math.
Meet the authors
This essay is part of The Discourse Papers — a series on how information erodes and what we can do about it. Every statistic cited above is verifiable. Click any underlined claim to see the source.