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You are of course, correct about the eyeball and numbers. But if there's a disconnect, it's good to question why that seems to be this case.

The way I read the study -- and correct me, please, if I'm wrong -- is that if a Wal-Mart was built on the east of the state but a new business started up on the west side of the state, that counted as proof that Wal-Mart doesn't reduce the number of "small businesses." Again: That tells us nothing about what happens in an individual community.

It's like saying that if you walked into a room with $100 and I was over on the other side of the room with two cents and we never talked to each other, never interacted, that the average net worth in the room was $50. That's technically true, but it doesn't really say anything true about you or me.

Couple of thoughts:

* First, the study is two years old, so we're not breaking any new ground here.

* Second, the authors give the game away pretty early on in the paper when they describe the parameters of their research this way:

"From an economic standpoint, the real question of interest is how Wal-Mart
impacts the overall size of the small business sector for the entire U.S. economy. To
overcome the problems in previous studies, we use both state and national level data,
restrict our analysis to small firms only, and include all small firms regardless of whether
they are in a directly competing business sector or not."

The authors' "real question" you see, apparently isn't how a new Wal-Mart store in a town tends to affect the small competing businesses in that community -- but how Wal-Mart stores affect ALL small businesses (even those that aren't in direct competition, like the widget firm that doesn't sell groceries or tennis shoes but still counts as a "small" business) across their state and even the nation. The authors, in other words, have gone out of their way to avoid a real apples-to-apples comparison. It's more like apples to rocket ships, and it tells us nothing about what happens when Wal-Mart comes to town.

Having said that: You can argue Wal-Mart's economies of scale benefit those same communities by making it possible for families to purchase those groceries and tennis shoes more cheaply than the local businesses can. (And, full disclosure, I have a close relative in the food industry who has made a good chunk of their living as a Wal-Mart supplier.) That's the better argument to make on Wal-Mart's behalf.

But the report doesn't really say what it seems to say. And it furthermore asks lots of people -- I'm one of them -- to deny the evidence of their own eyes: Wal-Mart tends to kill off the mom-and-pops. We might be better off because of it, we might not, but we shouldn't pretend it isn't happening.