Kids: It’s not cool to be innumerate. Struggling with basic maths is as crippling to your daily life as struggling with basic reading and writing would be, and while shame isn’t answer (self-improvement might be), pride certainly isn’t the right reaction either.
Not that you’d know it from Suzanne Moore, who is positively beaming as she announces in the Guardian:
We are silenced by some jargon and bogus maths (sorry, probabilities) because we are mostly innumerate and because economic orthodoxy presents itself as a higher faith. I am not the only person uncertain as to what a trillion means, surely?
Normally, using the third paragraph of a piece to declare yourself ignorant, not only of the subject of the piece, but of the most basic possible building blocks of that subject, would mean that you probably should think twice before opening Word. If you write about the failure of astronomy to predict meteor strikes, and declare in para three that you don’t understand what these “planet” things are, you get laughed out the building.
Yet admitting – showing off – that you don’t understand maths while you write about economics is apparently a Cool Thing To Do.
It’s even more irritating because Moore makes valid points. She writes that:
Economics is not a science; it’s not even a social science. It is an antisocial theory. It assumes behaviour is rational. It cannot calculate for contradiction, culture, altruism, fear, greed, love or humanity at all.
Although she is being somewhat hyperbolic, but bringing up real problems with the subject which academics are continually struggling to incorporate into their broader theories. Similarly, she writes:
Some of the free-market economists are right, but politicians can’t go there. The free movement of capital really requires the free movement of labour. Go where the jobs are, but do not complain when immigration undercuts your wage.
Again, the half-hearted attempt with which many politicians apply economic teachings to policy is aggravating. There is a tendency to cherry-pick recommendations when the economic rationale requires an all-or-nothing approach. See, for example, the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill, which merrily reduced availability of legal aid, citing a report which argued that “no-win no-fee” arrangements could make up the gap, and then also reduced the availability of those.
But criticisms like this are more powerful coming from someone who has not just proudly stated that they don’t know the difference between 1,000,000 and 1,000,000,000,000 and don’t believe that probability is real maths.
You don’t have to believe that people are cold unfeeling automata who exist to maximise utility functions. In fact, most economists don’t. But unless you plan to start your next book review with “I can’t read, LOL, so this was really boring,” don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.
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