‘Experts’ Playing Silly Numbers Games

Here we are, awash in the usual sea of numbers.

Should the federal budget be balanced in seven years (Republicans) or 10 years (Democrats)? Will the Social Security system be stone-broke ere long? Why did the Dow Jones industrial average go up to 4702.73 last week? If the chances are one in 12 million that O.J. Simpson’s DNA could be confused with someone else’s DNA, how many other murder suspects do we have in that case? How many homeless people are there in this country? And was there anything wrong with Lani Guinier’s “quota” proposal?

To the rescue comes our hero, John Allen Paulos, that mysterious masked mathematician on a white horse, with his new book, “A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper.” Paulos is a reader-friendly explainer of abstruse mathematical concepts for the mathematically illiterate, or innumerate, among us.

He begins, as usual, with the reassuring (sort of) news that practically nobody knows what they’re talking about when it comes to numbers in the newspapers. And that’s because we’re always quoting other people, such as politicians and stock-market analysts, who don’t know what they’re talking about either.

Paulos, with his usual calm good cheer, goes about explaining why it is that so many of our public policy debates are the equivalent of a group of medieval theologians solemnly disputing how many angels will fit on the head of a pin.

Let’s take the balanced-budget debate, for starters.

Should we balance the budget in seven years or in 10 years? The correct answer is: Not one of these “experts” knows what he or she is talking about.

The butterfly effect - the notion that a butterfly flapping its wings in China might spell the difference between a balmy day and a hurricane along the U.S. seaboard months later- is so well-known that it now is the subject of a television advertisement.

We all know that long-term weather forecasting is impossible because such minute changes as the breeze created by a butterfly’s wings affect, in turn, other factors that eventually will determine the weather. Even so, we have yet to grasp - much less apply - the notion of the butterfly effect in other complicated systems besides the weather.

Here we sit debating the difference between the Republican plan and the Democratic plan for a balanced budget as though anyone knows what the economy will be doing seven to 10 years from now.

It not only is profoundly silly, but the hilarious certitude that our politicians invest in this nonsensical debate makes it deliciously funny as well. As Johnny Faulk used to say, “I ain’t sure where I stand on that yet, but I’m prepared to be damn bitter about it.”

Regarding the widely held assumption that Social Security is going to hell in a handbasket: This assumption is based on projections that the system’s trustees made in their annual report. Their projections are based, in turn, on the assumption that the economy will grow an average of 1.5 percent (after inflation) for the next 75 years. But as Doug Henwood points out in the Left Business Observer, this is precisely half the rate at which the economy has grown for the past 75 years; even the 1930s saw a faster growth rate.

Assume that the economy grows at a below-average 2.2 percent for the next 75 years; then, Social Security is in no trouble at all.

Assume that the economy grows at a still-below-average 2.5 percent; then, the system will be running a surplus. Isn’t that nice?

I long have believed that fear is the most dangerous factor in politics. Fear makes people do terrible things. As Boots Cooper once observed of a harmless snake, “Some things’ll scare you so bad, you’ll hurt yourself.”

Paulos is quite good at puncturing the fear the media generate by using crime statistics stupidly - it’s the same old culprit: reporting without context. And our national tendency to scare ourselves into a frenzy is especially noticeable in reporting on health risks. Mathematically speaking, we are given to much ado about nothing.

If paranoia could be cured by math, Paulos would be the Jonas Salk of the disease.

His dissection of conspiracy theories is delicious. Coincidence continues to astonish all of us, but as Paulos points out, it’s as common as dirt for mathematical reasons. Remember the famous list of striking coincidences between the assassinations of Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy (Lincoln had a secretary named Kennedy and Kennedy had a secretary named Lincoln, etc.)? Paulos gives us an even more astonishing list of similarities between two other assassinated presidents, William McKinley and James Garfield - and it’s even more irrelevant.

The media are especially fond of scaring us all to death about health risks - remember the tabloid treatment of the “Bacteria That Eats You”? The disease du jour always is followed by a made-for-television movie that scares the pants off everyone who sees it - while everyone stands in far greater daily risk of being hit by lightning.

Bless his heart, Paulos even takes on elementary errors in logic that plague public debate. He is consistently refreshing, reassuring and helpful - and should be mandatory reading for journalists.

Eric Sevareid once pleaded for more time on television - time for policy-makers to express “not only the courage of their convictions but also the courage of their doubts.”

Amen.

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