OK, I’m going to try to address this topic again, and I will do my level best to stay calm about this subject and not lose my shit and fly way off the handle like I did last time.

One my my more persnickety and painful pet peeves has to do with people treat mathematics like it is some kind of obscure and arcane thing that they have no chance of possibly understanding, leaving them to make important life decisions based on gut feeling or similarly unreliable methods instead of using the far simpler and safer method of just doing the math.

Now, I am not some math loving Asperger’s patient who like numbers better than people and wishes everyone was more like him. I am not that particular flavour of nerd. I can take math or leave it. I got good marks in math in school, but not appreciably better than the rest of my courses. Math is just OK by me.

Nor am I talking about advanced algebra or calculus or some other blackboard-covering mind-denting level of the science of numbers, values, and relationships. I hit the wall at college level calculus like a lot of people did, and so anything I know, I learned in the regular school system. I am not, for a moment, saying that everyone should strive to be the next Stephen Hawking or Rene Descartes.

No, all I am talking about is the math you learned in elementary school. Add, subtract, multiply, divide. If you made it to junior high, you already know all this math. And thanks to the invention of the calculator, you don’t even have to actually do the math yourself. You just have to know what it means.

But a lot of people seem to treat math like a childhood disease : something you had to go through when you were a kid and are now incredibly glad they will never, ever, ever have to experience it again. (Sadly, a lot of people treat reading the same way, more’s the pity. )

And if math was truly an obscure and largely useless subject that had no bearing whatsoever on people’s day to day lives, that would be fine. History, for instance, is a subject which is very important to society as a whole (history is memory and to fail to learn from the mistakes of the past is to be doomed to repeat them), but in the context of the average person’s daily life, whether or not they remember the year in which the Diet of Worms occurred is not going to have much of an impact unless they are playing Trivial Pursuit. (It’s 1521, by the way. Thanks, Wikipedia!)

But math is considerably more important to day to day life, and for one tiny little reason : MONEY. The world of money is the world of numbers, and those who are not comfortable with dealing with the basics of the world of numbers (math, in other words) are naked and vulnerable when the wolves of superior numeracy who control the world of money with their math skills are looking for sheep to shear. Or worse.

In fact, the entire world is now in financial crisis, with millions suffering worldwide on every level of society, because a small group of extremely rich number nerds came up with a mathematical model so complicated and abstruse that they fooled a lot of other very rich people into buying the financial instruments based on these mathematical models under the sheer faith that these mathemagicians had someone invented a way to make financial risk disappear while maintaining a high return on investment. And by the time they realized their mistake, they had convinced the economy that this was real money, and when they eventually ran out of suckers to spend their real money on fake magic money, trillions of dollars disappeared from the world economy in a flash.

So we can’t pretend math is not important. It’s the heart and soul of money, especially in this day and age when our life savings are just digits on a computer screen. And yet so many people are intimidated by the world of numbers. Why is that?

Frankly, I don’t really know. It might have something to do with some people simply being temperamentally biased towards qualitative thinking over quantitative thinking, and hence the precise and definitive (but strictly limited) world of mathematics seems incomprehensible to them, even at such a basic level as addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division.

And we know it’s not a matter of ability, because again, we all can do these things. We all learned basic math in elementary school. It’s not like we lack basic numeracy.

It’s more, I think, a matter of being comfortable with numbers. Of getting over the feeling that when you are dealing with numbers, you are in alien territory and want to get out as soon as possible because you are outside your comfort zone.

If you can stick with it, you will realize that numbers are extremely simple, so simple it’s almost ludicrous, and once you realize that, you will lose your fear and be able to push numbers around and use them like the simple tools they are.

If enough of us can do that, we can crack the code behind which all these financial world jackals do their dirty business, drag them out into the light, and hold them accountable for their crimes.

If not, we will all remain in the dark about what is really going on, and be at the mercy of the predator who stalk their prey in the darkness of public ignorance.