Learning Something New, for Chrissake!

I am working on

“A nogid kumt op, un an oreman kumt oyf, iz nokh nit glaykh”. Rich man down and poor man up — they’re still not even.”

— Yiddish proverb.

In order to solve an equation, we are told, just simplify operations by making certain that what you do to one side of the equation you must do to the other. Simplify and simplify until there are no more operations to do, and voilà, you can go out and play.

Whine about the relevance of Algebra, and the patient answer you’ll get sounds airtight—that mathematics teaches a disciplined way of thinking, or that it’s music and art and a jigsaw puzzle all elegantly rolled up into one. Of course, someone will inevitably offer the spectacular, theological, mother of all answers of all—explaining the behavior of gnats and weather and the big-bang, that “mathematics explains life as it is.” After all, numbers don’t lie. They’re objective; they transcend cultures; they hold in their abstruse code the answer to life’s most vexing questions. It’s all quite simple, really. Just do the math! And show your work.

These explanations have never offered me much solace. Every futile attempt to “do the math’ tends to notch up my anxiety. Always has. I viewed math as a series of doors. If by luck, I managed to open one, others would surely appear, each one more forbidding than the next. Sometimes I wonder how I made it through graduate school.

Brains, scientists say, are elastic. By the time I came around to the connection between mathematics and the humanities, I pictured my brain with stretch lines, cellulite, craters. It has been slow going. Arnold Sommerfeld, the German theoretical physicist once said: “Mathematics is like childhood diseases. The younger you get it, the better.”

It is easy to cite studies that affirm our predetermined ideological stance and add a level of legitimacy by peppering our arguments with numbers. It is far more difficult to bridge the chasm between one’s assumptive rhetoric and credible proof. In short, I told myself to stop whining and to bone up. After all, I’m a college professor.

But I’ve found a way in—economics. And if you know enough economics, you will know a great deal more about inequality, marginalization, and economic disenfranchisement; the correlation between faulty education systems and poor health; the depth of profiling and disproportionate levels of incarceration based upon race; the divide between quality education and low self-efficacy, a lack of mobility, and susceptibility to discrimination in hiring and housing.

Sure, I live in the world of the social sciences, but sometimes I forget the science part. Economic analysis is a Rubik’s cube of dynamic insight about how societies function, how decisions are made, how strategic interactions unfold, how bounded our rationality really is, why inequality is so intractable. Fun fact: Ernő Rubik was both a sculptor and an architect. He knew the connections.

I plunked down three dollars for N. Gregory Mankiw’s Principles of Economics: Seventh Edition at my local library book sale, and committed myself on the spot to overcoming my mathematical mumps. While not exactly a car chase or a tawdry page-turner, the first two chapters convinced me that economics is not just about the world of numbers, but the world in numbers.

Chapter 1: Ten Principles of Economics includes: How People Make Decisions, including sub-principles like People Face Trade-Offs and Rational People Think at the Margin. “Chapter 2: Thinking Like an Economist,” includes The Role of Assumptions, Differences in Scientific Judgments, Differences in Values, and Perception versus Reality—heady, poetic assumptions about how incentives drive innovation and vaguely religious descriptions about how the “invisible hand” of the market can account for those abstruse or unobservable forces that drive demand and supply and market equilibrium. I also read Stiglitz’s assertion that the “invisible hand” is invisible because it isn’t there.

My autodidactic escapade motivated me to enroll in math MOOCs, listen to podcasts, bolster my own learning with Khan Academy videos, and watch TED Talks by the late Swedish public health physician, professor, and statistician, Hans Rosling. Rosling founded GapMinder to provide an accessible way for the public to visualize and “explore the vast treasure of global statistics” in order to “dismantle misconceptions, and promote a fact-based worldview.” Gapminder simply reported the numbers without the bias of “political, religious or economic affiliations.”

The more I played with interactive tools on the GapMinder site, the more I could picture human activity: the connection between child survival and GDP, the numbers behind haves and have-nots, and whether that gap is widening or closing; how industrialism has been both a liberator and an oppressor. Where some economists are accused of looking for the numbers, Rosling looked in the numbers.

The more I stuck with it, the more the math puzzle pieces took shape. I held back from making sweeping judgments about the state of the world before doing the numbers. I also started to worry. I read game theory hypotheticals about what drives us, how willing we are to defer immediate gratification for a bigger reward or play it safe. How much control we think we have over our lives. How much confidence we have in our decisions. Why we may vote against our own best interests or seek affirmation in social media for opinions prepackaged just for us. Heady, important stuff.

In his 2017 Nobel Prize lecture, “From Cashews to the Evolution of Behavioral Economics,” Richard H. Thaler discusses how a nudge one way or the other could have huge implications, and that “understanding human nature can improve the explanatory power of economic theory, and help us devise solutions to public policy problems. In short, we can nudge for good.” Imagine that. Nudges are powerful levers capable of stimulating breathtaking advances in human welfare or undermining our own power to reason. Nudges can set in motion the wisdom of crowds or a mob mentality. Scary stuff, too.

All the other Nobel Prizes are named with one word: Physics, Chemistry, Medicine, Literature, and Peace—except for Economic Sciences. Was this because economics needed a self-esteem boost to sit proud amongst the others? Established fifty years ago by Sweden’s central bank, the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences was not stipulated in Alfred Nobel’s will and has, ever since, been attacked for being influenced by—rather than pretending to rise above—the political whim and the imperious power of money. Peter Nobel, the great-grandson of Ludvig Nobel, claimed it provided cover for profiteers, did not honor the family’s name or the intention of the prize (for social good), and represented nothing short of a “PR coup by economists to improve their reputation.”

The Dismal Science

Economics has been called the “dismal science,” so coined in 1848 by the historian Thomas Carlyle, convinced that overpopulation and limited resources will doom and drain humanity. A downer if there ever was one, Carlyle was also an ardent fan of reintroducing slavery in the West Indies, because black men should be “compelled to work as he was fit, and to do the Maker’s will who had constructed him.” Dismal, indeed.

Jokes abound. In one, economists are often wrong: Why did God invent economists? Answer: To make weather forecasters look good. In another, they are too theoretical: A physicist, a chemist and an economist are stranded on an island, with nothing to eat. A can of soup washes ashore. The physicist says, “Let’s smash the can open with a rock.” The chemist says, “Let’s build a fire and heat the can first.” The economist says, “Let’s assume that we have a can-opener…”

Or they are unrealistic: Three economists (econometricians to be exact) went out hunting and came across a large deer. The first econometrician fired, but missed by a meter to the left. The second econometrician fired, but also missed by a meter to the right. The third econometrician didn’t fire, but shouted in triumph, “We got it! We got it!”

Or shady: A mathematician, an accountant and an economist apply for the same job. The interviewer calls in the mathematician and asks “What do two plus two equal?” The mathematician replies “Four.” The interviewer asks “Four, exactly?” The mathematician looks at the interviewer incredulously and says “Yes, four, exactly.” Then the interviewer calls in the accountant and asks the same question. The accountant’s answer is: “On average, four — give or take ten percent, but on average, four.” Finally, the interviewer calls in the economist. Same question. The economist gets up, locks the door, closes the shade, sits down next to the interviewer and says, “What do you want it to equal”?

Sure, they can be wrong, unrealistic, or shady. But so can we all. Look yourself in the mirror and ask: “Do I base my theories on facts, (given the sheer volume of information, fake news, and bias out there), or do I my twist my cherry-picked facts to fit my predetermined theories?” “Am I describing the real world outside my window or the one I want to see and convince others to see, too?”

Do I remain an economics ignoramus? Without question. My knowledge about the Tragedy of the Commons, Keynesian Economics, Marxism, Laissez Faire Capitalism, and Conspicuous Consumption is Wikipedia deep. In a police lineup, I wouldn’t be able to point out a Laffer Curve from a Lorenz Curve, or a Phillips Curve from a Palma ration, but they do shed light on some hefty poetic and sweeping economic theories that keep us all up at night: Rational Expectations, Creative Destruction, Dynamic Consistency, Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem, Offsetting Behavior, or Moral Hazard.

But here’s my point…