Numbers have a crazy effect on people. We really don’t understand them very well. But those people that do have some understanding have a great advantage. (I don’t really class myself in that category).
But it’s not maths I’m talking about and it’s less about individuals that I want to go into here. It’s the bigger role of numbers in our societies. How we are informed about the quality and quantity of how good things are by using numbers but actually in reality we don’t experience quality of life in numbers.
Unemployment numbers for example are told to us on the news and we are told they are high or low or going up or down or that one place has more or less than another. As the media reports them we take these things as being real and actual and important but in reality for individuals they are meaningless. (The numbers that are calculated are also quite sketchy as they are not consistently measured and in and of themselves have no real meaning without putting contexts against them). However our governmental systems including media have taken to using these and the communication of them as a clear indicators of how “well” we are doing as a group, even though there is no real qualitative indications included. And so the game becomes about governments trying to manipulate things so as to get better numbers so that they can “prove” that they have made things are better. So we end up getting lost on chasing imaginary numbers rather than understanding what our actual quality of life is and how we measure it. How successful are we as a group of people, how do you measure happiness and health, rather than how many of us contribute to a statistical measurement based on whether you are registered to receive government money, or how much money everyone has or is spending.