McCann: The Power Of Numbers

If the world had paid heed to the wisdom of John White, we might have avoided austerity.
 
Last year, the UCD lecturer published Do The Math! – everything you never wanted to know about mathematics but which you’ll be chuffed to find out about anyway.
What a pity Carrmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff didn’t read it.
Does fracking (sounds like a bizarre sexual practice, does it not) make economic sense? Does the fact that the US spends a zillion dollars a year on weapons designed (so they say) as ‘deterrents’ make an outbreak of war less likely? Why do intelligent people fall for pyramid schemes? Does shopping with a credit card rather than cash make sense?
Not only will you learn the answers to such conundrums, your granddaughter will think you are smarter than she thought you were yesterday. Take my word, this is an achievement. 
Do The Math! could do for mathematics what Eats Shoots & Leaves did for grammar or Amo, Amas, Amat for Latin-lovers or Bert Weedon’s Play In A Day for chordless rock guitarists.
White illustrates his arguments with examples and analogies drawn from sports, politics, gambling and other stuff that people like ourselves might know enough about to understand. His book is rooted in a recognisable world.
If you think that mathematics is innocent of ideology, think again. The sums and statistics show that competition is counter-productive, that an equal society is more efficient in the generation of wealth, that mainstream economists inhabit a world of their own making, and that some can’t count any better than an innumerate child fiddling with its fingers. You’ll be angry as well as amused.
It’s a moot point whether anger or amusement is the appropriate response to the undoing of Harvard economics professors Reinhart and Rogoff. They are the gurus whose pointy-headed pronouncements persuaded Michael Noonan, George Osborne and their decrepit ilk that the biggest obstacle to growth is the level of debt and that every last cent must therefore be squeezed from the people to cover the shortfall created by freakonomics and fraud.
R&R devised a model which purported to demonstrate that debt above 90% of GDP has a disastrous effect on growth. Last year’s figure for the Republic was 117.6%. Hence the insistence of Noonan, Gilmore, Kenny and Rabbitte that public servants, social welfare recipients, the sick, special-needs children and so on must do their bit to bring the debt down by suffering a bit more for a bit longer.
The chiefs of the Coalition are not alone. R&R’s This Time Is Different was greeted with squeals of delight when published in 2011. “An extraordinary piece of work,” said Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke. “A masterpiece”, reckoned the Financial Times. “A terrific book” according to the New York Times. “(They are) the most important authorities in the world today on financial crashes” – Bill Clinton. And so on.
Then along came Thomas Herndon, 28, graduate student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He took a fresh look at R&R’s figures and discovered they didn’t add up. Two Amherst economics professors checked and endorsed his conclusion. Consternation ensued in academic circles. But from the political advocates of austerity, not a word, much less a change in approach. The refusal to acknowledge reality has been highlighted by one or two commentators – Gene Kerrigan, for example. From the rest, shifty silence.
This is not to say the advocates of austerity would change their tune if forced to come out and defend themselves. It’s more likely they embraced the R&R analysis for no reason other than it seemed to provide objective backing for policies they were out to implement anyway. Even if now compelled to ditch R&R’s prescriptions, they’d come up with some alternative jiggery-pokery to justify continuance along the same path.
It remains relevant, though, that the case they made for clobbering the people has been shown to be fraudulent. Studying Do The Math! wouldn’t dent their determination. What it might do is stiffen the resolve of the rest of us to cleanse the country by driving them out.
You can’t ask more of a book than that.
 
Answering a question on April 28 from Sinn Féin TD Sean Crowe, Tánaiste Eamon Gilmore declared that none of the 548 US military aircraft that landed at Shannon Airport last year was carrying arms, ammunition or explosives or was involved in military operations.
Read that sentence again, if you will. Military aircraft, uninvolved in military operations. Of course.
At this point I would say that Gilmore must take the people for fools, except that we sort of know that already.
Retired US Army Colonel and former diplomat Ann Wright observed: “I have never heard of any such US military flights where there were not armed personnel.”
If they are not involved in military operations, what mission are they on? Checking out the duty-free?
Could Gilmore not ask around Labour for more plausible lies? I am sure Pat Rabbitte could come up with a few.