Unlike a former Barbie doll, I like math. But math and I haven’t always been best buddies.
As a 10th grader struggling to comprehend the mysterious angles and curves of geometry, I asked questions until the teacher told me in front of everyone that I asked too many questions.
I figured I must be stupid because he never told the boys they asked too many questions, and no other girls ever asked questions.
After that, math and angst settled simultaneously into my psyche, surfacing as dazed distraction when numbers needed demystifying.
I avoided frontal assaults on math. I met my math requirement in college by taking logic, as it was drolly called.
When the teaching assistant kept mumbling something about decks of cards and probabilities, however, I blithely skipped the rest of the classes and took a D because I had no interest in playing cards.
Quite logical, really.
I followed my own math rules, ones that made more sense and dealt with reality. For example, when I moved in 1974 to Des Moines from a warmer climate, I bought a down coat on sale for $80, an expensive outlay for our young family. I knew I would wear the coat for 10 years, though, so I figured the coat cost $8 each year, a bargain for sure.
But the coat actually lasted 15 years, which reduced the cost to about $5.30 a year. So I ultimately saved $13.50 ($8 – $5.30 (equals) $2.70 x 5 years (equals) $13.50), which meant I could buy a book with my profit.
I thought my secret budget-balancing methods were unique, devised because I didn’t get real math. Then one day I started reading a newspaper’s business pages. Well, the paper’s stories and others from Money, Forbes and Fortune were a revelation, let me tell you.
I realized a lot of business people used the same math I did, only they had degrees in economics and business, plus respect for prognostications that rarely came true at the appointed time.
I felt like MathWoman with a big M on my sweatshirt.
But I still have questions based on my reality-check math methods: How can the economy be improving when so many stories are about businesses laying off workers? (“Downsizing” is the euphemism tossed out by management still collecting paychecks.)
Xerox Corp. announces that its work force will be cut by 10 percent through attrition and layoffs. In Marshalltown, Iowa, Fisher Controls International Inc. eliminates 370 jobs. Yet the unemployment rate has dropped consistently.
Where are the laid off people going to work? Mainly in service jobs that don’t pay enough to maintain chickens in every pot and two cars in the garage. How, then, can folks replace refrigerators, cars or clothes, much less buy junk food and eat out?
Somebody’s buying though. At least that’s what the stories say. Consumer confidence-the feeling by us common folks that we can now spend what we saved for the rainy day ’cause the storm has blown by-is surging, so much that people are spending more than they are earning: Consumer debt numbers are rising.
Here it is in a nutshell or three: People are getting laid off left and right, but the jobless rate is decreasing.
People are spending faster than they are earning, but that’s OK because theoretically stores will buy to refill their shelves.
Then factories will hire more workers to make the products to sell the stores to fill their shelves to sell to consumers who charge the purchases and don’t have enough money to pay the bills.
The economy is on a definite upswing. But if people keep buying, interest rates might go up and investors would sell their stocks, causing the market to slump and erode confidence in the economy.
The muddle triggers memories of the child’s story about the old lady who swallowed a horse to swallow the goat to swallow the dog to swallow the cat to swallow the bird to swallow the spider to catch the fly she originally swallowed.
She died.
Common sense was not her forte.
Similarly, the economic news numbers don’t add up in common-sense, reality-check math.
This time I know my math questions aren’t stupid.
