More wheelbarrows

I suggested in a previous post that the surreal images and anecdotes of hyper-inflation (particularly in early Twenties Germany) have a more powerful hold on the imagination than do the deceptively benign images of deflation.

Today I learned (via Media Matters by way of Krugman) that hyper-inflation warnings are showing up on Glenn Beck's show:

As I told you at the beginning I'm not an expert. I am not a guy to listen to for financial advice. I'm an American with an opinion. Period. I don't know that the Weimar republic isn't going to happen here. I don't know if it is going to happen here. But I will tell you this: Those same damn experts told me two years ago that the Fed wouldn't do what they did yesterday. those same damn experts told me four years ago the housing market was fine. When will these experts lose a little bit of credibility? When will we start listening to our own guts, and to common sense?

While on another Fox show the host is calling for a return to gold not only to back the dollar but as an alternative currency.

Observational Research

Andrew Gelman quotes a discussion the design of clinical trials by John Langford. It's based on work by Amy Harmon on people who fail to get the drug in the active arm of a randomized controlled trial.

The case that she begins with:

But when Mr. Ryan, 22, was admitted to the trial in May, he was assigned by a computer lottery to what is known as the control arm. Instead of the pills, he was to get infusions of the chemotherapy drug that has been the notoriously ineffective recourse in treating melanoma for 30 years.

The question is:

With reasonable record keeping of existing outcomes for the standard treatments, there is no need to explicitly assign people to a control group with the standard treatment, as that approach is effectively explored with great certainty.

I see this as an argument for Observational (instead of experimental) research. The reason that experimental research is valuable is that you can rule out confounding and estimating quantities like the counter-factual outcomes is a lot easier (as counterfactuals have the nice properties of being missing completely at random).

If you only test the novel drug in the trial then you are assuming that there are not other changes (in population composition, in other forms of care) that do not explain some or all of the variability. You can use statistical adjustment to reduce differences but then things hinge on model specification and whether there are unmeasured differences.

I worry that we are some distance from trusting data where two analysts can get two different answers making different sets of assumptions (which years are the control years? who is included? which covariates are included?).

That being said, many key breakthroughs are entirely observational in nature and it would be good to see more use of this study design. But it is also clear that there are a lot of blind alleys that occur when non-randomized data is used (statins and cancer, anyone?).

[In a larger sense, I think that this is the danger of outside experts. Sometimes they point out that the Emperor has no clothes. However, they may not realize that is because it is currently bath-time . . . ]

The short, sad life of Toxie the toxic asset

Another exceptional example of financial journalism from This American Life/Planet Money. It's a remarkably entertaining hour but it still manages to be as or more informative as anything you're likely to read on the subject.

As always, the download is free but the show could really use the money if you care to donate a couple of bucks.

Bad polls, good polls, better polls

You might have expected Nate Silver to sleep through the rest of the week after the elections, but the Red Bull must flow freely at 538. Anyone who is serious about polls should read these two recent posts:

Rasmussen Polls Were Biased and Inaccurate; Quinnipiac, SurveyUSA Performed Strongly

and

When ‘House Effects’ Become ‘Bias’

Even more interesting is Mark Blumenthal's article on the remarkable accuracy of both camps internal polling in Nevada.

Not All Polls Were Wrong In Nevada

The Wheelbarrow Problem -- is the imagery of deflation influencing the debate?

Many economists (most notably Paul Krugman) have been arguing that deflation is a more immediate and far greater danger than inflation and recent data seems to back them up, but they don't seem to be getting much traction in the press. I wonder if part of this failure comes from the fact that the imagery of deflation seems so benign ("That'll be a nickel for the soda pop, sonny.") while the imagery of hyper-inflation is frightening and often surreal.

Here's how George Goodman put it in Paper Money:

In retrospect, you can trace the steps to hyperinflation, but some of the reasons remain cloudy. Germany abandoned the gold backing of its currency in 1914. The war was expected to be short, so it was financed by government borrowing, not by savings and taxation. In Germany prices doubled between 1914 and 1919.

After four disastrous years Germany had lost the war. Under the Treaty of Versailles it was forced to make a reparations payment in gold-backed Marks, and it was due to lose part of the production of the Ruhr and of the province of Upper Silesia. The Weimar Republic was politically fragile.

But the bourgeois habits were very strong. Ordinary citizens worked at their jobs, sent their children to school and worried about their grades, maneuvered for promotions and rejoiced when they got them, and generally expected things to get better. But the prices that had doubled from 1914 to 1919 doubled again during just five months in 1922. Milk went from 7 Marks per liter to 16; beer from 5.6 to 18. There were complaints about the high cost of living. Professors and civil servants complained of getting squeezed. Factory workers pressed for wage increases. An underground economy developed, aided by a desire to beat the tax collector.

On June 24, 1922, right-wing fanatics assassinated Walter Rathenau, the moderate, able foreign minister. Rathenau was a charismatic figure, and the idea that a popular, wealthy, and glamorous government minister could be shot in a law-abiding society shattered the faith of the Germans, who wanted to believe that things were going to be all right. Rathenau's state funeral was a national trauma. The nervous citizens of the Ruhr were already getting their money out of the currency and into real goods -- diamonds, works of art, safe real estate. Now ordinary Germans began to get out of Marks and into real goods.

Pianos, wrote the British historian Adam Fergusson, were bought even by unmusical families. Sellers held back because the Mark was worth less every day. As prices went up, the amounts of currency demanded were greater, and the German Central Bank responded to the demands. Yet the ruling authorities did not see anything wrong. A leading financial newspaper said that the amounts of money in circulation were not excessively high. Dr. Rudolf Havenstein, the president of the Reichsbank (equivalent to the Federal Reserve) told an economics professor that he needed a new suit but wasn't going to buy one until prices came down.

Why did the German government not act to halt the inflation? It was a shaky, fragile government, especially after the assassination. The vengeful French sent their army into the Ruhr to enforce their demands for reparations, and the Germans were powerless to resist. More than inflation, the Germans feared unemployment. In 1919 Communists had tried to take over, and severe unemployment might give the Communists another chance. The great German industrial combines -- Krupp, Thyssen, Farben, Stinnes -- condoned the inflation and survived it well. A cheaper Mark, they reasoned, would make German goods cheap and easy to export, and they needed the export earnings to buy raw materials abroad. Inflation kept everyone working.

So the printing presses ran, and once they began to run, they were hard to stop. The price increases began to be dizzying. Menus in cafes could not be revised quickly enough. A student at Freiburg University ordered a cup of coffee at a cafe. The price on the menu was 5,000 Marks. He had two cups. When the bill came, it was for 14,000 Marks. "If you want to save money," he was told, "and you want two cups of coffee, you should order them both at the same time."

The presses of the Reichsbank could not keep up though they ran through the night. Individual cities and states began to issue their own money. Dr. Havenstein, the president of the Reichsbank, did not get his new suit. A factory worker described payday, which was every day at 11:00 a.m.: "At 11:00 in the morning a siren sounded, and everybody gathered in the factory forecourt, where a five-ton lorry was drawn up loaded brimful with paper money. The chief cashier and his assistants climbed up on top. They read out names and just threw out bundles of notes. As soon as you had caught one you made a dash for the nearest shop and bought just anything that was going." Teachers, paid at 10:00 a.m., brought their money to the playground, where relatives took the bundles and hurried off with them. Banks closed at 11:00 a.m.; the harried clerks went on strike.

The flight from currency that had begun with the buying of diamonds, gold, country houses, and antiques now extended to minor and almost useless items -- bric-a-brac, soap, hairpins. The law-abiding country crumbled into petty thievery. Copper pipes and brass armatures weren't safe. Gasoline was siphoned from cars. People bought things they didn't need and used them to barter -- a pair of shoes for a shirt, some crockery for coffee. Berlin had a "witches' Sabbath" atmosphere. Prostitutes of both sexes roamed the streets. Cocaine was the fashionable drug. In the cabarets the newly rich and their foreign friends could dance and spend money. Other reports noted that not all the young people had a bad time. Their parents had taught them to work and save, and that was clearly wrong, so they could spend money, enjoy themselves, and flout the old.

The publisher Leopold Ullstein wrote: "People just didn't understand what was happening. All the economic theory they had been taught didn't provide for the phenomenon. There was a feeling of utter dependence on anonymous powers -- almost as a primitive people believed in magic -- that somebody must be in the know, and that this small group of 'somebodies' must be a conspiracy."

When the 1,000-billion Mark note came out, few bothered to collect the change when they spent it. By November 1923, with one dollar equal to one trillion Marks, the breakdown was complete. The currency had lost meaning.

What happened immediately afterward is as fascinating as the Great Inflation itself. The tornado of the Mark inflation was succeeded by the "miracle of the Rentenmark." A new president took over the Reichsbank, Horace Greeley Hjalmar Schacht, who came by his first two names because of his father's admiration for an editor of the New York Tribune. The Rentenmark was not Schacht's idea, but he executed it, and as the Reichsbank president, he got the credit for it. For decades afterward he was able to maintain a reputation for financial wizardry. He became the architect of the financial prosperity brought by the Nazi party.

Obviously, though the currency was worthless, Germany was still a rich country -- with mines, farms, factories, forests. The backing for the Rentenmark was mortgages on the land and bonds on the factories, but that backing was a fiction; the factories and land couldn't be turned into cash or used abroad. Nine zeros were struck from the currency; that is, one Rentenmark was equal to one billion old Marks. The Germans wanted desperately to believe in the Rentenmark, and so they did. "I remember," said one Frau Barten of East Prussia, "the feeling of having just one Rentenmark to spend. I bought a small tin bread bin. Just to buy something that had a price tag for one Mark was so exciting."

All money is a matter of belief. Credit derives from Latin, credere, "to believe." Belief was there, the factories functioned, the farmers delivered their produce. The Central Bank kept the belief alive when it would not let even the government borrow further.

But although the country functioned again, the savings were never restored, nor were the values of hard work and decency that had accompanied the savings. There was a different temper in the country, a temper that Hitler would later exploit with diabolical talent. Thomas Mann wrote: "The market woman who without batting an eyelash demanded 100 million for an egg lost the capacity for surprise. And nothing that has happened since has been insane or cruel enough to surprise her."

update: restored the missing words in the title.

Not quite grasping the placebo concept

Marcus A. Winters writing in the Manhattan Institute's City Journal says:

The charters’ random-selection policy has allowed Hoxby’s team to evaluate them with a randomized field trial (RFT), the kind of experiment often described by social scientists as the “gold standard” in research design. RFTs resemble the clinical trials performed by pharmaceutical companies, which test a new drug by assembling a pool of subjects, randomly assigning subjects to receive either the drug or a placebo, and then comparing the subjects’ condition. Similarly, Hoxby took a pool of subjects (students applying to New York City charter schools); took advantage of the random nature of the lotteries, which assigned the subjects either to charters or to traditional public schools; and then compared their academic achievement. Because access to a charter school is the only meaningful difference between the two groups—both applied to charter schools, after all—comparing the groups’ later achievement really will tell us what effect charters have on student performance.

I've seen researchers and commentators ignore potential issues with open-label studies (see here and here for background), but Mr. Winters is the first not only to mention placebos but to compare them explicitly to public schools. At the risk of beating a man while he's down, the use of placebos is based on the assumption that knowing that you are being treated can and often does produce a "meaningful difference between the two groups."

Caroline Hoxby never mentioned placebos in this paper and I'm certain she would never suggest that being randomly assigned a public school is equivalent to receiving a placebo in a double blind test.

Unfortunately Dr. Hoxby is not the one writing the articles.

Not sure about this one...

John Judis is not someone you want to pick a fight with on the demographics of politics but I'm not sure he's made his case here (emphasis added):

The other telltale sign of Obama’s failure was the youth vote. Democratic victories in 2006 and 2008 very much depended upon increased support from and turnout among young voters. In 2008, Obama’s organization specifically targeted these voters. In this election, voters 18 to 29 again favored Democrats by a whopping 56 to 40 percent in House races. But they constituted only 11 percent of the electorate this year compared to 18 percent in 2008 House races and 12.5 percent in 2006. Obama and his political aides recognized that this was a problem, and in the last weeks of the election, tried to rouse these voters (hence all those campus rallies and the “Daily Show” appearance). But it was too late.

The natural comparison here seems to be with 2006 and the drop doesn't seem that big, particularly given anti-war issue (something that, even without the draft, would tend to skew by age) four years ago.

Any thoughts?

More on Health Care Efficiency

An update here on medical insurance with an inventory problem.

Depending on the condition being discussed, this can be a pretty serious matter and remedies are unclear. At the very least we are seeing the following as the solution:

1) Make a visit to an MD to get a prescription (cost of MD)

2) Visit a pharmacy and argue about insurance coverage (cost of administration)

3) Take much of a day off work (this is a cost to the employer via sick days or employee via needing to work longer hours to make up for this)

If these issues are frequent then the inventory control system is imposing a lot of costs on the system. Now, if this was a store (say Amazon) then it would be fighting to remedy these issues before it went bankrupt. But the lack of customer mobility is another area where Health Care is an unusual market.

"How much [math, literature, history, politics and music] do we really need?"

Last night I posted a long excerpt from G. V. Ramanathan's op-ed in the Washington Post. Though he made some valid points, I couldn't fully endorse the essay because of paragraphs like this:

Unlike literature, history, politics and music, math has little relevance to everyday life. That courses such as "Quantitative Reasoning" improve critical thinking is an unsubstantiated myth. All the mathematics one needs in real life can be learned in early years without much fuss. Most adults have no contact with math at work, nor do they curl up with an algebra book for relaxation.

There are two ways of looking at this, but whichever you pick, this analogy doesn't hold up.

First, we can view that what we learn as transferable. This view is consistent with my experience. I went from a BFA in creative writing to a master's in statistics and found that reading and writing about Shakespeare, Twain and Faulkner was good preparation for classes like experimental design and non-parametric methods. I have also found the reverse true: training as a statistician makes you a better critic.**

If problem solving, pattern recognition, logical thinking and other related skills can be transferred to a non-mathematical context then we can make an excellent for teaching more math (though probably not for the way we've been teaching it). If these skills aren't transferable, we can still make a case for math based on statistics and on spreadsheets (everyone has to deal with statistics as a citizen and consumer and every business I've seen could use at least one person who was good on Excel). We can no longer, however, make any kind of case for literature, history or music.

Let's start with literature. It is true that many people read books for enjoyment, but how much effect do literature classes have on what books people read after graduation? The adult recreational reading experience is largely independent of anything learned in school past eighth grade (working under the assumption that a proficient eighth grade reader should be able to handle most of the books people read for pleasure).

We keep teaching literature through high school and include it in the general ed requirements for college because we believe that what students learn in those classes is, to some degree, transferable. If you honestly believe that reading Macbeth does nothing but make you better at reading Elizabethan dialogue, there is no way to justify the waste of class time covering it.

The situation for history is even worse. You can at least make a reading-and-writing case for literature; barring the writing of erudite-sounding op-eds and blog posts, when's the last time you actually needed a historical fact? A few do occasionally come in handy for understanding current events, but the overwhelming majority have no conceivable value unless we assume that students are capable of transferring what they've learned about the long dead to questions regarding the living.

The case for music and art are strictly based on enrichment.

As for politics, I can't rebut this because I'm not sure what he's talking about. Other than a year of junior high civics, we don't really teach politics. We teach courses that are relevant to politics like history, economics and statistics, but the first one requires the students to generalize what they've learned and the last two require lots of you know what.

Professor Ramanathan makes some great points about the marketing of mathematics (read the whole thing) and I'm glad to see national attention brought to the question of what we should be teaching, but it's a complex and subtle question and the professor's Gordian approach isn't going to cut it.



* Along these lines, I did a couple of posts on economics and popular literature here and here and and a post on economics and film criticism here.

Ask your doctor if Sucrosa might be right for you

Unfortunately, this is just the sort of thing that won't be covered under Obamacare, so make sure to stock up.

FDA Approves Sale Of Prescription Placebo

September 17, 2003 | ISSUE 39•36

WASHINGTON, DC—After more than four decades of testing in tandem with other drugs, placebo gained approval for prescription use from the Food and Drug Administration Monday.

"For years, scientists have been aware of the effectiveness of placebo in treating a surprisingly wide range of conditions," said Dr. Jonathan Bergen of the FDA's Center for Drug Evaluation and Research. "It was time to provide doctors with this often highly effective option."

In its most common form, placebo is a white, crystalline substance of a sandy consistency, obtained from the evaporated juice of the Saccharum officinarum plant. The FDA has approved placebo in doses ranging from 1 to 40,000 milligrams.

...

Pain-sufferers like Margerite Kohler, who participated in a Sucrosa study in March, welcomed the FDA's approval.

"For years, I battled with strange headaches that surfaced during times of stress," Kohler said. "Doctors repeatedly turned me away empty-handed, or suggested that I try an over-the-counter pain reliever—as if that would be strong enough. Finally, I heard about Sucrosa. They said, 'This will work,' and it worked. The headaches are gone."

Researchers diagnosed Kohler with Random Occasional Nonspecific Pain and Discomfort Disorder (RONPDD), a minor but surprisingly pervasive medical condition that strikes otherwise healthy adults.

RONPDD is only one of many disorders for which placebo has proven effective, Bergen said.
...

"All placebos are not the same," Eli Lilly spokesman Giles French said. "Pacifex is the only placebo that's green and shaped like a triangle. Pacifex: A doctor gave it to you."

Despite such ringing endorsements, some members of the medical community have spoken out against placebo's approval, saying that the drug's wide range of side effects is a cause for concern.

"Yes, placebo has benefits, but studies link it to a hundred different side effects, from lower-back pain to erectile dysfunction to nausea," drug researcher Patrick Wheeler said. "Placebo wreaked havoc all over the body, with no rhyme or reason. Basically, whichever side effects were included on the questionnaire, we found in research subjects."

Added Wheeler: "We must not introduce placebo to the public until we pinpoint exactly how and why it works. The drug never should have advanced beyond the stage of animal testing, which, for some reason, was totally ineffective in determining its effectiveness."

In spite of the confusing data, drug makers say placebo is safe.

"The only side effect consistent in all test subjects was a negligible one—an almost imperceptible elevation in blood-glucose levels," French said. "It's unfair to the American people to withhold a drug so many of them desperately think they need."

Health Care

We haven't talked as much about Health Care lately, because I have been slammed by my first year of teaching. But I did want to highlight this post by Aaron Carroll:

You ready for this? They didn’t ship the medication. Why? It’s on back-order.

So explain this to me, awesome insurance system. You will only allow me to get my medication from one pharmacy, which is not local, and which you own and run. And you won’t send the medication early, which would provide a safe buffer. And then you run out of the medication. And then you don’t tell me until the day I run out. And then you don’t really tell me, you leave me a cryptic message on my voice mail that I would usually not be able to get until I arrive home and you are closed.

Will you allow me to go to another pharmacy? Sure. But you won’t cover it. Will you have the medication soon? Yeah, you hope to have it tomorrow.

I don’t believe you.

Do you have any concern – whatsoever – that I am without my medication for a period of time? That it’s entirely your fault?

I’m a model patient. I pay all my bills. I go to the doctor. I get the labs done. I refill the meds on time with a weeks’ advance. I follow the rules. And you screw me.

Are we really sure that the health care system in the United States meets the requirements for market efficiency*? Really?


* And, if you have not read the classic post by Mark Thoma then now is as good a time as any. Well worth the ten minutes to breeze through it and it is a very good way of evaluating whether a particular market is likely to be efficient.

More thoughts on Charter Schools

Mark quotes Diane Ravitch about the new film Waiting for Superman.

I think that these paragraphs really deserve some more discussion:

Geoffrey Canada is justly celebrated for the creation of the Harlem Children’s Zone, which not only runs two charter schools but surrounds children and their families with a broad array of social and medical services. Canada has a board of wealthy philanthropists and a very successful fund-raising apparatus. With assets of more than $200 million, his organization has no shortage of funds. Canada himself is currently paid $400,000 annually. For Guggenheim to praise Canada while also claiming that public schools don’t need any more money is bizarre. Canada’s charter schools get better results than nearby public schools serving impoverished students. If all inner-city schools had the same resources as his, they might get the same good results.

But contrary to the myth that Guggenheim propounds about “amazing results,” even Geoffrey Canada’s schools have many students who are not proficient. On the 2010 state tests, 60 percent of the fourth-grade students in one of his charter schools were not proficient in reading, nor were 50 percent in the other. It should be noted—and Guggenheim didn’t note it—that Canada kicked out his entire first class of middle school students when they didn’t get good enough test scores to satisfy his board of trustees

I note that the Harlem's Children's Zone seems to get only positive press in the blogosphere. Yet two facts here really seem to stand out. One, making the compensation structure that of a corporation is going to mean that we get advertising and not honest accounting of performance. A very high salary ($400,000 per year) and a corporation that lives or dies on profit does not incent actors to give a balanced view of the shortcomings of the corporation.

The second, and more damning, issue is that kicking out an entire class of students when their tests scores are low is guaranteed to ensure that Charter schools look better -- after all, the weak students have been ruthlessly removed. Anybody can look competent under this system.

This cuts to the heart of my discomfort with the charter school system. One of the most important issues facing American education is the drop-out of vulnerable students. Charter schools that are willing to remove poorly preforming students for reasons of "optics" cannot, in aggregate, improve this situation.

[Mark has already extensively documented other concerns with interpreting charter school performance]

Nervous Nate -- why timidity at FiveThirtyEight is a sign of professionalism

I've been working on an article on educational statistics. One of the major themes is the way statisticians should handle research when they don't have much faith in the results. This is not quite the same as the way Bayesians assign weights to beliefs but it's not all that different. Us poor, simple frequentist-folk approach the problem in an informal way and try to present our results with sufficient caveats that the listeners will understand that we may have a small p-value but that doesn't mean we'd bet the farm.

As I was working on that part of the article, I was struck by how Nate Silver was doing exactly what I was describing, pointing out the factors that could throw his forecasts off, reminding people that in this election, more than most, anything could happen.

That's one of the reason's Silver is the gold standard* in the field.





* Sorry, I just couldn't help myself.

An excellent Maxine Udall post

Really good stuff (via guess who):

In 1940, Howard Florey and Ernst Chain, at Oxford University, produced enough stable chemical from a mold, penicillium, to test on mice infected with streptococcus. Of eight infected, 4 were treated and recovered rapidly. "Eureka!," you say. "The rest is history, yes?"

Well, no. Not quite.

Florey and a colleague packed up their penicillin and their results and took them to major pharmaceutical companies in the UK, the US, and Canada. None wanted to invest the capital in scaling it for production, mainly because there were signs that bacteria were becoming resistant to the sulfa drugs they were already manufacturing. Even if penicillin were effective for a while, it would eventually become ineffective and demand would dwindle. Where's the profit in that, they rightly asked?

So how did we the people get penicillin (and the many subsequent antibiotics that repeatedly haul us back from the brink of death, bronchitis, and septicemia)? The US government stepped in. The US military pushed a bit on this. After all, who better to sense on the eve of war the potential gains from a new antibiotic? Roughly half of all deaths in at least one previous war had been from infection.

It was a group of government scientists at the US Department of Agriculture who scaled production and increased the drug's efficacy four-fold. And in record time. Imagine. Guvmint scientists produced something quickly, efficiently, and made it (and us) better.

I know what you're thinking. You're thinking that surely now, after the US government and the US taxpayers had volunteered the start up costs, the drugs manufacturers must have agreed to produce it, yes? By the time it had been scaled, it was more apparent than ever that the US might be drawn into a major world war. The military wanted it. Surely an appeal to patriotic duty would move them?

No. I'm afraid not. Not until George Merck, CEO of Merck & Company, agreed to do it and persuaded the heads of several other manufacturers to join him. "Medicine is for people, not for profits," George said.

"How much math do we really need?"

I disagree with a fair chunk of this, but it's worth reading:

Twenty-seven years have passed since the publication of the report "A Nation at Risk," which warned of dire consequences if we did not reform our educational system. This report, not unlike the Sputnik scare of the 1950s, offered tremendous opportunities to universities and colleges to create and sell mathematics education programs.

Unfortunately, the marketing of math has become similar to the marketing of creams to whiten teeth, gels to grow hair and regimens to build a beautiful body.

There are three steps to this kind of aggressive marketing. The first is to convince people that white teeth, a full head of hair and a sculpted physique are essential to a good life. The second is to embarrass those who do not possess them. The third is to make people think that, since a good life is their right, they must buy these products.

So it is with math education. A lot of effort and money has been spent to make mathematics seem essential to everybody's daily life. There are even calculus textbooks showing how to calculate -- I am not making this up and in fact I taught from such a book -- the rate at which the fluid level in a martini glass will go down, assuming, of course, that one sips differentiably. Elementary math books have to be stuffed with such contrived applications; otherwise they won't be published.

You can see attempts at embarrassing the public in popular books written by mathematicians bemoaning the innumeracy of common folk and how it is supposed to be costing billions; books about how mathematicians have a more clever way of reading the newspaper than the masses; and studies purportedly showing how much dumber our kids are than those in Europe and Asia.

As for the third, even people who used to proudly proclaim their mathematical innocence do not wish to abridge the rights of their children to a good life. They now participate in family math and send the kids to math camps, convinced that the path to good citizenship is through math.

We need to ask two questions. First, how effective are these educational creams and gels? With generous government grants over the past 25 years, countless courses and conferences have been invented and books written on how to teach teachers to teach. But where is the evidence that these efforts have helped students? A 2008 review by the Education Department found that the nation is at "greater risk now" than it was in 1983, and the National Assessment of Educational Progress math scores for 17-year-olds have remained stagnant since the 1980s.

The second question is more fundamental: How much math do you really need in everyday life? Ask yourself that -- and also the next 10 people you meet, say, your plumber, your lawyer, your grocer, your mechanic, your physician or even a math teacher.

Unlike literature, history, politics and music, math has little relevance to everyday life. That courses such as "Quantitative Reasoning" improve critical thinking is an unsubstantiated myth. All the mathematics one needs in real life can be learned in early years without much fuss. Most adults have no contact with math at work, nor do they curl up with an algebra book for relaxation.