Either due to an insatiable thirst for knowledge, or a wounding intellectual inferiority complex that gets me out of bed most mornings, I’ve been teaching myself microeconomics. I bought a $130 copy of William F. Samuelson and Stephen G. Marks’ 10th edition “Managerial Economics” textbook, and most nights after work, I walk to the coffee shop, order a green tea, and start studying the Necronomicon.
One of the first things I discovered during the textbook’s checkpoint quizzes, which demanded I calculate some marginal revenue or marginal profit or their related tangents, is that I needed to relearn differential calculus before I could proceed to the mastery of microeconomics. OK, fine. I rolled up my sleeves. Then, while relearning some differential calculus, I learned I needed to reteach myself elementary algebra. While reteaching myself elementary algebra, I discovered I forgot how to do long division.
Once upon a time on the plains of rural Missouri, it’s true, I attended high school and thought I had acquitted myself well. But all these years later, facing down management economics and its world-conquering profit curves and price elasticities, I wondered if I had ever really mastered the fundamentals of symbolic logic at all. This felt like a strange thought for an adult professional who is comfortable reading and writing contracts and legislation.
Any writer, lawyer or lawmaker knows what it means to live within the logic of words, which are just symbols made up of letters; how to navigate the near-infinitely referential relationship of words to other words; the triumph of creating a covalent bond between the right words and reality. Anyone who has parsed a public figure’s nondenial-denial knows how even common words can be made to behave like variables, functioning as concrete abstractions just like X and Y that change meanings depending on an unrevealed context. To be a journalist is to solve for the unknowns, or at least to identify them and clearly state the problem.
But while I work logically with words all the time, I had let my algebraic knowledge rust under a tarp in the barn. Maybe not a wise maintenance schedule to keep these days. We’re in a postliterate society, which has depreciated the relevance of accurate words while awarding trillions of dollars to the formal logicians of the hard sciences. My aha moment came once I remastered enough calculus to calculate a firm’s marginal and maximum profit and saw, with math, how decreasing production (laying off workers) can optimally increase profits and maximize the value of the firm. I experienced one of those world-opening glimpses of fluency that comes while learning a new tongue: Oh so this is what’s really going on. Business rules the planet, and marginal economics is the language of the courtiers in the imperial court.
Of course, the weakness of formal logic is in its very power: Sweeping away irrelevancies to establish rigorous relationships between differing forces. By doing this, the questions determine the answers. But it also means you can only solve for what you see, and it’s what you don’t see coming that can really fuck you up.
Systems are made by humans, and humans are filled with irrational weirdnesses and passions and emotional damage that can’t help but interrupt the flows of logic. At the same time I’ve been touring the land of the shape-rotators, I started reading about Sigmund Freud after tech lord Marc Andreessen recently weirdly accused Freud of inventing introspection, with Andreessen bragging about having “zero, as little as possible” levels of introspection: It just gets in the way of building more Walmarts.
To me, psychotherapy seems like a pseudoscience (I read “Oedipus Rex” last weekend and do not think it has anything to say about the arc of my personal development, no this is not denial). Yet I must yield that psychotherapy, with its focus on the real griminess of the human psyche, with its belief that our tics and irrelevancies betray some deeper story about us, had the forced-flatness of our technopreneur class diagnosed from the very beginning. “Engineers, they’re not convinced we have an interior,” German psychoanalyst Erik Erikson, coiner of the “identity crisis,” told American sociologist Sherry Turkle. “It’s not necessary for their purposes.”
My econ textbook will explain that Andreessen is a business genius, but its marginal equations can’t solve for the mystery of his obvious misanthropy. It’s Freud the essayist who writes that “happiness, in the reduced sense in which we recognize it as possible, is a problem of the economics of the libido.” Humans are equations that don’t really solve, though we multiply. Literature is our science for explaining how it feels to not make sense.
Would you be willing to share your remedial math curriculum? For the other wordcels out there tired of being innumerate.