Why Fuzzy Math Makes Sense in Politics

Nov. 1 -- It’s a safe bet that you have never heard the presidential candidates explain how adjusted multiple correlation coefficients work.

(And that’s a very good thing too.)

Instead they talk a lot about individuals with specific problems (89-year-old Mrs. Kadoskins from rural Nebraska whose prescription bill is exorbitant) that, it is hoped, will resonate with millions of other people.

Politicians tell stories and anecdotes because they’re much easier to understand than numbers. Statistics, if they’re more complicated than batting averages, usually go relatively unnoticed. And even when politicians do insist on citing the relevant figures, they’re liable to be mocked. In the first debate, George Bush spoke derisively of Al Gore’s “fuzzy numbers.”

As a fuzzy mathematician, I took umbrage.

Fuzziness Covers the Unknowns

What’s wrong with fuzzy numbers? It is my opinion that, in politics or economics, there are no other kinds of numbers. Polls explicitly acknowledge some of their fuzziness by including margins of error, but fuzziness is implicit in many other contexts. If a politician, for example, were to say that the size of his tax cut was exactly $1,265,155,844,138.36, he would surely be delusional.

Economic numbers with a couple of significant digits (say $1.3 trillion) are usually the most we can hope for, but even this is often impossible due to all sorts of wild cards. A big unknown today is whether the current budget surpluses will last. Both candidates are banking on them, but that’s certainly no guarantee.

Consider some of the complexity involved. Interest rates have an impact on unemployment, which in turn influences revenues. And budget deficits affect trade, which sways interest and exchange rates. And what about external events and consumer confidence? They may rouse or depress the stock market, which alters other indices, and all of these interact with each other in complicated ways.