The Arithmetic of Life and Death

170 Pages·2001·1.65 MB·English

by  George Shaffner

More praise for Living by the Numbers
“An appealing mix of common sense and solid
reasoning … Written in lively style, with sly wit … Shines light
into several interesting corners of everyday life, often with
surprising results.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Shaffner’s writing is … clever and clear.… It’s highly probable
that many readers will learn from it.”
—Publishers Weekly

A Ballantine Book
Published by The Ballantine Publishing Group Copyright © 1999 by George Shaffner All rights
reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United
States by The Ballantine Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and
simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Ballantine and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
www.randomhouse.com/BB/
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 00-193407
eISBN: 978-0-30777574-0
v3.1
For Grace, our children, and their children
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Preface: The Refugees from Math
Part I: Multiple Choices
1. The Probability That You Would Be You
2. You Can(’t) Be Anything You Want
3. The Value of Education
4. The Sum of All Decisions
5. The Value of Being Stupid
6. The Gift of Fallibility
7. The Case for Smoking
8. The Odds of Getting Caught
Part II: Division of Labor
9. Why You Must Produce
10. Focus on Priorities
11. Rules of Thumb
12. Equalized Opportunity
13. Prima Donna Effect
14. Teamwork
15. Why There Are Meetings
16. Common Cause
17. Consensus at Work
18. MB(U)O
19. The Mystery of Middle Management
Part III: Calculating Behavior
20. Figures Don’t Lie …
21. The Duke of Pork
22. The National Debt
23. Personal Debt
24. Investing Young
25. Gambling
26. Streaks and the Law of Averages
27. Coincidence
28. The PLLO
29. The Tailgater’s Advantage
Part IV: Dark Matters
30. Death by Misadventure
31. Life Expectancy
32. The Preservation of Prejudice
33. A Trick of Perspective
34. The Importance of Small Infinities
35. Life after Death
36. Are We Alone?
37. A Message from Rapa Nui
After Math: Why More Things Go Wrong
Acknowledgments
I wish to thank the following for their instrumental contributions to
The Arithmetic of Life and Death:
Anya Karavanov, for her diligent research;
Bill Brastow, for checking and rechecking the calculations;
Pat Brown, for being the devil’s advocate in the details;
Jane Dystel, my agent, for having the courage to take me in;
Cheryl Woodruff, my editor, for slapping me around; and
Grace, for listening to it all, over and over, without (much)
complaint.
Preface:
The Refugees from Math
“… and the different branches of arithmetic—Ambition, Distraction,
Uglification, and Derision.”
—LEWIS CARROLL
he Arithmetic of Life and Death began by accident in 1997 when I
T
noticed a change in my octogenarian mother-in-law. Normally a
cheerful, bright woman, her mood began to darken as her brother-in-
law, also in his eighties, slowly lost his fight against cancer and its
complications. Certainly, my mother-in-law was sad for him and for her
older sister. But there was something else gnawing at her from within.
For the first time in her life, she was afraid of dying. Though a devout,
lifelong Catholic, she was afraid because she wasn’t absolutely sure that
there was another life waiting for her on the other side of this one.
Not the spontaneous hugging sort, I decided to write “Life after
Death,” a brief essay that uses common sense, along with rudimentary
chaos theory and a little inferential logic, to establish a secular case for
life after death. I do not claim to have cracked the mystery of the ages,
but my mother-in-law seemed to feel a lot better after she read it.
If a little chaos could help my mother-in-law believe in life after
death, I dared to believe that a little arithmetic could help my twenty-
year-old son understand why he was involved in motor vehicle mishaps
with such consistency. The result was a short, arithmetic essay called
“The Odds of Getting Caught.” The speeding tickets stopped. That
success inspired “The Value of Education,” which compares the career
earnings of a high school dropout, a high school graduate, and a college
graduate using earnings data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
My son finished high school.
Shortly thereafter, a personnel problem at work motivated me to write
“Prima Donna Effect” and “Teamwork,” both of which use simple
arithmetic models to show why people have to work together. My
success in implementing the lessons learned from those two essays later
prompted the writing of “Common Cause” and “Why More Things Go
Wrong,” by which time The Arithmetic of Life and Death had taken on a
life of its own.
As the chapters increased in number, I began to discover that many of
my relatives, a few of my friends, and practically all politicians seem to
live their lives in a sort of innumerate bliss—a state in which virtually
all remnants of mathematical thought have been exorcised since high
school. These people are the “Refugees from Math.”
Now is not a good time to be a Math Refugee. This is the Age of
Information; numbers are everywhere: time and temperature, height and
weight, speed and distance, power and capacity, prices and discounts.
Principal, interest, taxes, and insurance. Dealer prep, transportation,
licenses, and fees. All of these are numbers. They represent information
that is different from words. Each and every one of them can be applied,
analyzed, and manipulated—especially manipulated—in thousands of
ways that words can’t.
It is important to preserve this distinction between words and
numbers. For example, although the word ten can be subtracted from the
word twenty, the result is the rather difficult to express wty. And even if
it were possible to settle on a standard pronunciation, it might be
somewhat harder to agree on how to multiply wty by eleven. For similar
reasons, it was essential that Roman numerals, which look exactly like
letters of the alphabet, were replaced by the distinctive and elegant
Arabic number system sometime prior to the creation of NASA. (Skeptics
and the “innumerati” should consider a simple example, such as dividing
MMCCLXV by CCCLXIII, before appealing the matter to the Roman
Catholic Church.)
Astronauts and rocket scientists notwithstanding, there seem to be a
lot of Math Refugees out there. How else can one explain tailgaters, who
cause one-sixth of all traffic accidents in return for getting to work about
two seconds sooner (from “The Tailgater’s Advantage”)? Or teenagers
who leave high school just before their senior year, when a diploma