GIGO

Innumeracy

If we get to the final, then we've got a 50% chance of winning.

That's a comment I heard recently from a perhaps overly optimistic cricket coach -- one hopes his sporting prowess is better than his mathematical, as it appears unlikely that the teams are so closely matched as to guarantee even odds on victory.

That's not a major worry (except to cricket fans), but innumeracy can have dire consequences. A recent television documentary covered a fatal base-jumping incident, where one jumper was injured in a fall and his companion, jumping after that, fell to his death. The comment was that, the first accident having occurred, the "law of averages" should have meant that the second jumper was safe. Sadly, reality doesn't recognise this putative law, despite the fervent prayers of many a desperate gambler.

Gambling operations, from sophisticated casino card games to the most basic scratch-and-win, rely on the difficulty people have in applying mathematics in a practical sense. This, too, can cause a great deal of harm to those individuals who are bitten by the gambling bug.

It seems that whole societies can succumb to innumeracy as the recent astonishing altercations in Albania have shown. The collapse of a pyramid scheme, plunging thousands of people into debt, is cited as sparking the the nation-wide civil strife. No doubt there will have been those wise to the impossible mathematics of such schemes who were able to exploit the system, make their money and get out. For the bulk of people in a struggling economy, the chance of getting a big return on a small investment proved too tempting.

It's easy to see how such schemes require vast amounts of people and money to operate, and how those at the top of the pyramid are in prime position. Ever-increasing numbers of people have to pay in ever-increasing amounts of money so that the early participants can collect. As Albania shows, such a scheme can rapidly exhaust the population available, in more ways than one.

Vicki Hyde is the editor of New Zealand Science Monthly.