Everywhere I look, there are numbers, and pressure to provide numbers. Fill out this survey. Fill out another for a chance to win $1000 worth of groceries. Tell us how you liked this book. Tell us how you liked your flight. Tell us how the service was at the bank. Rate your purchase.

And that’s just the beginning. The President’s popularity is down – or up. This television program will return next season because the numerical ratings are up, that other one… so long. Advertising rates are tied to ratings as well, and because the attention spans of Americans are down, negative sensational news or quick laugh or quick action entertainment get higher numbers, and higher numbers mean higher profits.

All the stock-tracking systems show continuous numbers on public companies, the stock price by the minute, the latest P/E ratio, ratings by up to a dozen or so different services. The state of the economy is measured by the numbers of GDP or inflation by the CPI numbers [or some variant thereof] or the unemployment rate… always the numbers.

Why numbers? Because for the data to be effectively aggregated and analyzed, it has to first be quantified numerically.

All these numbers convey a sense of accuracy and authenticity, but how accurate are they? And even when they are “accurate” in their own terms, do they really convey a “true” picture?

I have grave doubts. As an author, I have access to Bookscan numbers about my sales, and, according to Bookscan, their data are 75-80% accurate. According to Bookscan, I’m only making about 25-30% of what my publisher is paying me. Now, my publisher is a good publisher, with good people, but Macmillan isn’t going to pay me for books it doesn’t sell. That, I can guarantee, and a number of other authors have made the same point. For one thing, Bookscan data represents print sales in bookstores and other venues that are point of sale outlets, which Walmart and Costco aren’t. Nor are F&SF convention booksellers, and ebook data isn’t factored in. So those “authoritative” numbers aren’t nearly as accurate as Bookscan would have one believe.

Similar problems arise in education. My wife the professor also feels inundated by numbers. There’s the pressure to retain students, because the retention and graduation numbers are “solid,” but there’s no real way to measure in terms of numbers the expertise of a singer or the ability of a music teacher to teach. And the numbers from student evaluations [as shown by more than a few studies] track more closely to a professor’s likeability and easy grading than the professor’s ability to teach singing, teaching, and actual thinking. A student switches majors because they’re not suited, and even if that student graduates in another field, the major/department in which the student began is penalized with lower “retention” numbers, which, in effect, penalizes the most demanding fields, especially demanding fields that don’t reward graduates with high paying jobs.

Yet, the more I look around, the more people seem to be relying on numbers, often without understanding what those numbers represent, or don’t represent. And there’s a real problem when decisions are made by executives or administrators or politicians who don’t understand the numbers, and from what I’ve seen, all too many of them don’t understand those numbers. We see this in the environmental field, where politicians bring snowballs into Congress and claim that there can’t be global warming, or suggest that a mere one degree rise in overall world ambient temperature is insignificant [it’s anything but insignificant, but the data and the math are too detailed for a blog post].

The unemployment numbers are another good example. The latest U.S. unemployment rate is listed at 4.5%, down from 10% in October of 2009. Supposedly, a five percent unemployment rate signifies full employment. Except… this number doesn’t include the 20% of white males aged 25-54 who’ve dropped out of the labor force. Why not? Because they’re not looking for work. If you included them, the unemployment rate would be around 17%.

Yet, as a nation, in all fields, we’re relying more and more on numbers that all too many decision-makers don’t understand… and people wonder why things don’t turn out the way they thought.

Numbers are wonderful… until they’re not.

Right now, statistics show that, in the United States, working class men without college educations in the 25-54 age group now have the lowest workforce participation levels ever, with one of five not even being in the workforce. This cohort is the only segment of the U.S. population that has shown an actual decrease in life expectancy, a marked increase in illness and suicide, and a declining earnings level – bringing it close to the same lower statistical levels as less-educated minority males, who have not shown any declines (but no significant improvement in recent years, either). In fact, the mortality level for middle-aged, non-college-educated white males is now thirty percent higher than for blacks, the first time in history that any cohort of white males has had a higher death rate than blacks of the same age.

This hollowing-out of the middle class workers who used to get paid far better wages than at present for semi-skilled work has led to a great upwelling of anger among them, and that anger was focused against Hillary Clinton and the Democrats in the last election and largely in support of Donald Trump. These men, and their families, are angry, and they’re hurting and lashing out at pretty much anyone and anything they think is getting a “better deal” from government and industry. They’re essentially claiming that no one is hearing their pain.

I understand that. What I don’t understand is why this group is so angry at women and minorities.

Here in the United States we’ve had two groups that have been minimalized and denied rights ever since the U.S. was founded, and while one group technically and legally received the right to vote over a century and a half ago, in practice that right was denied in one way or another in most of the country until little more than fifty years ago. The other group not only didn’t even get the legal right to vote until the twentieth century, and for much of U.S. history in many parts of the country did not even have the effective rights to hold property.

African-Americans and women remain comparatively disadvantaged to this day, no matter what stories individual white males can come up with anecdotally. I can recall stories about black men who lived in shacks but owned Cadillacs, but I didn’t learn until I was older that was because all too often they were denied decent or, sometimes, any real property. There was an ancestor in my wife’s family who had a hard time in North Carolina. It might have been because he was mulatto, part-black. Then he moved to Kentucky and passed as white. He became a very successful farmer and was one of the first to own a car, largely, I suspect, because he passed as white. He didn’t change; the community acceptance did.

After watching three wives and six daughters – and they are privileged compared to many women – battle gender discrimination in a wide range of occupations and fronts over the past fifty years, after watching how men gamed the federal government civil service system to benefit males, after seeing how much easier it was for me to raise four children for several years as a single father than it was for single women, and after living and working for more than twenty years in the extremely patriarchal culture of Utah, otherwise known as the semi-sovereign theocracy of Deseret, I tend to lose patience with people who complain about “reverse discrimination.”

Bur regardless of my impatience or what all too many people seem to believe, the plain fact is that all three of these groups are hurting and that the current political system is pitting them against each other. What’s worse is that each of these groups is pretty much ignoring the other’s pain. Is this really going to improve the situation or help any of them… or the United States?

If one compares movies or television shows of the 1960s to those of today, it’s fairly obvious that the level of action, especially violence, and the frequency of violence have increased dramatically. So has the graphic depiction of that violence. I’m far from the first to have noticed this; it’s become almost a cliché.

Nor I am the first to have pointed out that exposure to so much violence tends to inure those who watch it to violence, both real and entertainment violence. What’s paradoxical about all this is that, as Steven Pinker and a number of scholars have pointed out, on average, life, particularly in the U.S., is far less violent today than it ever has been, yet on screen it’s more violent than it’s ever been, and U.S. parents, also interestingly enough, are far more worried about such violence occurring to their children than ever before, even though violence against children in the U.S., especially for children of the middle and upper classes, is markedly lower, rather than higher.

Yet, as a society, we seem to be becoming more and more addicted to violence in entertainment. Some scholars have pointed out as well that the continuing increase in violent public entertainment was a hallmark of the declining Western Roman Empire. Today, violent acts caught and broadcast via the internet seem to spark copy-cat actions.

All of this would seem to suggest that the emphasis on violence in public media and entertainment is anything but a welcome trend, yet it continues to increase with each television season dripping with more blood and action-packed violence than the previous season, certainly suggestive of a societal addiction to voyeur-violence.

At the same time, there’s an aspect to this that is generally overlooked, and one that, to me, is equally worrisome, if not even more troubling. As many of my readers know, for the most part I tend to keep graphic violence to a comparative minimum. I certainly acknowledge that it exists and is a part of any society or culture in some form, but what is overlooked about violence is that the vast majority of violence is a symptom of other factors or a reaction to another’s violence.

Thus, the concentration of attention on the violence itself, or the application of violent force to stop otherwise unchecked violence (while it may be necessary) tends to overshadow or minimize the causes of the initial violence.

But then, trying to solve problems that lead to violence just doesn’t play well on the screen, and it doesn’t have the satisfying crunch of seeing the so-called villain pulverized at the end of a great action sequence.

My wife just received an email from a student seeking to be a music major at the university. The student wanted to accept the scholarship that the department had offered, but wanted to know how to do so. My wife doesn’t know whether to be frustrated, amused, appalled, or enraged, if not all four. Why?

Because the letter offering the scholarship and setting forth the terms is sent in duplicate. All the student has to do is sign one copy, accepting the scholarship and its terms, and return it. Or, if the terms aren’t acceptable or the student decides to go elsewhere, rejecting the scholarship. The letter states all that precisely. This is not exactly complicated. Neither are the simple written scholarship requirements.

One of the terms that is spelled out in the scholarship letter is that to receive a Music Department scholarship, a student has to major in music. And every year there are several students who fail to follow the written requirements for their scholarship, even after being explicitly told both verbally and in writing what music department courses to take and in what order… and they lose their scholarships because they didn’t read the requirements or bother to follow directions. And there are those who register to major in other disciplines and then are shocked to learn that they don’t get a scholarship unless they major in music.

The department offers several levels of scholarships. The ones that cover all tuition for four years essentially have two major conditions: major in music, taking the requisite courses, and maintain a 3.5 grade average. Despite having high ACT/SAT scores, and good high school grades, there are always a few students who don’t seem to have read or understood those two requirements… and lose their scholarships.

Then there are the ones who try to register for courses that have pre-requisites, without having taken the earlier courses, or the ones who wait until their senior year for a course that’s only given every other year, despite the fact that this is noted in print in more than a few places. And then, of course, some administrators pressure the professors to make special accommodations. My wife doesn’t, but a few do.

All this conveys a strong impression that a great number of high school graduates don’t read, or don’t comprehend what they read… or don’t bother to. Pretty much every member of the Music Department, and any other department, has noticed this trend. Students will ask questions, such as, “What’s required for my jury [or gateway or recital]?” Seemingly not a bad question, except the requirements are listed in the syllabus and in the Voice Handbook. Students are also told the requirements verbally, and repeatedly. Did I mention that a great number of them don’t listen, either?

All of which brings up some questions: Just what aren’t these students being taught by their parents and/or their high schools about responsibility and consequences? How do so many of them get to the point of nearly legal majority without being held accountable? And why do so many colleges and universities make it even harder for professors to hold students accountable?

There’s an old saying along the lines of, if the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. The newest version of this seems to be, if a “model” works in one setting, it works everywhere.

I’ve already railed about the inapplicability of “the business model” to education and the arts, but the “model” problem goes far beyond that. There’s also the “peer review” model, which is a mainstay of the scientific community, and I don’t have a problem with its proper use in the pursuit of better science, especially in areas where there’s hard factual evidence. But the peer review concept is also creeping into education and elsewhere… and it’s incredibly easy to abuse in situations where the background conditions and the environment differ markedly. Peer review in such areas as music, art, theatre, and dance becomes essentially a race for awards of some sort. It also distorts education, because one “sterling” piece of artwork, one concert, a high ranking in vocal or instrumental competition by one or two students – none of these reflect accurately the value or depth of the education received (or not received) by all students in a given program. Neither do tests, but legislators and administrators keep searching for “hard benchmarks,” regardless of how flawed or inapplicable they may be.

The same problem applies with cost-effectiveness models. One of the big problems with the F-35 is that it can do everything “pretty well” and very little really well, which was the result of attempting to develop a single cost-effective aircraft that could be used by all four service branches. So we have a very expensive aircraft that does nothing in a superior fashion.

In education, cost-effectiveness gets translated into “the most graduates for the lowest cost” or “the best education for “X” dollars,” neither of which is particularly effective at producing high school or college graduates who can write, think, and calculate without extensive electronic aids [which usually don’t help].

Even in business, cost-effectiveness can be over-applied. Cost-effective production of existing products, undertaken to avoid more expensive product improvement or the introduction of newer products, can be the road to bankruptcy. And sometimes, the opposite is also true; it depends on the situation.

Models and methods are tools, and just like physical tools, knowing when to use them, and when not to, is critical. But then, that requires critical thought, and not just hopping on the bandwagon of the latest and greatest new technique, model, paradigm, or the like.