Numbers From the Amazon

I've written in this space before about my discomfort with numbers and economic theory. German and Russian grammar, no problem...macro- and microeconomics, and my head starts to smoke. I'm a verbal and visual person, not a numeric one.

I especially don't understand "generally accepted accounting principles." It just doesn't make sense to me that two equally competent (?) CPAs can take the same set of numbers and, using different accounting methods, show that a business is either very profitable or on the edge of financial ruin. This was parodied beautifully in the stage show and film of "The Producers," where the police raiding the offices of Blum and Bialystock find two sets of ledgers: one labeled "Show to the IRS;" the other labeled "Never Show to the IRS."

All of this is my windy way of getting around to sharing with you this fascinating article that one of my co-workers passed to me yesterday - MIT-led Team Finds Language Without Numbers. According to this story, a team of researchers in the remote Amazonian jungle has found a small tribe whose language has no words to express the concept of "one" or of any specific number.

It's difficult for a 21st century Western person to come to grips with a society that doesn't need numbers, since numbers rule our lives. Nevertheless, in the context of the Piraha tribe's world, there's no particular need for specific numbers...all they apparently need to express are relative concepts like "some" and "more."

This reminded me of one of the curious aspects of counting in Russian. In this language, nouns are declined (change their endings to reflect their grammatical use in the sentence) through six cases, singular and plural, and numbers are expressed using three different cases: for instance, a child might have one toy (nominative singular), but would have two, three, or four "of toy" (genitive singular), or five or more "of toys" (genitive plural). The same rule applies to any larger number ending in 1, 2-4, or 5-0. There's also a Piraha-like construction called the "partitive genitive" - if you ask for "some" of something, you ask for it in the genitive singular, as in "give me some of bread."

But getting back to the Piraha and their language without numbers...

It occurs to me that this is a language that is particularly suited to modern economics. Since numbers aren't real any more, why not use a language that doesn't have them? Think about it: can you get your head around, say, a government budget in the trillions of dollars, with individual departments spending hundreds of billions of dollars a year? When you worry about making the payments on your $25,000 clunker, can you comprehend spending a half-billion dollars on a single airplane? Josef Stalin once supposedly said that one death was a tragedy, but a million deaths was a statistic...is this why we can accept the horrific death tolls in Darfur and across the Middle East with nothing more than a weary shake of the head?

The Piraha will probably someday regret being discovered by the MIT researchers. I expect that 50 years from now, they'll be wearing suits and wielding ATM cards and worrying about mortgages on their mud-and-wattle huts. They'll have traded exotic jungle diseases for ulcers brought on by economic distress.

They'll need enough, have some, but want more, just like the rest of us.

And maybe those are all the numbers we ought to have.

Have a good day. By the numbers. More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo