Innumeracy Research: Statistical Decision Techniques for Managers
Your task has 3 parts.
- Research Innumeracy on your own and provide two reliable references along with a summary in your own words of the findings.
In his bestseller book, Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences John Allen, brought more light into the word innumeracy and its implication to the illiterate and the well-read people. It is a term that refers to the inability of someone to understand mathematics. Paulo brings the reader into a broader understanding that innumeracy is seen in our world when people and organization, ranks notwithstanding, are pressed with the challenge of dealing with large numbers and the probabilities tagged along with them.
The implication of innumeracy is widespread with or without people’s knowledge. It makes governments make uninformed decisions on policies and other key things in a country, affects people’s rational decision making in their personal lives, and increases the way people depend on pseudoscience.
Sporting activities statistics are evidence of innumeracy, fraudulent election outcomes, the scamming game in stocks value, discrimination based on sex, lotteries, insurance, psychics on the media, claims in the medical field and drug testing activities.
The famous quote by Darrel Huff in his book How to Lie with Statistics, “There is terror in numbers”, implies how big innumeracy has engulfed the globe. It is mainly found when people who are not accustomed to statistics view graphs and other related aspects irrationally. Huff ones of the oversimplification of what the outside world calls statistics and the impending danger.
- Take the statement below as your starting point and using the Covid-19 Pandemic, make the case for or against the proposition that “Innumeracy adversely affected the decisions made by many nations but primarily the USA in terms of responding to the Pandemic.” By adversely affected, we mean deaths, economic harm and social chaos. Your (minimum) two-page response must also include quotes by experts, references and supportive statistics and studies. Note: Innumeracy is mathematical illiteracy and usually includes a mistrust or misuse of science.
By 11th March 2021, the COVID-19 cases in the USA were more than 29million and deaths almost crossing the 530,000 mark. Deaths per capita were more in the country than in most parts of the world. The question is, what went wrong? A virologist, Stanley Perlman at the University of Iowa, said that at the beginning of the pandemic, together with a group of experts, knew that the virus was spreading in some quarters but had not appreciated how bad the spread was.
When the virus was declared a pandemic, the government made the mistake of sidelining the experts and downplaying the danger pegged with the virus. The experts had the mathematical knowledge of how the spread could be if necessary measures were not taken.
The government’s innumeracy came to light on how they made policies of lockdown and cessation of movement. Former President Trump was at one time quoted saying that the COVID-19 virus was just another flu and would be out of the nation by Easter of the year 2020. This, however, turned not to be true. The virus has so far been distributed to many other parts of the nation, causing unprecedented havoc on the social norms, economy and health care system. If the government could have taken time to educate themselves on the real interpretation of the prevailing COVID-19 virus spread data, a different scenario could have resulted.
- Finally, what should world leaders in general and the USA in particular have done differently if their decisions had been informed by science, math, statistics and verifiable evidence. Did any of the world leaders get it right, based on numeracy? How can we tell? Submit your final paper to the assignment page. Ten points.
If the USA government took the time to study the data of how the virus was spreading across the country, they could have made better policies on quarantine and isolation cases. Tracing also could have been easier if the data collection process was guided scientifically.
At the start of the pandemic, the leaders of Vietnam, South Korea, Thailand and New Zealand made a better choice in following the guidelines by WHO on how to do adequate testing, tracing and isolation of those found positive. As a result, the COVID-19 cases in these countries were and still are below the USA.
