I don't know how many people know that back in the 1950s (starting earlier perhaps, I'm not fully aware of this history), there was a concerted right-wing attack on teaching concepts of abstract mathematics to schoolchildren in the United States. There had been some push to teach young students concepts such as set theory, numerical bases, and other concepts relevant to the logical underpinnings of what we think of as "arithmetic" and basic algebra. This push to teach abstract mathematical concepts was generally called "New Math", and the Republicans killed it.
Tom Lehrer—remember that smug MIT jackanape with the piano?—helped kill "New Math", using the same approach that American conservative ideologues took: he lampooned it as nonsensical, confusing, and above all useless. Conservatives have one use for mathematics: you can count money with it. Therefore they've always taken a dim view of teaching anything beyond basic arithmetic (one of the "three Rs" they love to harp about) and enough algebra to use a spreadsheet maybe or write some simple computer programs. They like education to be practical, i.e. they want education to be vocational training for the corporate workforce.
Killing "New Math" was a major intellectual victory for the American right wing and arguably, it energized them. They realized they had real power, power to warp education, power to eliminate entire academic disciplines from mainstream thought. Obviously they've kept going. If you went through the academic catalogue of any major American college and struck off everything that some right-wing ideologue denounced as "woke" and "social Marxism" and all that, I daresay you'd discard at least half of it, probably quite a bit more. There's not much that conservative propagandists regard as legitimate education—for the general public, anyway. It's not that they want advanced disciplines completely wiped out, but they want them captive, their teaching restricted to an elite. Their model of the future requires only a limited number of specialists, because the bulk of the population is meant for grunt labor.
Plainly, American right-wing intellectuals sensed danger in abstract mathematics, just as they scented a threat to themselves in post-modern theory. Both of these subjects encourage the student to start reflecting, dangerously, on the hazy nature of ultimate knowledge. If numerical systems are arbitrary, if we use base 10 for arithmetic solely by accident, then what else about our systems is accidental? If words and their meanings can be twisted to signify almost anything with sufficient contortion, then what does language mean in the mouths of politicians? Conservatives demand a very simple worldview, which they assert to be "self-evident" and the only possible truth: the world and its political and economic systems run by a simple set of rules ordained by [here it gets blurry], a system that's plainly self-sufficient and the best possible. Theorizing about this system is for experts only. The situation is clearly analogous to that period in Christianity when the common people were instructed not to read the Bible for themselves.
Hence mathematics has become mystified in American society, much as science has been mystified and obfuscated so that "optimistic" entrepreneurs can get away with pretending to be miracle-workers. I've noticed that there's almost a sneaky guilty social status in the pose of being bad at math. Being illiterate is nothing but shameful, but people can get away with giggling and snarking about how they're unable to do simple sums. After all, there's calculators and smart phones now—who needs to ADD? Even basic algebra receives some derision as useless and for eggheads only. Calculus has come to be practically a "woke" subject, for Marxists only, effete unmanly impractical subjects for people who can't handle the real world, along with literature and African history. You can get a computer to do integrals now, anyway.
The result? Many mathematical concepts that ought to be taught to everyone, demystified for everyone, have become virtual idols in finance and politics. Large numbers turn people's heads. Exponential curves captivate investors and speculators who seem to think that, merely because the abstract exponential function goes towards infinity, that somehow proves they're entitled to infinitely accruing money. Probability and statistics are...er, well, let's skip over that subject for now, because I don't want to start crying. Even humble percentages fare badly in contemporary American culture.
It's astonishing to me that this widespread innumeracy, this "mathematical illiteracy", flourishes in direct contact and coexistence with a high-technology world stuffed full of computer programmers. Surely a lot of these programmers know some mathematics, or think they know some mathematics.
~Chara of Pnictogen
Exponential curves captivate investors and speculators who seem to think that, merely because the abstract exponential function goes towards infinity, that somehow proves they're entitled to infinitely accruing money.
This whole essay is well-pointed but this part stuck out to me.
I want to beat the people who think this over the head with a differential equations textbook while also yelling at them about the logistic equation in particular
