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Notes -
I donno man. Maybe it's all perspective. It's more forgivable to be off in degrees (Lots when it's actually almost everybody, or a small minority versus a tiny minority), it seems less forgivable to be wildly innumerate and off by several orders of magnitude. Like when a cable news host claimed Bloomberg could have made everyone in the US a millionaire with the amount he spent on his failed presidential campaign.
You can choose not to forgive people for being wildly innumerate but you will, in doing so, condemn a substantial fraction of adults who function adequately on a day-to-day basis.
Maybe I've been watching too much Financial Audit, but I severely question how many people who are wildly innumerate function adequately in practice, versus in appearance thanks to endless financing.
Lots of people who don’t mathematically understand scale can manage their finances well enough- they’re used to buying x amount of groceries and y amount of gas. It’s really not difficult.
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