Focus Less On Numbers

You are not a number

My daughter Caroline's popsicle stick me and her.

As a mathematics educator, I think a lot (probably too much) about how numbers influence the way we see the world. I see the influence of numbers all over in my professional and personal life. Folks take a complex and nuanced phenomena and try to simplify or reduce the thing by assigning a number. Assigning the number isn’t really the problem though. It’s how quickly folks can lose sight of what the numbers represent. They then operate on the numbers as if they were context free and not connected to complex people, ideas, beliefs, etc.

It’s easy to get fixated on making big numbers bigger or making small numbers smaller. When bigness or smallness becomes the focus, we can lose sight of ourselves and values in pursuit of efficiency. I also see folks reason passionately about quantities that are familiar (e.g., ones, tens, hundreds, thousands, quarters, halves, tenths, hundredths) and get hand wavy about numbers with which they are unfamiliar (e.g., billions, trillions, thousandths, millionths). 

There is plenty of psychological research discussing different biases that folks are influenced by when reasoning (check out this seminal article by Amos Tversky and Daniel Khaneman on the subject). For example, if you give someone an initial value for something, they tend to use that value as an anchor and make adjustments from there. I think a common example in personal finance is the asking price for a home.  This initial price is an anchor that folks accept and then haggle over the few thousand dollars in closing costs, which represent a small percentage of the total price. If you start looking at homes and everything is around $300K, then this number becomes an anchor. A reduction in price of $5K looks great. A drop to $275K is a steal that you need to move on now! But is it really what you need? What does the number tell us about the fit of the home for your lifestyle? I have no idea and neither should you. The price does not really convey all the nuances and subtleties of a home. It probably is correlated with size, bedrooms, location, etc., but it is a representation of these things. It isn't those things.

I say all this because I think there is a general tendency for folks to focus on numbers first when thinking about personal finance. Of course the numbers and mathematical ideas are important, but we fixate on them to our peril. Common across the many personal finance writers and celebrities out there is a continued focus on changing behavior, mindset, and thinking alongside a collection of practical mathematical ideas. For example, in the classic Your Money or Your Life, Vicki Robin and Joe Dominguez set out detailed behavioral steps for taking control of finances. Bill Perkin's discussion in Die With Zero argues for a change in mindset to focus on experience and efficiently spending all your money by the time you die. Likewise, in The Psychology of Money, Morgan Housel digs deeply into the behavioral and lifestyle lessons we can learn about happiness, wealth, and greed from history. (Note: In a future post, I'm planning to discuss some of the books I've been reading and podcasts I enjoy.)

With regard to the profession of education, I think there is a tendency to quickly fixate on two numbers: the low salary and the time commitment. I don’t dispute either. The low salary creates real challenges in trying to make things work. Likewise, most teachers spend far more than their contract time preparing, grading, and working, particularly at the beginning. My point is that fixating on the low salary and large time commitment is not going to advance our discussion of personal finance. Why? Because those numbers represent complicated things and increasing/decreasing them is not straightforward. I’m not an administrator (nor do I want to be one), but I know that salary is connected to big structural things like school funding and student enrollment. With regard to time, the late nights grading, after work hours, and weekends preparing are part of the gig at the beginning. Teaching is a kind of skilled trade and it takes a while to figure out how to do things and then more time figuring out how to do them efficiently. I expect that most beginning teachers have 50-60 hour work weeks. However, as they build their practice and hone their craft, it gets better. Ask any experienced teacher about the amount of work needed to prepare a new class versus teaching one they’ve done a few times and they’ll tell you a story about time. I personally find it takes me three iterations of a course to understand its arc (the content, where it is going, the interesting parts of the story, etc.) Only after I understand the arc can I figure out how to be more efficient. It just takes a while.

So my advice for educators pursuing financial stability and independence is to focus less on the numbers. Yes, you need to have a mathematically viable path to achieve your goals. However, if you become too focused on numbers initially, I think you might lose track of more important things. For example, How do you want to live your life with dignity and purpose? What experiences are you hoping to have? Moreover, focusing on numbers can lead you to use them as a way to dehumanize and devalue yourself and others. That salary number does not represent you. It is not a representation of your worth any more than your shoe size, your phone bill, or the amount you last paid for parking. Don’t fall into that trap friends.

First published July 3, 2024