Sometimes Fuzziness Is Required When Analyzing Politics and the Economy Self-described fuzzy mathematician John Allen Paulos claims that fuzzy numbers are the only kind of numbers that work when it comes to explaining the economy. It's a safe bet that you have never heard the presidential candidates explain how adjusted multiple correlation coefficients work.
Politicians tell stories and anecdotes because they're much easier to understand than numbers.
Statistics, if they're more complicated than batting averages, usually go relatively unnoticed. And even when politicians do insist on citing the relevant figures, they're liable to be mocked. As a fuzzy mathematician, I took umbrage. It is my opinion that, in politics or economics, there are no other kinds of numbers. Polls explicitly acknowledge some of their fuzziness by including margins of error, but fuzziness is implicit in many other contexts.