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“Mathiness: British economic journalist John Kay defines mathiness as a “use of algebraic symbols
and quantitative data to give an appearance of scientific content to ideological preconceptions.��
Expressing an idea in mathematical symbols instead of straightforward literary terms helps legitimize
it in the minds of many people, thanks to a seeming similarity with natural science. In this respect
math is basically a form of numerical rhetoric.

“The American economist Paul Romer has recently
written of ‘mathiness,�� by analogy with ‘truthiness,�� a term coined by American talk show host
Stephen Colbert. Truthiness presents narratives which are not actually true, but consistent with the
world view of the person who spins the story. It is exemplified in rightwing fabrications about
European health systems �� their death panels and forced euthanasia.��
Paul Samuelson, for instance, trivialized economics in terms that give the outward appearance of science by being expressed mathematically, even when its assumptions are purely hypothetical (and not all realistic)and there are no quantitative statistics to illustrate its categories.”