Get in Touch with Your Inner Child (Who Just Happens to Be A Mathematician)

Economics students are often dismayed by the math in even a basic economics course. Computing an elasticity of demand, for example, seems to send a number of learners into panic.

Somewhere along the line, lots of students have developed the attitude (as one girl put it to me): "I am stupid in math."

The story linked by this post offers a surprising rejoinder to that girl. According to a recent study, five year olds have innate math abilities, even when they have not received any instruction in math. Heck, you don't even have to be human to have mathematical abilities. Studies have shown similar math abilities in monkeys.

Here's an example of the type of experiment the researchers performed with 5-year olds:

In one experiment, the children saw 13 blue dots on a computer screen; those were covered, and then they saw 17 blue dots and were forced to keep the running tally in their heads. Then they were shown 50 red dots and asked whether there were more blue dots or red dots.
Presented this way, the children answered correctly about two-thirds of the time that there were more red dots than blue dots.

This and similar mathematical abilities appear to be inborn:

"What's central about numbers for us as adults is that we can apply a number like 7 to a diverse number of things," said Elizabeth Spelke, a psychologist at Harvard University and the principal investigator of the study. "We can say that there are seven dots but also that a horn honks seven times. Although these are different in their sensory qualities, the numbers are the same."
Past studies performed on infants and non-human primates suggests that these abilities are present even before the age of 5.

"The experiments of the infants and the monkeys, I think, make it extremely likely that these abilities are inborn," Spelke said.

What are we to make of this insight? For one thing, somewhere between age 5 and age 18, something happens to many people that creates "math anxiety." What are the causes of math anxiety? How can people suffering from it be helped?

In terms of teaching economics using math, the best advice I can give learners is to practice, practice, practice, if you have trouble getting in touch with that inner child mathematician.