Well, I dunno if it's because I find arithmetic a bit dull or because I find people rather interesting, but I do find less uses for arithmetic in human affairs as I get older. A good example of what I mean is Bruce Sprinsteen's '57 channels and nothing on'. If you have a multicultural TV channel, a public service broadcaster, and three commercial stations to soak up the sport and US product - you have more diversity than if you had 57 competing commercial outlets (and I've had expatriate Americans tell me this - even a LBO resident). And if it's gotta be all commercial, as our 'market' will one day be (because we've become convinced it is a 'market'), you might be better off giving one proprietor a dozen licences than a hundred proprietors one licence each. The lone proprietor won't compete with herself, so you get more variety coz she'd be likely to construct more target niches. I know people like Steiner tried to quantify all this, but I reckon there are (many) times when we should just say 'that makes sense' and move on.
I'm like that with Marxian economics (such as I grasp it), too. Too many temporal and domain-definition problems (relations are buggers of things to weigh and count) for a start, but it makes sense - I don't need numbers to accept that total value and surplus value produced can decrease just as the use-values produced increase (given an increase in OCC), and I'm yet convinced the numbers would actually help the case anyway.
A coward's way out, mayhap, but at least I don't end up playing on the other bloke's home patch all the time - I tried that for a while and found myself implicitly accepting all kinds of stuff I wouldn't have gone near if I hadn't been using both my brain cells to keep my numbers in shape. That's how the other side got that 'information economy' idea past us, I suspect. We forget to ask stuff like 'what the #!* is that'? 'How's it different from other ages'? 'Are 4 MBs of info worth twice what 2MBs are worth'? 'How much is the meaning component worth'? 'Is that per MB of meaning'? etc etc.
But I'm talking to the author of *Wall St*, a real institutionalist tour de force which effortlessly and explicitly avoids mathematical fetishisation, so I'm obviously just letting rip to avoid work. In which luxury I no longer have time to indulge ...
All the best, Rob.