ABSTRACT
Numbers are pervasive in modern societies and provide us with confidence that we have control of the situation and understand what we are doing, both highly questionable assumptions. Several trillions of numbers disappeared from the American economy during the bursting of the high-tech bubble in twenty-first century. The financial sector is in the business of dealing with numbers and has grown in size over the last decade relative to other sectors of the economy. In the final analysis, financial numbers represent power in that they can be used to get people to do things one wants done, and the more numbers one has, the more power one has over other people. The corollary of the principle of the rational economic man in the financial world is that financial markets are rational rather than haphazard and unpredictable. The financial numbers that managers of business organizations deal with are of a different kind than the numbers of concern to engineers and scientists.
