> banks and insurance companies clamour for “numerate” workforce, but prefer to deal with innumerate customers And, honestly, they also prefer to isolate numer

> banks and insurance companies clamour for “numerate” workforce, but prefer to deal with innumerate customers And, honestly, they also prefer to isolate numerate expertise in a few "cost centers" inside their operation. Years ago I held a number of bonds my grandparents had bought for me as a gift (and educational tool) when I was a young child. I'd studied enough mathematics that I could derive compounding interest formulas and enough finance I thought I understood the instrument. But the bond values I calculated and the values my bank would redeem them for diverged enough that I wondered. So I asked if I could talk with anyone at the bank about why their calculated values were different from mine. I wanted either higher redemption values or an education. I had a brief conversation with a customer facing local officer where I started to explain. It was over quickly; the officer was polite, but clearly uninterested in following (much less enlightening) any conversation about the specific computation of bond values. And very sure that whoever had done it had done it correctly, and that was all that was necessary.