How Math Can Kill You
This week, governments which ignored basics are seeing serious consequences for fantastical thinking.
Clarice Feldman | March 29, 2026
Math ruins some really enchanting ideas. Things like fossil-free energy and open borders, combined with generous social welfare. This week, governments that ignored the basics are seeing serious consequences for fantastical thinking. By the same token, however, properly applied math can dispel doomster thinking.
Pollster Mark Penn presents a “math camp” this week. It’s a refreshing response to offset the hysteria about the economic disruption of Iran’s “global terror network.”
We use 20 million barrels of oil a day. So if oil prices increased during the war to $110 a barrel that is an extra $1 billion a day in costs. So 60 or 90 days of conflict adds about 60 to 90 billion in costs in a 29 trillion dollar economy. About 70 per cent of that is domestically produced so 70 per cent of it stays in the US economy. It just shifts from one sector to the other. In comparison, Trump took in 260 billion in tariff revenues last year and all of the fears of it were overblown as that amounted to only 1 per cent of the economy. The impact here of even a 4 or 6 month conflict (and there’s no indication it will go on that long) are much less than last year’s tariffs. Oil was over $100 for 3.5 years of Obam[a]’s term without daily headlines.
[snip] Imagine for a second how much the world will save in military and human costs once the greatest sponsor of global terror falls or is contained. This is a regime that gunned down thousands of unarmed protesters while diverting all its resources to missiles and nuclear weapons and their aims remain regional domination and beyond.
Net net the math shows that once again the impacts, while absolutely real, are way overblown. The Iranians are playing to our fears and only once we realize that the benefit of removing their stranglehold on the Mideast is worth trillions in the long term can we put our fears in perspective. Once we overcome them, Iran’s principal remaining source of power on the West collapses.
Ingenuity and structural resilience go far in preventing doomsday predictions from materializing. Major Gulf oil producers are showing how strategic management and resilience are working around the Strait of Hormuz constraints and Iranian attacks.
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https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2026/03/how_math_can_kill_you.html
