We've got troubles! Too bad. We were warned about some of the greatest problems of this half-century. And mathematics played a major role in those warnings! But we ignored those warnings! As a veteran of World War II ("The Big War", as Archy calls it), I place the principal blame upon my generation, since we were there at the start of this ongoing fiasco.

But I also place blame upon The Media for not "hanging out a storm cloud" about the warnings and not reporting the successes. If The Media had told The Public about the role played by mathematics in crises of this half-century then we might now not be in an epidemic of mathematical illiteracy! And Lester Thurow, MIT economist, would not have to say, "Americans are not used to a world in which ordinary production workers need mathematical skills".

Here's a list of our fiascos (and a few but unreported, or poorly reported, successes).

• In 1946 Russian-American mathematical economist (and 1973 Economics Nobelist), Wassily Leontief, used his "input-output" analysis to warn us about the importance of long-term planning and national budgeting to avoid budget deficits. A warning ignored (and, in one instance, laughed at by industrialists), with consequences we now observe.
• In 1948, the great American mathematician, Norbert Wiener (x-y), published a classic, Cybernetics. and warned us that computers and robots would lead to the "downsizing" which took away the jobs of millions in the '90s. Wiener tried to warn labor unions, chambers of commerce, politicians, reporters, etc., but was laughed at. Again, math warned and we blew it.
• From April, 1948, to September, 1949, the Soviet Union maintained a Berlin Blockade. Food, fuel, and other supplies had to be flown to Berliners from outside the Soviet zone, a massive airlift carried out by limited number of planes. The effectiveness of this effort was due to good planning, aide by a mathematical tool, linear programming, using the simplex algorithm of George Dantzig to obtain solutions. (Ironically, a Soviet mathematician, Kantorevitch, had obtained this result earlier, but his work was ignored until after Dantzig's success.)
• On April 11, 1951, President Truman removed General Douglas MacArthur from command of U. S. forces in Korea. (MacArthur wanted to pursue the conflict into China and bypassed the President by writing a letter to the Speaker of the House of Representatives, pleading for support in this adventure..) President Truman's decision was influenced by a Leontief input-output analysis of the American economy, showing that America would need two years to provide the support our troops would need against an enemy which might be fighting on its own soil and able to live off the land wherever engaged!
• In 1957, General Matthew Ridway, who succeeded MacArthur in Korea, warned President Eisenhower against "meddling" in Vietnam. Later, to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, Ridgway repeated warnings about "another Korea" -- long before the millions of peace-demonstrators. But General Ridgway was ignored. This Bastard War still polarizes our nation. Ridgway warned us against bastard wars, but we blew it! Ignorance of a cardinal rule of probability theory -- don't "bet" on probability but EXPECTATION: PROBABILITY TIMES EVENT'S VALUE -- played a crucial role in Adminstrative strategy for this bastard war and confused "post-mortems" about it.
• In 1957, The Rockefeller Brothers' Report warned us that America's increasing consumption would make us increasingly dependent upon imports, especially for oil and strategic materials and require changes in our forelign policy. The Trade Deficit of the past ten years, increasing the National Debt and the budget deficit, along with arguments about our "foreign entanglements", show the consequences of ignoring the warnings of this report.
• In 1964, the Surgeon General of the United States issued a report linking smoking of tobacco with lung cancer, coronary artery disease, and other ailments. Prior to this action, there had begun the most impressive accumulation of statistics ever amassed on any subject. But it took more than 20 years for The Media and the general public to take warning from these statistics.