Skip to main content

How to Make the World Add Up - Tim Harford ****

Many UK listeners will be familiar with the BBC's excellent More or Less radio show, hosted by the Financial Times' 'undercover economist' Tim Harford. The programme takes on numbers in the news to explain them and, where necessary, show what's wrong with them, in a light but informative fashion. The only slight problem with the programme is that it does tend towards silly presentation styles (though the last couple of years these have been toned down). On his own, Tim Harford is perhaps less fun and more serious in style, but remains approachable on a subject that most of us ought to understand better.

One of the most enjoyable things in the field is to shoot down misuse of stats. It's certainly an important thing to do, but Harford points out that only doing this, while entertaining, is potentially dangerous as it may lead to a total detachment from the usefulness of statistics. Instead, he suggests, we need to get better about thinking about the numbers we are bombarded with in our lives, so that we can most sensibly make use of what we are being told.

The approach in the book, in the fashionable 'ten rules' style, gives us a series of statistical 'commandments' such as being aware of our emotional response to data to avoid simply reacting based on emotion, or finding appropriate context, or being aware that facts can change. For each of the ten we are given examples, mostly historical, though all interesting. It's a shame in a way that the book was finished in March, so we get a few initial thoughts on by far the biggest statistical impact on lives in 2020 - the coronavirus pandemic - but it was too soon to have in-depth examples from this.

In the final chapter, Harford condenses all his commandments in New Testament style into simpler guidance that encompasses the rest - be curious. It is curiosity that inspires us to explore the statistics we are given - and to question them effectively when they need questioning, rather than simply dismissing them as fake news or accepting them as indisputable fact.

If you want guidance on what's really happening in the numbers we see, it's impossible to beat David Spiegelhalter's magisterial The Art of Statistics. But if you want to discover the best mindset to appreciate statistics, make the most of them and find where it's necessary to ask more and doubt the outcome, then Harford, through How to Make the World Add Up, is an ideal guide.

I'm reminded in a way of Brian Cox's popular science titles written with Jeff Forshaw, such as The Quantum Universe. If the fans of Cox's fluffy TV documentaries were to pick up one of these books (as no doubt many did), they would find it a lot harder going that the TV shows, but more intellectually rewarding. There's not quite such a disparity between Harford's book and More or Less - but listeners will find it less of an educational entertainment and more of an educative read.

Hardback:    
Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Antigravity Enigma - Andrew May ****

Antigravity - the ability to overcome the pull of gravity - has been a fantasy for thousands of years and subject to more scientific (if impractical) fictional representation since H. G. Wells came up with cavorite in The First Men in the Moon . But is it plausible scientifically?  Andrew May does a good job of pulling together three ways of looking at our love affair with antigravity (and the related concept of cancelling inertia) - in science fiction, in physics and in pseudoscience and crankery. As May points out, science fiction is an important starting point as the concept was deployed there well before we had a good enough understanding of gravity to make any sensible scientific stabs at the idea (even though, for instance, Michael Faraday did unsuccessfully experiment with a possible interaction between gravity and electromagnetism). We then get onto the science itself, noting the potential impact on any ideas of antigravity that come from the move from a Newtonian view of a...
Post a Comment
Read more

The World as We Know It - Peter Dear ***

History professor Peter Dear gives us a detailed and reasoned coverage of the development of science as a concept from its origins as natural philosophy, covering the years from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. inclusive If that sounds a little dry, frankly, it is. But if you don't mind a very academic approach, it is certainly interesting. Obviously a major theme running through is the move from largely gentleman natural philosophers (with both implications of that word 'gentleman') to professional academic scientists. What started with clubs for relatively well off men with an interest, when universities did not stray far beyond what was included in mathematics (astronomy, for instance), would become a very different beast. The main scientific subjects that Dear covers are physics and biology - we get, for instance, a lot on the gradual move away from a purely mechanical views of physics - the reason Newton's 'action at a distance' gravity caused such ...
Post a Comment
Read more

It's On You - Nick Chater and George Loewenstein *****

Going on the cover you might think this was a political polemic - and admittedly there's an element of that - but the reason it's so good is quite different. It shows how behavioural economics and social psychology have led us astray by putting the focus way too much on individuals. A particular target is the concept of nudges which (as described in Brainjacking ) have been hugely over-rated. But overall the key problem ties to another psychological concept: framing. Huge kudos to both Nick Chater and George Loewenstein - a behavioural scientist and an economics and psychology professor - for having the guts to take on the flaws in their own earlier work and that of colleagues, because they make clear just how limited and potentially dangerous is the belief that individuals changing their behaviour can solve large-scale problems. The main thesis of the book is that there are two ways to approach the major problems we face - an 'i-frame' where we focus on the individual ...
Post a Comment
Read more