How to Make the World Add Up
This is the first Tim Harford novel I have come across and with a history of keeping fish, I have to be honest that if it wasn’t for the cover shown above I don’t know if I would have picked it up, Mr. Harford said himself that ‘the interestingness filter is enormously powerful’. The value in a book can far exceed the cost, a way to justify this is that if you pay $32.99 for this book and it takes at least 24 hours to read it, that would be a cost of $1.37 per hour.
It is a dangerous method to use to divide the cost of an item by how many hours you spend using it, think of a pair of jeans. You may pay $119.00 for a pair and wear them once a month for half of the year and 3 times a month for the other half of the year, when you wear them you are doing so for over 5 hours. 5 x 24 =120 hours, approximately $1.00 per hour and that is year 1. How old is your favourite pair of jeans?
As the front cover suggests, figures can appear more sinister than what they really are. The quote mentioned in the excerpt “About 25 years ago Uganda’s labour force increased by 700,000 people, most of them women. The problem was not that women were ignored, but that the earlier surveys had an old-fashioned division of household labour” is explaining that the way labour was recorded in Uganda was altered, resulting in a major increase in the amount of people listed in the workforce, when in reality, those people had been performing the same tasks the years prior.
This book is filled with insightful play on statistics, ‘The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) of America advises Congress on $4 trillion worth of annual spending, on a budget of $50 million. For every $80,000 spent, $1.00 of funds from the Congressional Budget would need to improve effectiveness by 0.00125%’. Reading causes you to think about the words and this book causes you to think about the figures, which is brought together with a broad range of terminology and facts, like an algorithm. Perhaps the same algorithm researched by computer scientist Sameer Singh in establishing that the algorithm that got really good at distinguishing wolves from husky’s ‘turned out that it was simply labelling any picture with snow a husky’.
From the ‘About the Author’
Tim Harford is a senior columnist for the Financial Times, and the presenter of Cautionary Tales and Radio 4’s More or Less. He is an honorary fellow of the Royal Statistical Society, a member of Nuffield College, Oxford, and the winner of numerous awards for economic and statistical journalism. For a third of the cost of a pair of jeans you can purchase over 300 pages of published literature from someone so acclaimed, that is an investment.
