The Sum of Our Discontent: Why Numbers Make Us Irrational

Anita Roddick

A brilliant, funny book, which puts into words what many of us have been thinking for a very long time.

Earl Russell

It is the strength of this book that it is written by an author who loves and enjoys numbers.

This book is far from number heavy. It is written in a rather soft, descriptive and often very funny style.

Wonderfully subversive.

Boyle's fascinating historical account confirms our suspicions of those who would dare sum up a nation in a number.

[A] great antidote to cynicism, and a sharply witty reminder of what is important in life.

Boyle, a writer and journalist specializing in economics, feels that much of our difficulty in understanding economic and sociological problems can be traced to our attempts to describe complex systems by simple statistics. He points out that since most things in real life are multifaceted, one must almost automatically fail when trying to reduce such things to a single number. He also makes the very good points that what we choose to count tells us more than the result of the count, that many of our measurements are inaccurate, and, most importantly, that the measuring process affects the very things that we are trying to understand. However, whether our failures result from statistical oversimplification that may be correctable or from the inherent impossibility of the task is debatable. Boyle's book features short biographies, interesting in their own right, of people like Robert Malthus and John Maynard Keynes who have helped move us in the direction of greater quantification. For academic and larger public libraries. Harold D. Shane, Baruch Coll., CUNY Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

The short answer is that a fetish for numbers makes people and peoples lose touch with their instincts, according to economist- at-large Boyle. He explores such aspects as a short history of counting, Robert Malthus and the death of moral statistics, damage by numbers, and the fine balance of John Maynard Keynes. He has not indexed his work. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)