What the Numbers Say: A Field Guide to Mastering Our Numerical World [Hardcover]

Ahh! Twice as much as what? As Stephen Covey's books? As much as this book's actual sales? What's the base? Now that I've read this "Field Guide to Mastering Our Numerical World" (actually the subtitle,) I am trained to ask the pertinent questions about numerical comparisons. I have learned to simultaneously "only trust the numbers" and to "never trust the numbers" - habits #1 and #2.

In this entertaining tour of today's quantitative landscape, the authors expose our collective inability to cope with numerical reasoning. From humorous pot shots at "our favorite punching bag, the International Skating Union," whose farcical scoring systems are easily exposed, to a better method of comparing safety between small plane flying and automobile safety, to famous courtroom misuses of statistical data, Niederman and Boyum demonstrate a growing gap between our increasingly data dependent decisions and our nation's declining numerical literacy.

"What The Numbers Say" provides a layman's look at mathematical skills required by everyone. It is a book for non-mathematicians, liberal arts students, teachers of all subjects, political and educational leaders, and above all, parents. To anyone struggling with children struggling to master the multiplication table, and wondering what became of the rote memorization and textbooks from earlier days, the authors make sense of the new teaching techniques. Traditionally, it seems, mathematicians have been Euclideans, "deriving truths, in step-by-step fashion, from first principles or axioms." But, "good quantitative thinkers are Babylonians. They understand that quantities can be measured and expressed in many different ways, and that looking at something from multiple viewpoints enhances perspective and fosters creative thinking." Finally, we understand why our kids can't complete the 9-times Table, but are whizzes at stacking Lego blocks.

Niederman and Boyum embellish their hypotheses deriving wonderful examples of easy-to-comprehend quantitative situations involving baseball, weather forecasting, popular movies, roulette odds, consumer tips, home finance and stock market analysis, timed swimming contests, fair games, and more. Readers cannot fail to understand how simple some of the recipes (Pareto's Law, The Rule of 72, how to interpret Zagat's Restaurant Guides) are for understanding quantitative measurement. Mathematics, long misunderstood as "uncool" for its complicated formulae and notation, in fact, is often a beautiful and handy tool with which to find "the easy way out."

Though the authors uncover highly political ramifications of misunderstood data and twisted statistics (e.g., environmental debates), the book is apolitical save for the last chapter that cries out for educational reforms. Niederman and Boyum sum the book up neatly with suggestions for educators regarding curricula, calculators, and competitiveness. They propose ending the "math wars between Progressives and Traditionalists," and put forth solutions. The authors' main salvo: differentiate between mathematics and quantitative reasoning, and offer training on a separate track for each.

Put this on your 'to-read' list for the coming year. If only to find out how many combinations a 2 X 3 Lego brick can form.

If you are uneasy with quantitative reasoning, you will never read the business page, or your medical chart in quite the same way after reading this book. If you fancy yourself more sophisticated, you will still learn a lot, and you will swoon with joy at the emphatic debunking of much humbug: predictable flaws of Olympic judging, hidden messages in the Bible, and so on. the chapter on measures is my favorite. I never understood the difference between an acre and a hectare.

I have assigned Chapters 2 and 3 to my masters' level students in policy analysis. I think this is a nice addition to the bookshelf of any manager, investment manager, or reader of the sports page.