In the tradition of Innumeracy and the various Freakonomics books. The authors are a PhD mathematician (Niederman) and a PhD in Public Policy {Boyum). The book is interesting to browse, but we’ve heard all this stuff before – the perils of small sample size, the lack of understanding of the Pareto distribution, how to mislead with percentages, regression to the mean, and so on. I did pick up a very useful trick from the chapter on the value of approximations and the perils of using a calculator, though: if you look up converting Celsius to Fahrenheit, the exact conversion is multiply by 9/5 and add 32. You probably can’t do that readily in your head. Niederman and Boyum point out the approximation – double and add 30 – is doable mentally and will never be off by more than a few degrees. (If you’re going the other way, subtract 30 and divide by 2).

The authors use examples from contemporary politics, which not only illustrate the woeful innumeracy of many commentators but also the maxim that you should never assume malevolence when incompetence is a valid explanation – sort of a variant on Occam’s Razor. One interesting point is the authors actually concur with the Washington Post columnist who criticized requiring all high school students to take algebra; they propose “practical math” type courses instead. Possibly not a bad idea; the kind of numerical reasoning they give examples of would benefit most people more than algebra. Alas, I suspect this sort of thing would somehow degenerate into a Common Core-type math fiasco.

Worth a browse; a quick read and, perhaps surprisingly no math beyond the basics. ( )