INTRODUCTION

This book began over a pizza as an idea for a BBC radio program. Few took it seriously: “Numbers? On the radio?” In six short years the program More or Less became a fixture in the schedules, the skepticism wilted, and our extravagant ambition—of changing the culture of numbers in public argument—blinked into sunlight.

Listeners told of the subversive thrill of having the mental ammunition to shoot down official claims and dodgy data—regardless of the politics. They relished clarity on facts they’d not been given straight before, told in surprising, accessible ways that made them wonder, not always politely, why they’d had to wait so long for what seemed so straightforward. The program chased down bad data and sought out good to answer pressing questions about economic and social life, it poked fun at politicians, media, and others who were content to spout numerical gibberish, it sifted research and delved into surveys and samples to find the true measure of trends, attitudes, and behavior, it sought to put risk into human proportion, and to popularize simple principles and tricks for seeing through numbers. Wherever they appeared—and they seemed to appear everywhere—we insisted they speak clearly, exposing their limitations, acknowledging their uncertainty, but also applauding their insights. In doing so, we came across an apparently endless stream of stories, some comic, some tragic, some scandalous.

Neither of us is a professional mathematician or statistician. One is a Cambridge English graduate who began asking dumb questions about numbers in the news only to find that too many of the answers were even dumber, the other an economist who is now principal of a college at Oxford University, and came to public notice as the fiercely independent head of an economic research institute. One thinks the other tall enough to be a mutant giant, while the second thinks the first should get a proper job as a jockey, which makes us middling, on average, and just goes to show the trouble with averages. What we share is the same incredulity at the way a whole language seems to be debased.

The radio program acquired a growing, often devoted, always opinionated audience of nearly a million, a Web site, imitators in the press, the financial backing of the Open University, and the interest of publishers. It became part of BBC training for new and established journalists, the basis of lectures, articles in the press, and journals and, though we hope this is not the last of its manifestations, the pizza turned into a book, and sold out twice in the UK in two months.

This edition, extensively revised for American readers, has the same aims, above all to prove that what we can do, they can do, and no doubt surpass. That’s just as well; numbers nowadays saturate the news, politics, life, in the United States as in the UK. For good or ill, they are today’s preeminent public language—and those who speak it rule. Quick and cool, numbers seem to have conquered fact.

But they are also hated, often for the same reasons. They can bamboozle not enlighten, terrorize not guide, and all too easily end up abused and distrusted. Potent but shifty, the role of numbers is frighteningly ambiguous. How can we see through them? Our answer is unconventional:

First, relax . . .

We know more than we think we do. We have been beautifully conditioned to make sense of numbers, believe it or not, by our own experience. This is the radical premise of this book—that readers have no need to throw up their hands in fear or contempt, if only they see how much they know already.

Numbers can make sense of a world otherwise too vast and intricate to get into proportion. They have their limitations, no doubt, but are sometimes, for some tasks, unbeatable. That is, if used properly. So although there is here a rich store of mischief and scandal, it is not to discredit numbers themselves. There are lies and damned lies in statistics, for sure, but scorning numbers is no remedy. For that is to give up the game on every political, economic, or social argument you follow, every cause you love or hate.

Our aim is rather to bring numbers back to earth, not only by uncovering the tricks of the trade—the multiple counting, suspicious graphs, sneaky start dates, and funny scales—there have been exposés of that kind of duplicity before, though there are gems in the stories that follow; nor by relying on arcane statistical techniques, brilliant though those often are. Instead, wherever possible, we offer images from life—self, experience, prompts to the imagination—to show how to cut through to what matters. It is all there—all of us possess most of it already—this basic mastery of the principles that govern the way numbers work. It can be shared, we think, even by those who once found math a cobwebbed mystery.

But simple does not mean trivial; simple numbers help to answer imperative questions. Do we know what people earn and owe, who is rich and who poor? Is that government spending promise worth a dime? Who lives and who dies by performance measures for health care? Are educational ranking charts honest? Do speed cameras really save lives? What about that survey of teenage offending, the 1 in 4 who do this, the 6 percent increase in risk for women who do that, Iraqi war dead, HIV/AIDS cases, how the United States compares with other countries, the decline of fish stocks or other wildlife, the threat of cancer, health budgets, third world debt, recycling rates, predictions of global warming? Hardly a subject is broached these days without measurements, quantifications, forecasts, rankings, statistics, targets, numbers of every variety; they are ubiquitous, and often disputed. If we are the least bit serious about any of these issues, we should attempt to get the numbers straight.

This means taking on lofty critics. Too many find it is easier to distrust numbers wholesale, affecting disdain, than get to grips with them. When a well-known writer explained to us that he had heard quite enough numbers, thank you—he didn’t understand them and didn’t see why he should—his objection seemed to us to mask fear. Jealous of his prejudices or the few scraps of numerical litter he already possessed, he turned up his nose at evidence in case it proved inconvenient. Everyone pays for this attitude in bad policy, bad government, gobbledygook news, and it ends in lost chances and screwed-up lives.

Another dragon better slain is the attitude that, if numbers cannot deliver the whole truth straight off, they are all just opinion. That damns them with unreasonable expectation. One of the few things we say with certainty is that some of the numbers in this book are wrong. Those who expect certainty might as well leave real life behind. Everyone is making their way precariously through the world of numbers, no single number offers instant enlightenment, life is not like that, and numbers won’t be either.

Still others blame statistical bean counters for a kind of crass reductionism, and think they, with subtlety and sensitivity, know better. Sometimes there is something in this, but just as often it is the other way around. Most statisticians know the limits of any human attempt to capture life in data—they have tried, after all. Statistics is far from the dry collection of facts; it is the science of making what subtle sense of the facts we can. No science could be more necessary, and those who do it are sometimes detectives of quiet ingenuity. It is others, snatching at numbers, brash or overconfident, who are more naively out of touch.

So we should shun the extremes of cynicism or fear, on the one hand, and number idolatry on the other, and get on with doing what we can. And we can do a great deal.

Most of what is here is already used and understood in some part of their lives by almost everyone; we all apply the principles, we already understand the ideas. Everyone recognizes, for example, the folly of mistaking one big wave for a rising tide and, since we can do that, perhaps to our surprise, we can unravel arguments about whether speed cameras really save lives or cut accidents. In life, we would see—of course we would see—the way that falling rice scatters and, because we can see it, we can also make simple sense of the numbers behind cancer clusters. We know the vibrancy of the colors of the rainbow and we know what we would lack if we combined them to form a bland white band in the sky. Knowing this can, as we will see, show us what an average—average income, for example— can conceal and what it can illuminate. Many know from ready experience what it costs to buy child care, and so they can know whether government spending on child care is big or small. We are, each one of us, the obvious and ideal measure of the policies aimed at us. These things we know. And each can be a model for the way numbers work. All we seek to do is reconnect what anyone can know with what now seems mysterious, reconnect numbers with images and experience from life, such that, if we have done our job, what once was baffling or intimidating will become transparent.

What follows will not be found in a textbook: even the choice and arrangement of subjects would look odd to an expert, let alone the way they are presented. Good. This is a book from the point of view of the consumer of numbers. It is short and to the point. Each chapter starts with what we see as the nub of the matter: a principle, or a vivid image. Wipe the mental slate clean of anxiety or fuzziness and inscribe instead these ideas, keep each motif in mind while reading, see how they work in practice from the stories we tell. In this way we hope to light the path toward clarity and confidence.

The alignment of power and abuse is not unique to numbers, but it is just possible that it could be uniquely challenged, and the powerless become powerful. Here’s how.