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

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Useful in an endless number of situations, "What the Numbers Say is the practical guide to navigating today's data-rich world. Would you like to tell us about a lower price? If you are a seller for this product, would you like to suggest updates through seller support?

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Write a customer review. There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later. This book, by a friend and former colleague, is a wonderful introduction to the ways that numbers are used, and misused, in our work and everyday lives.

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

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: 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. Forgot if this was any good for the kids, just didn't want this popping up all the time so I decided to review it as average and unmemorable. One person found this helpful. This book offers examples of quantitative reasoning, including the topics of compound growth and statistics. Their perspective is that without the ability to work with numbers, people can easily be misled.

One of the examples is a statistic used by defense attorney Alan Dershowitz to mislead the jurors in the infamous Simpson trial. As I was reading the book, I wondered who the audience ought to be. Although the tone is breezy and the examples are presented without the use of algebra or higher mathematics, I am not sure how a math-phobic person would react.

My experience with math phobes is that they would feel threatened by the book and be resistant to picking it up. A better audience for the book might be math educators. As a teacher, I found numerous examples in the book that will be helpful. Moreover, the last chapter, in which they discuss ways to reform math education, is a gem. What the authors are saying is that people need good basic intuition about numbers in order to understand a world that is increasingly dominated by numerical data.

The traditional math curriculum tries to prepare a student to study Newtonian physics. Instead, I think that the authors would argue that the curriculum ought to be aimed at enabling a student to understand stock market ratios and statistical research. One random note is that the authors attribute the phrase "independence from irrelevant alternatives" to John Nash. I may be wrong, but I believe that it was Kenneth Arrow who brought that concept to the fore.

By filling the book with interesting examples that illustrate the type of quantitative reasoning that they consider important, the authors make a compelling case for the math education reform that they advocate. However, if their primary audience is math educators, that fact is obscured on the book jacket, which makes the intended audience unclear. Premised on the idea that we now live in a "quantitative information age", in which a person can hardly get through a day without reaching some conclusion based on numerical data, but that most people are poor quantitative thinkers who routinely make poor decisions because they are unskilled in analyzing numerical data, authors Derrick Niederman and David Boyum offer us "What the Numbers Say", a guide to spotting the most common kinds of data manipulation and determining what those numbers really mean.

I should say that you do not need to know any mathematics beyond a 6th grade level to understand this book or to successfully decipher the numerical data that one encounters in everyday life. There are interesting examples taken from the stock market, business world, and current events for every subject that is discussed. And the examples don't have a pervasive political bias. In "A Peace Offering for the Math Wars", the authors offer a critique of the current mathematics curricula and the lack of quantitative thinking instruction in U.

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.

Customers who bought this item also bought

I think this is a nice addition to the bookshelf of any manager, investment manager, or reader of the sports page. Forgot if this was any good for the kids, just didn't want this popping up all the time so I decided to review it as average and unmemorable. One person found this helpful.

This book offers examples of quantitative reasoning, including the topics of compound growth and statistics. Their perspective is that without the ability to work with numbers, people can easily be misled. One of the examples is a statistic used by defense attorney Alan Dershowitz to mislead the jurors in the infamous Simpson trial. As I was reading the book, I wondered who the audience ought to be. Although the tone is breezy and the examples are presented without the use of algebra or higher mathematics, I am not sure how a math-phobic person would react.

My experience with math phobes is that they would feel threatened by the book and be resistant to picking it up. A better audience for the book might be math educators. As a teacher, I found numerous examples in the book that will be helpful. Moreover, the last chapter, in which they discuss ways to reform math education, is a gem. What the authors are saying is that people need good basic intuition about numbers in order to understand a world that is increasingly dominated by numerical data. The traditional math curriculum tries to prepare a student to study Newtonian physics.

Instead, I think that the authors would argue that the curriculum ought to be aimed at enabling a student to understand stock market ratios and statistical research. One random note is that the authors attribute the phrase "independence from irrelevant alternatives" to John Nash. I may be wrong, but I believe that it was Kenneth Arrow who brought that concept to the fore. By filling the book with interesting examples that illustrate the type of quantitative reasoning that they consider important, the authors make a compelling case for the math education reform that they advocate.

However, if their primary audience is math educators, that fact is obscured on the book jacket, which makes the intended audience unclear. Premised on the idea that we now live in a "quantitative information age", in which a person can hardly get through a day without reaching some conclusion based on numerical data, but that most people are poor quantitative thinkers who routinely make poor decisions because they are unskilled in analyzing numerical data, authors Derrick Niederman and David Boyum offer us "What the Numbers Say", a guide to spotting the most common kinds of data manipulation and determining what those numbers really mean.

I should say that you do not need to know any mathematics beyond a 6th grade level to understand this book or to successfully decipher the numerical data that one encounters in everyday life. There are interesting examples taken from the stock market, business world, and current events for every subject that is discussed. And the examples don't have a pervasive political bias. In "A Peace Offering for the Math Wars", the authors offer a critique of the current mathematics curricula and the lack of quantitative thinking instruction in U.

In the book's last chapter, the authors get up on their soapbox about mathematical and quantitative education in American schools, so I trust they won't mind if I get up on mine. I wholeheartedly agree with most of what they say, but I find the authors' reaction to American students' performance in the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study puzzling.

Boyum to conclude that American students are bad at math and that American schools are bad at teaching it.

Americans do better than average. There are always some anglophone nations that do worse and some that do better. I think the results for American students are rather good considering that we have a significant population of non-native-English speakers in our schools and a very heterogeneous population -culturally, ethnically, and geographically- in general. In any case, the authors acknowledge that "mathematical knowledge and quantitative reasoning are quite different things". So why the fuss? Speaking on another subject, the authors lament the elementary school mathematics curricula, which is full of useless stuff.

That's a hopeless cause, because it doesn't take 6 years to cover basic mathematics. So most of elementary school education is filler and repetition -in all subjects.

Junior high school and high school mathematics could be improved though. Not really, but at least in theory. There is nothing in a "pre-algebra" class that anyone needs to do algebra; there's nothing in a "pre-calculus" class that anyone needs to do calculus; and there's nothing in a geometry class that couldn't be memorized in 10 minutes.

Ditching those courses would allow school systems to require that all students take a quantitative reasoning course and one year of calculus without placing any more burden on students or budgets.

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