What the Numbers Say

Our society is churning out more numbers than ever before, whether in the form of spreadsheets, brokerage statements, survey results, or just the numbers on the sports pages. Unfortunately, people’s ability to understand and analyze numbers isn’t keeping pace with today’s whizzing data streams. And the benefits of living in the Information Age are available only to those who can process the information in front of them.

What the Numbers Say offers remedies to this national problem. Through a series of witty and engaging discussions, the authors introduce original quantitative concepts, skills, and habits that reduce even the most daunting numerical challenges to simple, bite-sized pieces. Why do the nutritional values on a Cheerios box appear different in Canada than in the U.S.? How is it that top-performing mutual funds often lose money for the majority of their shareholders? Why was the scoring system for Olympic figure skating doomed even without biased judges?

By anchoring their discussions in real-world scenarios, Derrick Niederman and David Boyum show that skilled quantitative thinking involves old-fashioned logic, not advanced mathematical tools. Useful in an endless number of situations, What the Numbers Say is the practical guide to navigating today’s data-rich world.

DERRICK NIEDERMAN received a B.A. in mathematics from Yale and a Ph.D. in mathematics from MIT. He is the author of This Is Not Your Father’s Stockpicking Book, The Inner Game of Investing, and A Killing on Wall Street. DAVID BOYUM received a B.A. in applied mathematics and a Ph.D. in public policy from Harvard. He has been a visiting scholar at the Yale School of Management and a Robert Wood Johnson Scholar in Health Policy Research at Yale.

"The bad news is that, in an age of science, complex financial planning, and competing deficit forecasts to support competing stimulus packages, the average citizen needs math more than ever. The good news, according to this delightful and eye-opening numeracy primer, is that it's all sixth-grade math. Niederman, a mathematics Ph.D, and author of The Inner Game of Investing, and Boyum, a public policy consultant, assert that quantitative competence is mostly a matter of simple habits of mind, including: trust numerical data over anecdotal observations, but always question what the data are really saying; think in terms of probabilities rather than certainties; and make rough-and-ready estimates so your calculations don't go off track. With such rules of thumb and a little arithmetic, the authors illuminate basic ideas about probability, statistics and measuring and comparing numbers. Their lucid, light-handed, equation-free style is based on a skeptical examination of the dogmas of our modern culture of quantity, in which they take a close look at such numerical sacred cows as the batting average, the body-mass index and the wind-chill factor; clarify the math behind public policy nostrums like Social Security privatization and the flat tax; and reveal what they see as the statistical distortions of The Bible Code and the reasons for taking Zagat scores with a few grains of salt. They conclude with some recommendations on instilling quantitative common sense in students (restricting calculators in the classroom is job one). This engaging book is a great challenge to fuzzy math of all stripes."

--Publishers Weekly