Counting: How We Use Numbers to Decide What Matters
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
“Required reading for anyone who’s interested in the truth.” —Robert Reich
In a post-Trumpian world where COVID rates soar and Americans wage near–civil war about election results, Deborah Stone’s Counting promises to transform how we think about numbers. Contrary to what you learned in kindergarten, counting is more art than arithmetic. In fact, numbers are just as much creatures of the human imagination as poetry and painting; the simplest tally starts with judgments about what counts. In a nation whose Constitution originally counted a slave as three-fifths of a person and where algorithms disproportionately consign Black Americans to prison, it is now more important than ever to understand how numbers can be both weapons of the powerful and tools of resistance. With her “signature brilliance” (Robert Kuttner), eminent political scientist Deborah Stone delivers a “mild-altering” work (Jacob Hacker) that shows “how being in thrall to numbers is misguided and dangerous” (New York Times Book Review).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The recourse to supposedly neutral, objective statistics warps social policy in subtle yet egregious ways, according to this incisive treatise. Political scientist Stone (Policy Paradox) examines a variety of controversial political issues in her investigation into how numbers are shaped by human perceptions and shape them in turn, including the Constitution's infamous reckoning of slaves as three-fifths of a person; the Census Bureau's present-day counting of racial categories (why, she wonders, is Barack Obama counted as "a black man with a white mother instead of a white man with a black father"?); and GDP estimates that count the paid labor of prison guards as an economic plus but not free child care by parents. She also describes how computerized parole algorithms estimate not the actual chances of recidivism but the racial assumptions of police and courts, and how educators game school-performance numbers by "artfully managing" which students take state-mandated standardized tests. Stone distills a wealth of thinking about statistics and their psychological and social foundations into lucid, engaging prose, illustrated with piquant graphics and cartoons, though her critique of cost-benefit analyses gives short shrift to their role in spotlighting unintended consequences of policy. Still, this is a stimulating layperson's guide to the pseudo-mathematical rationalizations behind so much of what governments do.
