The Tyranny of Numbers:: Mismeasurement and Misrule

There are other books that have highlighted statistical illusions and talked about how the numbers of things didn't add up ("Freakonomics" comes immediately to mind) but did a better job of keeping the reader interested. This book was at turns light and easy to read and at other times heavy and dense. But the end result was well worth the harder-to-read parts.) This book was, overall, very good though. In the interest of keeping the review readable, I'll just offer 10 good points (there could have been many more that I noted): 1. This book was written several years ago, and it talks about things that have already come to pass. And in this way, one can test the predictions as one reads the book (people who have things to say about different economics issues are often 150% wrong in their predictions, and so the fact that this predicted so much that was right makes it a testament to the quality of the writing). 2. The author gives an excellent (brief) explanation of how the apartheid system in SA actually came to be-- it started out as racial preferences to "help someone that needed a helping hand" (Afrikaners), but morphed into something much worse. But the manifest function of the government was not the oppression of blacks. It just happened to work out that way through some number of steps. 3. A lot of people have commented on the restive Muslim population in Russia. But Eberstadt does a good job pinning down the demographic dynamics that made this so. In fact, it seems that this book was written before the worst parts of the Chechen crisis. 4. Particularly interesting was his treatment of poverty statistics (since EVERYONE seems to have an opinion about what is the appropriate government solution to poverty) that pointed out that who is poor depends on whether you measure income or consumption. (So, a person who cuts his own hair with a pair of $10 clippers consumes the exact same amount of services as a person who goes to the barbershop once every two weeks and pays a barber $15 each time to cut his hair-- independent of their income.) 5. Many of the things in this book foreshadow what was written in another great book: "Misadventures in the Tropics" by Bill Easterly. The Easterly book was a bit more readable, but Eberstadt's treatment set out the backbone by demonstrating what had ACTUALLY HAPPENED. 6. Hooray for throwing cold water on Cuba's revered health care system. I particularly liked the way that he went through and demonstrated that THE DATA FOR THIS JUST DON'T ADD UP. This is a good antidote to the filthy misrepresentations of that fat slob Michael Moore. 7. This book also foreshadowed a lot of research that was later done by other people on the sex imbalance in China. (Valerie Hudson, for example.) If anything, Eberstadt was too conservative in his estimates of the magnitude of the imbalance. It actually ended up that the imbalance was MUCH WORSE than even he anticipated. 8. This book has a heavy empirical bent (which it sh