. This audio broadcast can also be read: Book Review: Cured | Arts, reviews & current affairs (wordpress.com)
Category Archives: Books
Book Review – Science: ‘How To Read Numbers’
REVIEW
Intro: Why numbers don’t always add up
DOES swearing when you lift something heavy make it easier? According to one scientific study, shouting obscenities will help you shift that heavy and cumbersome wardrobe across your bedroom.
It seems halfway plausible until you look at the micro numbers in the study. One experiment had 52 participants, the other 29. Perhaps swearing and using uncouth language does make you stronger, but it seems [expletive deleted] unlikely.
In this fascinating and easy to read narrative of how to interpret numbers in the news, cousins Tom and David Chivers reveal that it’s best to be wary of large claims based on small samples. Who can forget the claim and advocacy by Donald Trump of hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for Covid-19? It all stemmed from a trial on just 42 patients.
Smallness of sample is not the only problem. So too is an unrepresentative one. You’d get a very skewed and biased view of average human height if you took your measurements at a basketball players’ convention.
And very different answers to the question of which was the greatest English football club in Manchester and in Liverpool.
The authors cite a classic story from the 1936 American elections. The Democrat F D Roosevelt won, taking 62 per cent of the vote, but one poll had confidently predicted victory for his Republican opponent by 57 to 43 per cent. They’d canvassed two million voters, but they’d contacted them by telephone. Phones at the time were owned mainly by the affluent who were more likely to vote Republican.
It’s also easy to make links between statistics where none exist. Sales of ice cream rise on the same days that drownings do. The explanation, obviously, is not that there is a causal link between the two.
Ice cream is nice on a hot summer day and so, too, is swimming which, unfortunately, leads to more drownings.
When we see a claim that X is linked to Y, we shouldn’t assume one causes the other. There could be some hidden thing, Z, which causes both.
When confronted by a number in a news story, it’s often difficult to assess its significance. Is that a big number? In London, over a 25-year period, 361 cyclists were killed. That seems a lot until you learn that, in the same quarter century, the average number of daily journeys by bicycle was 437,000. There was one in a ten million chance of a fatal accident per journey.
It’s also tricky to judge whether percentage increases are significant without knowing base numbers. To say that a political party doubled in size in a week would sound impressive, but not so much if it had one original member and he’d just recruited one more.
We are bombarded daily with statistics and the barrage has only increased during this year of Covid. “It’s wise to be wary”, point out the Chivers. Their enlightening book provides us with the tools to quickly identify when we’re being led astray.
– How To Read Numbers, by Tom and David Chivers, is published by W&N, 208pp
Book Review – ‘Work: A History of How We Spend Our Time’
REVIEW
IN 1776, Economist Adam Smith predicted that one day machines would “abridge labour”. We were meant to be able “to lie on the grass under trees on a summer’s day . . . watching the clouds float by”.
John Maynard Keynes, in the 1930s, thought that by now robots would be doing the donkey work, and food, water, warmth and safety would be “universal… and experienced equally by everyone”.
To which the only reasonable rejoinder or retort is: pig’s bottom. In 2020, owing to what James Suzman, a Cambridge professor, calls “cyber-physical systems animated by machine-learning algorithms”, i.e., computers, people are spending much longer staring at screens. In Britain in 2018, there were 600,000 work-related mental health issues reported to doctors.
In Professor Suzman’s reading of human history, nothing ever runs smoothly for long. For primitive peoples, life was “a constant battle”. When agriculture was developed, there were always droughts, floods and frost. What characterised us, however, was persistence. With the herding of animals came settlements and barns for grain, thence the need for carpenters, blacksmiths, merchants, stonemasons – eventually doctors, teachers and lawyers. Literacy enabled the keeping of accounts and the creation of banks.
The fatal paradox, though, is that gains in productivity are cancelled by population growth – more mouths to feed. Britain’s population in 1750 was 5.7 million, in 1851 21.1 million. Today it is nearly 70 million.
The Industrial Revolution behind the boom had little to recommend it: in the mines, children toiled like slaves. Women worked 14-hour shifts in mills. The working class were nothing but “a pin in a big machine”. Creativity was not wanted, only “target-driven, repetitive work”.
It has not been the proletariat, however, who benefit. Suzman quotes the alarming statistic that between 1978 and 2016, while the average pay increases were 11.7 per cent, the remuneration of CEOs went up by a staggering 937 per cent.
Clearly, we are victims of our ingenuity: we clear rainforests and generate greenhouse gases in the name of cheap food. Each year, 66 billion chickens are reared – triple the number of all wild birds.
Greed is the key to modern problems, what Suzman calls “the malady of infinite aspiration” – more microwave ovens, cars, phones. Nor is there a proportional correspondence between human labour and reward. What really counts if you want good prospects, are family connections, inheritance and “getting lucky”.
When order is under threat from human folly, Suzman says famines, wars and pandemics are the usual “imminent and severe correction” – so coronavirus should not be a surprise.
– ‘Work: A History of How We Spend Our time’ is published by Bloomsbury, 447pp
Arts, reviews & current affairs 