Arts, Books, Science

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

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Arts, Books, Economic, History, Society

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

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Arts, Books, Culture, Society

The Life of John le Carré

John le Carré, one of the greatest spy novelists, died at the end of last week following a short illness. He was 89.

The Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy author – whose real name was David Cornwell – has been described as an “undisputed giant of English literature” who “defined the Cold War era and fearlessly spoke truth to power”.

Le Carré – who had been in the intelligence services himself – rallied against the idea of spies being glamorous characters like James Bond.

His self-effacing spymaster George Smiley was created as a deliberate contrast to Ian Fleming’s OO7, who he felt inaccurately portrayed the life of a spy.

The writer worked for both MI5 and MI6 during the height of the Cold War in the 1950s and 1960s, before leaving the service in 1964 to become a full-time writer.

Many of his novels were adapted into successful films and TV shows starring a wide array of Hollywood talent including Sean Connery, Pierce Brosnan and Ralph Fiennes. His 1974 Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy was first turned in to a TV miniseries in 1979 starring Alec Guinness. The book was then adopted for a second time 32 years later into a successful film starring Gary Oldman, Colin Firth and Kathy Burke.

In 2016 his first post-Cold War novel The Night Manager was serialised in six parts on the BBC starring Tom Hiddleston, Hugh Laurie and Olivia Colman.

The show was widely praised and won two Emmy Awards and three Golden Globes.

Despite his international success – the wife of the Russian leader, Raisa Gorbachev, was said to be a fan – the author once said he did not want his books considered for literary prizes.

He reportedly turned down an honour from the Queen but accepted Germany’s Goethe Medal in 2011.

Le Carré was born in Poole, Dorset on October 19, 1931. After attending Sherborne School he spent a year studying German literature at the University of Bern, before enlisting for compulsory military service in Austria, where his tasks involved interrogating Eastern Bloc defectors.

Upon his return to England he earned a degree in modern languages at Oxford University, then taught at Eton before joining the Foreign Service.

It was during his time at MI5 and MI6 that Le Carré began to write down ideas for spy stories, often on trips between work and home.

His first novel, Call For The Dead, was published in 1961 under his pen name, to get around a ban on Foreign Office employees publishing books under their own name.

George Smiley featured in nine of Le Carré’s books and played the central character in his Karla Trilogy, made up of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, The Honourable Schoolboy and Smiley’s People.

Le Carré said the character was based on John Bingham, an MI5 agent who wrote spy thrillers and encouraged Le Carré’s literary career and the ecclesiastical historian Vivian Green, the chaplain of his school and later his Oxford College who he said became his “confessor and godfather”.

Le Carré married Alison Sharp in 1954, with whom he had three sons before the couple divorced in 1971. In 1972, he married Valerie Jane Eustace, with whom he had a son, the novelist Nick Harkaway.

Fellow writer Robert Harris said: “I think he will be one of those writers who will be read a century from now.”

Le Carré is survived by second wife of almost 50 years, Valerie Jane and his sons Nicholas, Timothy, Stephen and Simon. A family statement thanked the NHS team at the Royal Cornwall Hospital in Truro for the care and compassion that he was shown. His illness from pneumonia was not Covid-related the statement said.

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