Enthralling evidence that there is less to numbers than meets the eye.
A delightful takedown of our unreasonable worship of numbers.
In 1954, Darrell Huff’s bestselling How To Lie With Statistics began a genre that continues to produce numerous books each year. Stone, a professor at MIT and Brandeis whose specialty is political science and social policy, casts an equally critical eye but delves far more deeply into the subject. To Stone, a number is not a fact but a tool, useful only if we know how it works. When the U.S. Census Bureau announces that Whites are becoming a minority, what’s to argue with? Doesn’t the census merely count? However, the Bureau defines White as a person who checks the “White” box on the form—and none of the 13 other boxes. Checking the “Hispanic” box or both the “Hispanic” and “White” boxes makes you a non-White. Children of mixed marriages are never White, ditto with anyone checking “White” and “Other.” It’s a mess. “Numbers don’t speak for themselves but their creators….More often than not,” writes the author, “numbers are part of somebody’s argument.” They can mean whatever their authors want them to mean, so all are “cooked”—not faked but assembled from various ingredients that vary according to circumstances. If you have any doubts, asking the numbers themselves won’t help; you have to address the authors. As Stone lays out her examples of irrational faith in numbers, readers will squirm, but not with disbelief. Founding Father James Madison’s meticulous, if creepy calculation demonstrating that a Black slave is worth precisely three-fifths of a White freeman will certainly put his statues in peril. Graded according to their death rates, the best hospitals perform badly because they deal with the sickest patients. Graded (and promoted or fired) on how well students score on a standardized test, teachers teach how to take the test.
Enthralling evidence that there is less to numbers than meets the eye.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-63149-592-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2020
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
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Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
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