The Tyranny of Numbers: Why counting Can't Make Us Happy Book

The 1988 film Drowning by Numbers contains a scene where a boy is asked why he is counting the hairs on his dog. He answers "To see how many there are", incredulous at the stupidity of the question.David Boyle may not cite Peter Greenaway's film, but he would surely concur with its title. The premise of his irreverent, witty and passionate treatise is that we've lost sight of the non-quantitative character of life, suffocated by the number-crunchers and their churned-out reams of statistics. At a swift canter, he summarises the major historical human figures in the counting game--Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, Edwin Chadwick, Charles Booth, John Maynard Keynes, David Pearce--mostly in terms of their eccentric personalities, which he makes as ironical and twinkly as their pursuits were methodical. Bentham yearned to calculate human happiness yet ended up, stuffed, in a university lobby, while Booth, who collected heroic amounts of information about the London poor, never quite worked out what to do with it. Beyond the cosy gossiping, Boyle has the more serious intention of countering the solemn, pseudo-scientific jargon that he believes is inducing a "pervasive blindness" in our perception of the world, where a commercial value is put on everything, physical or abstract. This undignified shoehorning is causality gone mad, he contends. At the time of Clinton's impeachment, figures were produced to show that 84 percent of those in favour of his trial were consumers of Campbell's Soup, while Burger King customers were largely pro-Clinton.What does this prove? Whatever you want, as long as you're not taking it seriously. What does need to be taken seriously, Boyle contends, is the growing lack of imagination and, by extension, wisdom, to accept and interpret or reject this sludge of figures. Intended as no more than a polemic, his book exceeds its brief. It entertains as it rails, and is packed with wonderful literary quotations and anecdotes, and regular bizarre measurements (for example, "Gry": a very small archaic English measurement the size of a speck of dirt under a fingernail). Subjective, digressive, unquantifiable and priceless. The one thing to count on is that economists will hate it. --David VincentRead More