The Sum of Our Discontent (Cloth): Why Numbers Make Us Irrational

by David Boyle

In The Sum of Our Discontent, David Boyle has put his finger on the problem with our numbers-obsessed societies: The trouble is that numbers have proliferated and that it is sometimes hard to tell the difference between a good statistic and a bad one and that therefore numbers have become meaningless and in the process reduced humans to be coldly calculating.

Genres: Nonfiction, Economics

200 pages, Hardcover

First published June 17, 2001

About the author

David Courtney Boyle was a British author and journalist who wrote mainly about history and new ideas in economics, money, business, and culture. He lived in Steyning in West Sussex.
He conducted an independent review for the Treasury and the Cabinet Office on public demand for choice in public services which reported in 2013. Boyle was a co-founder and policy director of Radix, which he characterized in 2017 as a radical centrist think tank. He was also co-director of the mutual think tank New Weather Institute.

Reviews

[Glenn Murphy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I originally read this book a couple of years ago, but it has been on my mind a lot lately, so I read it again. I work in a field where measuring is at the heart of what we do, but management's obsession with “metrics”, “continuous improvement”, and lean six sigma “green belt projects” just makes me feel more and more that the numbers and reality are moving further apart. In order to measure something, you must define it, usually in a narrow way in order to make measuring simpler. Nuances and the complexity of real life are lost in the footnotes. That's what this book is all about--the paradox of counting. We must count things in order to understand our world and make it a better place, but the numbers exclude much that is important.

Boyle provides a fascinating history of counting and measuring over the last couple of centuries to help the reader understand how we've gotten to where we are today, from Jeremy Bentham and his belief that happiness can be defined and measured, to the modern obsession with GDP and economic growth. The chapter on Frederick Taylor made me shudder as I remembered being forced to time a process at work as part of an “improvement project”. Scientific management seems to be back in fashion, even though the original issues of treating workers as machines and dehumanizing them remain.

Quotes from the book:

“We admit that numbers can't reveal everything, but we try to force them to anyway. We tend to solve the problem by measuring ever more ephemeral aspects of life, constantly bumping up against the central paradox of the whole problem, which is that the most important things are just not measurable.”

“You can put information into figures, tables, and graphs, but you can't necessarily do the same with knowledge. Ironically, most organizations and bureaucracies very much prefer information, which they know as 'data'. Knowledge, often simply informal know-how that people exchange over coffee or a cigarette, often gets ignored because it can't be measured. Often the people who hold it are the first victims of downsizing.”

“Number crunchers and pantometrists reduce complex connections to simple habitual links. They assume the world is a simple machine where one simple cause connects with a simple effect, when the truth is that the universe is a blooming, buzzing cacophony of competing causes and effects that no amount of measuring will interpret. Pantometry will throw up these unexpected connections, but it won't explain them: That requires human judgement, experience, common sense, and intuition—those very human attributes we have been losing faith in.”

[***Dave Hill · Rating 2 out of 5]

Great premise, flawed conclusion - While Boyle dishes up some fascinating mini-biographies, and some solid (if sometimes poorly-organized and repetitive) examples of how, when we measure too much, we measure nothing completely and little of that well, the book falls apart toward the end, as we get to hear about how civilization will be saved if only we ... measure different things than what we're already measuring. The closer this book comes to the present, the more dated it feels.