Jump to ratings and reviews
Rate this book

Counting: How We Use Numbers to Decide What Matters

Rate this book
“Deborah Stone’s mind-altering insight is that the numbers we use to capture the human experience are themselves a form of creative story-telling. They shouldn’t end the conversation, but spark a deeper and richer one. Counting deserves five stars for showing why five stars can never tell the whole story.” ―Jacob S. Hacker, co-author of Let Them Eat How the Right Rules in an Age of Extreme Inequality What do people do when they count? What do numbers really mean? We all know that people can lie with statistics, but in this groundbreaking work, eminent political scientist Deborah Stone uncovers a much deeper problem. With help from Dr. Seuss and Cookie Monster, she explains why numbers can’t be in order to count, one must first decide what counts. Every number is the ending to a story built on cultural assumptions, social conventions, and personal judgments. And yet, in this age of big data and metric mania, numbers shape almost every facet of our whether we get hired, fired, or promoted; whether we get into college or out of prison; how our opinions are gathered and portrayed to politicians; or how government designs health and safety regulations. In warm and playful prose, Counting explores what happens when we measure nebulous notions like merit, race, poverty, pain, or productivity. When so much rides on numbers, they can become instruments of social welfare, justice, and democracy―or not. The citizens of Flint, Michigan, for instance, used numbers to prove how their household water got contaminated and to force their government to take remedial action. In stark contrast, the Founding Fathers finessed an intractable conflict by counting each slave as three-fifths of a person in the national census. They set a terrible precedent for today’s politicians who claim to solve moral and political dilemmas with arithmetic. Suffused with moral reflection and ending with a powerful epilogue on COVID-19’s dizzying statistics, Counting will forever change our relationship with numbers.

312 pages, Hardcover

Published October 6, 2020

58 people are currently reading
679 people want to read

About the author

Deborah Stone

19 books25 followers

Ratings & Reviews

What do you think?
Rate this book

Friends & Following

Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!

Community Reviews

5 stars
50 (16%)
4 stars
110 (37%)
3 stars
95 (32%)
2 stars
35 (11%)
1 star
6 (2%)
Displaying 1 - 30 of 51 reviews
Profile Image for Sofia.
459 reviews2 followers
August 10, 2025
I liked this book - it's a nonfiction that kind of examines the over reliance on numbers, and how numbers can be manipulated. One of my favourite moments was a story she told near the beginning, when she talked about when we measure the health benefits of breastfeeding, we often are just measuring one thing. She mentioned that fathers she knew had been able to connect more deeply with their children by formula feeding them and being involved in such a crucial part of keeping their child alive. I think what I appreciated about this book is that it made me consider what we aren't measuring or counting. That being said, it did get quite repetitive and I found the first half to be much stronger than the second half.
Profile Image for Shane.
416 reviews5 followers
January 18, 2021
If you've read Stone's earlier book, the Policy Paradox, this book will feel familiar. It's an updated version of her numbers chapters with more examples and nuance. Stone is excellent at drawing our eyes to the things we take for granted in society and policy. The book is full of examples from multiple sectors that areas useful to drive home hey points but would also be useful in a class. The plentiful examples can start to feel a bit redundant though.
Profile Image for Leif.
1,923 reviews103 followers
May 16, 2021
Look, if you're new to this idea about how numbers work in social policy, then this is a good book! Here is what I think Stone was aiming for: an accessible text that takes a subject with potentially hard edges and softens them for your lay audience. If so, okay. It's not like this subject hasn't been repeatedly and frequently addressed for the same audience for many years - perhaps the opportunity to update the basic premises is helpful. And, granted, books like Cathy O'Neill's Weapons of Math Destruction are really about "big data" and algorithms, even if it's pitched at the same audience Stone is aiming at, and Safiya Umoja Noble's Algorithms of Oppression is much more specialized, and Jerry Z. Muller's superficial (and philosophically shaky) The Tyranny of Metrics reads like a warmed over version of Weapons of Math Destruction, and that's only a handful of the recent publications... never mind the classics like Darrel Huff's How to Lie with Statistics, which at least Stone explicitly acknowledges and diverges from... wait, what was I saying? That Stone provides any additional wisdom in this packed field?

Read it a different way: the field illustrates that the topic is important (I think it's absolutely crucial). That's true enough, and credit to Stone for honing in on it. This was my reason for reading the book: I like her earlier work in public policy research, I think the subject is important enough to read another book on it, hoping that she pitches at the public policy level, and, hell, why not give it a chance.

A mess. Especially, one imagines, for the experts in the room. After all, the truism is well known about numbers and statistics across the board: "garbage in, garbage out."

Early on, Stone clarifies that she is concerned with numbers and counting in social issues - ie., your Fitbit that counts your steps, or your performance metric that suggests if you have done well in a given year - and not about the numbers that scientists use to measure the physical world. This is not very true: she happily ventures into discussions about drinking water in Flint, about the metre as a unit of measurement, about nutrition as a corollary of income, and so on. But she may imagine that this disclaimer creates a sanitary cordon that allows her to speculate on the fictitious quality of numbers without countenancing the radical implications of her arguments. Let's think about pollution, for example. Stone notes that talking about "parts per million" is not good communications (a blinding insight!), but what would her thesis about the fundamental fiction of measurements and number have to say about carbon dioxide equivalents and the thesis of climate change? Would, like her discussion of water in Flint, she ridicule the technical language of scientific measurement in environmental science? (Stone has a problem with the words "reference level" despite relying on the legal and scientific judgements that depend on the same the measurement provided by said reference level, thus exposing an inability to either understand the issue or demonstrating her preference for snappy, anti-technical platitudes over the engagement with real issues.) Tough to know, but an example of an absence of judgement on the author's part.

My sense is that Stone avoids the question of numbers in science because she has no good answers for real policy issues. Instead, she superficially glides along from example to example about the use and abuse of numbers in mostly social policy. Even here, however, she is frustratingly opaque. It is well-known that the numbers used in the motivational devices and tracking applications are essentially made-up: 10,000 steps being totally arbitrary, and the Fitbit being merely a mechanical prompt. Stone notes that the Fitbit merely prompts action, but - as is typical - never engages with this as an issue. Does Fitbit usage correlate with higher fitness levels? Are Fitbits serving their purpose? You'll never know from this book, because Stone doesn't bother to engage with the research - or, if she does, she won't tell you about it, because her point is simply that, if I can paraphrase, "when you measure something, people start to work toward that measurement outcome".

Gee, I've never heard that before.

And then there is the arch tone of vaguely sanctimonious, vaguely ignorant judgement, as if Stone knew she was "on the right side of history" (and would use that phrase). I don't mean to criticize her occasional focus on issues of equity and justice - though I think that others (particularly O'Neill and Noble's books referenced above, and Caroline Criado Perez's Invisible Women, are examples of books that do this SO MUCH better). But I do mean to criticize her intellectual snobbery and laziness, as demonstrated by ideas like this one:
We acquire a sense of power by being able to make a difference in how other people treat us. Okay, some people get a sense of power from winning video games and coaxing smartphones to do their bidding, but these devices treat them to stare at their LED screens like zombies, oblivious to anyone else. Only interacting with humans can teach the social and civic skills that Konnor learned when he questioned his mother and grandmother about counting his age.

Hold up, what? If someone has to tell someone, especially a well-educated and well-resourced professional that many people train self-assertion and find meaningful interactions through video games and smartphone use - especially in smartphone use! - in 2020, then I think that person needs to go back to their cozy study and think about the fact that she is more concerned about making value judgements without any evidence than she should be about lecturing the rest of us about something that others have done quite effectively. Maybe this is an overreaction on my part - but what arrogance on Stone's part. Yes, interacting with human beings is of paramount importance! But hey: technology doesn't just turn people into zombies! Come on!

The problem isn't "garbage in, garbage out". If it were, we wouldn't have this book. Depending on your philosophical bent, the problems are about social structures of power, inequalities in access to resources, justice, and administrative decision-making, and, some would say, about the human brain and/or human nature and the complexities of modern life. Counting and numbers are also part of the problem, but I cannot recommend this book at all.
Profile Image for Laurie.
191 reviews15 followers
March 31, 2022
More like 3.5 stars. I enjoyed this book. It discusses the importance of understanding more details behind quantitative data and asking critical questions - what was counted, what was the motivation, what biases might be embedded. A standout quote for me: "Social issues aren't math problems. The danger of converting a social issue into a math problem lies in teaching citizens that there's one right answer and only mathematicians can find it... Sometimes the right answer to a question is to challenge it."

I felt like it was an accessible read - perhaps a bit more simplified than I was looking for. Other books on this topic that I felt were more in-depth include:

Bad Data: Why We Measure the Wrong Things and Often Miss the Metrics That Matter

Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are
Profile Image for Amy.
157 reviews
February 25, 2023
So I struggled with rating this book. I enjoyed the content but I felt like the book was too long for what I got out of it. My standard for 3 stars is “worth the time it took me to read” and for 2 stars is “would not recommend.” Neither is wholly accurate. Perhaps my struggle to find a numerical rating encapsulates the idea of the book!
Profile Image for Heather.
385 reviews56 followers
September 30, 2020
The book simply expounds on the author’s thesis that numbers, or statistics, are subjective. They are based on the definition you give to categorizing whatever it is you are counting. I did not finish this book because I didn’t find it interesting enough.

Big thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for the advanced reader copy in exchange for an honest review.
Profile Image for Holly.
17 reviews
September 16, 2023
An interesting discussion exploring the conundrums of using numbers to decide and inform. From our youth we are taught numbers are absolute and there’s only one answer, yet the prolific application of numbers in real life is much more complicated and biased
Profile Image for Sam.
102 reviews
December 12, 2020
A compact review of how statistics can lie because of how we count and how counting something changes it. She shares Jill Lepore's disdain of opinion polling, which I appreciated. Her discussion of the "Fitbit effect" is really relevant during the pandemic--putting out projections of infections/deaths changes how people behave and leads to the recursive rounds of closing and reopening.
Profile Image for Dan Drake.
197 reviews13 followers
February 1, 2022
If you've read other, similar books, such as Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy or Data Feminism or Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code, or other books on modern AI, predictive algorithms, and their use in society these days...this book is likely not worth reading. It's pretty good, but doesn't seem to be worth reading if you are up to speed on this topic.
Profile Image for Ashley.
12 reviews3 followers
February 6, 2022
Deborah Stone argues that numbers are simply a tool, that in many cases we have assigned too much power to. ⁠

Numbers are beneficial to us, absolutely! I am an engineer - I use numbers ALL THE TIME! However, something becomes a number (or a metric) based on HUMAN decisions. Numbers are tools that we decide how to use. If we assign the power of judgment to a number or an algorithm, do we really understand how those numbers were developed and what they mean?⁠

Deborah Stone does an incredible job of breaking down how algorithms are developed, how categories are used, and how numbers can be taken out of context to make "objective" decisions. This book is a quick read whose lessons you will take with you far into the future.⁠
51 reviews
May 29, 2021
My beef with this book is that when Stone, reasonably enough, talks about all of the reasons we ought to be careful about, skeptical of, arguments made using numbers, it seemed that the easiest conclusion for a reader to draw was to not trust numbers or the people who use them. In a dangerously anti-science culture, I worry about the consequences of making that argument.

I don't believe that is what ms. Stone wants the take-away to be. Her training and job suggest quite the opposite. But she offers too little help on how to take precautions against being hoodwinked by numbery arguments to give me any confidence that many readers won't just throw the baby out with the bath.
25 reviews1 follower
October 27, 2020
The author relayed a personal narrative that a male author wrote about his experience with breastfeeding vs. bottle feeding. The personal narrative had nothing to do with counting or statistics, it didn't change the science of the matter and my husband had the opposite experience than the author. Not sure why she threw in random stories. I was hoping for a book that was more mathematical and scientific; a book that actually took a deep look into how we use numbers and what they mean. Disappointed.
Profile Image for Amber.
2,299 reviews
March 13, 2022
I would recommend approaching this book as a long conversation with Stone. It likely would be a good fit for an undergraduate qualitative methods course/section. Stone uses different interesting examples about the subjective nature of quantitative data and relies on Kahneman's work quite a bit to highlight her points.

I'm not sure this would convince my hardcore quant friends to explore the subjective nature of their supposedly objective hard data, but I enjoyed it.
Profile Image for Terry.
67 reviews1 follower
January 12, 2021
Interesting but gets a bit repetitive at the end. I think it would have made a good long magazine essay.
Author 20 books81 followers
January 24, 2021
A thought-provoking exploration of what the author calls “trapped between ‘the two cultures,’ Sir Charles Snow’s phrase for the chasm he observed between scientists and literary types.” Stone’s first teaching job was “another oxymoron, a new program called ‘Policy Science.’ There was no policy problem and no personal problem (Should I marry my girlfriend or boyfriend?) for which statistics couldn’t find the best answer.” In order to count, we must first categorize, which is full of subjective bias, and she documents this very well with many examples, from the Census Bureau, measuring pain, the unemployed, policing crime, parole decisions, among others. She uses the Fitbit effect to demonstrate how counting changes our behavior. A summary:

“Stories are just data with a soul,” Too often numbers are used as data without a soul. But numbers are made of stories. They are stories. This book is about how to put the soul back into numbers. The existential dilemma of counting: How can we possibly count things if not one of them is like another? The only way to count is to force things into categories by ignoring their differences (We categorize by ignoring differences among things. Red fish, blue fish, fast fish, slow fish—they’re all fish. While we count them, we stop noticing their differences). Numbers don’t have purposes. People do. Per capita GDP is a fantasy measure if ever there was one, because it pretends that a country’s total wealth is divided equally among its population. If only we could find objective ways of counting, everyone would be treated equally. Life would be perfectly fair. The Fairness Genie is a creature of our own wishful thinking. While the Fairness Genie is looking the other way, humans build their biases and their notions of good and bad into their counting methods.”

And as the COVID pandemic has taught us, “All models are wrong, but some are useful.” This book is similar to Jerry Muller’s The Tyranny of Metrics, David Boyle’s The Sum of Our Discontent, and my own entry into this genre, Measure What Matters to Customers: Using Key Predictive Indicators.
Profile Image for Sarah.
138 reviews
June 28, 2022
Closer to 2.5 stars, but wouldn't read again.

Found some portions of the book intriguing and most of it well-explained, accessible for non-mathematicians. But, the book fell flat for me. I guess I was hoping for more insight into HOW numbers are applied, not just statements regarding the inequality or questionable ways in which they are applied. Overall, I found Stone's book to be relatively partisan, and not necessarily in a good way. The last chapter in particular rubbed me the wrong way seeing as the author aimed to be honest about tackling the balancing act of subjectivity and objectivity with regard to numbers.

Stone poses in her subtitle the notion of how numbers are used to decide what matters. But I found the book to skirt around that question/topic. Rather than explaining how numbers can be used to decide what matters, Stone instead sets forth the notion that numbers are biased because biased humans can tinker with them in order to decide what matters to them. This is a fair notion, but I don't think it needed 200+ pages.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
1 review
May 21, 2024
So much promise in this book, but unfortunately it gets pulled down into the author's own political views and biases.
The premise of this book is a good one, and the intro and first chapter seem to be headed in the right direction. Then things take a sharp left turn, and the book ends up becoming simply a platform for the author's own political rants. Numerous times she highlights how numbers can be presented in a way that skews the reader's perspective - but then only focuses on examples that favor a left-leaning perspective of the world. Situations are cherry-picked and presented as though the only logical conclusion is racism, sexism, or other -isms. But only when the alleged victims of such bias are specific groups, but not other groups.
This would all be fine if the book were presented as an opinion or political piece - but the whole premise is to highlight and call out bias baked into our way of counting. Sadly and ironically, Ms. Stone evidences her own bias instead.
Profile Image for Popup-ch.
891 reviews24 followers
April 19, 2021
"Numbers acquire their power the same way the gods acquire theirs. Humans invest them with virtues they want their rulers to have."

Stone wants us to question numbers, and ask where they come from. Even when the numbers are undisputable, it pays to ask oneself 'who decided to count these things' and 'what about edge cases'. Some numbers that are tricky to define, such as Tim Harford's example of 'two sheep in a field' "Except that one of the sheep isn’t a sheep, it’s a lamb. And the other sheep is heavily pregnant—in fact, she’s in labor, about to give birth at any moment. How many sheep again?"

That is all well and good - but I believe that she then goes on a bit too far to claim that numbers shouldn't be trusted at all.
Profile Image for Rob Brock.
406 reviews12 followers
May 29, 2024
This book could easily have adopted the subtitle “The Murky Morality of Mathematics,” since the book is less about math or statistics than it is about the choices we make about what should be counted and why. The author spends a lot of time analyzing the assumptions that drive many social and policy systems, and in a way provides a counterpoint to Hans Rosling’s book “Factfulness.” There are also discussions of philosophy, voters rights, mass incarceration, and the global Covid-19 pandemic response. Some reviewers seem to be put off by the authors clear liberal stances, and she is not shy about her criticism of some politicians, even naming names. But I found her questions and observations insightful and worth discussing, even if you come from a different political persuasion.
Profile Image for William Schram.
2,353 reviews99 followers
January 29, 2023
Counting is a book on how social science uses statistics to tell stories. Before you can count something, you have to figure out what matters, and in 99% of cases, people take their biases along with them.

The book twists thinking on its head in some cases. It's like the study with the basketball players and the gorilla. I believe it's called inattentional blindness. The numbers are there waiting to be used, but people with ideas and agendas must translate them into something meaningful.

Deborah Stone does a good job explaining her position. I enjoyed the book. Thanks for reading my review, and see you next time.
20 reviews
April 23, 2021
Numbers and Lies

An interesting book for the reason that it highlights the unappreciated bias and misinformation in numbers and statistics in particular. However, the author is unaware of her own bias in her poor understanding of topics like biology, chemistry, physics, and so on. Her point of view leans to the postmodern “woke” view and includes all the biases in that point of view.
One could accurately say that “she is hoist by her own petard”.
Despite this, this is an important read because it exposes the complexity of understanding the reality of the world we live in.
Profile Image for Christine Barth.
1,822 reviews3 followers
June 21, 2022
Very interesting food for thought, particularly in regards to political motivations behind data that drives policy decisions.
The chapter on covid lacked the benefit of hindsight (obviously).
Overall an easy read about developing critical thinking, even for those not mathematically inclined.
I do give kudos to the author for the variety of examples. Even though I'm sure I share few of her political views, I did not feel villianized or unable to follow the reasoning.
Profile Image for Rainbowyikes.
108 reviews5 followers
April 18, 2024
A game changer in political and economic discourse; much more easily digestible than paradox.

This quote ✨: “Counting reveals some things and makes others invisible. Why don’t we know who the coronavirus victims are? Because we count only what we care about. We don’t count what we don’t want to see. Coronavirus deaths are an acute manifestation of the social injustices we’ve come to accept as normal” (240).
Profile Image for Alice.
409 reviews
August 31, 2023
2.5 stars - i had high hopes for this book but couldn't follow the way it was organized and felt like it often strayed away from its main topic of counting to talk about how data can be weaponized and machine learning algorithms biased. it was a bit all over the place and seemed to repeat a lot of what other books in this topic space have already said.
129 reviews
October 28, 2023
Did you know that metrics presented as "objective" truth in fact are socially determined and not always perfect at measuring what we want them to? Would you like an entire book repeating this argument?

"Counting" lacks the nuance and humor - much less the quantitative rigor - of other "pop statistics/ML" books like The Data Detective or You Look Like a Thing and I Love You
Profile Image for anklecemetery.
486 reviews23 followers
January 16, 2021
Digs into how statistics tell stories based on what they do and do not explicitly report. I learned a lot about how the census works, and the final chapter, on COVID-19 and its statistics, was fascinating. (Recommended by Kate McDowell/Data storytelling)
Profile Image for Amanda.
220 reviews3 followers
February 2, 2021
I think this is a great entry point for people who are just engaging with statistics. However, it was under edited and a little broad for my taste. I would very much recommend to readers who are interested in the power of statistics and the vagaries of how those statistics are compiled.
Profile Image for Steven.
574 reviews26 followers
Read
March 22, 2021
I bailed out of reading this. It's a good book (as far as I got), but my reading got really interrupted by other things lately, and I had to return my ebook copy to the public library. I'm thinking I won't re-check it out. Not a reflection on this book -- just need a clean slate.
Profile Image for Brittany McLaughlin.
199 reviews7 followers
August 19, 2021
Started off OK then everything was written with such a tone it became painful to keep listening to (audio book). Much better recent read in this area was Tim Harford's The Data Detective. He warns about/against all the emotionality exhibited by Stone.
Profile Image for Annie.
1,170 reviews22 followers
January 13, 2022
I heard an interview with the author, which prompted me to read this.
Well worth it.
I was gathering quotes to include in this review, but there are too many nuggets.
Ethics and morality, and Covid-19, all appear.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 51 reviews

Can't find what you're looking for?

Get help and learn more about the design.