# How to make the world add up

- Link: https://fundraising.co.uk/books/how-to-make-the-world-add-up/
- Published: 2021-08-31T08:06:00+01:00
- Author: Howard Lake

When was the last time you read a grand statement, accompanied by a large number,
and wondered whether it could really be true? Statistics are vital in helping us
tell stories – we see them in the papers, on social media, and we hear them used
in everyday conversation – and yet we doubt them more than ever.

But numbers – in the right hands – have the power to change the world for the better.

Contrary to popular belief, good statistics are not a trick, although they are a
kind of magic. Good statistics are not smoke and mirrors; in fact, they help us 
see more clearly. Good statistics are like a telescope for an astronomer, a microscope
for a bacteriologist, or an X-ray for a radiologist.

If we are willing to let them, good statistics help us see things about the world
around us and about ourselves – both large and small – that we would not be able
to see in any other way.

In How to Make the World Add Up, Tim Harford draws on his experience as both an 
economist and presenter of the BBC’s radio show ‘More or Less’. He takes us deep
into the world of disinformation and obfuscation, bad research and misplaced motivation
to find those priceless jewels of data and analysis that make communicating with
numbers worthwhile.

Harford’s characters range from the art forger who conned the Nazis to the stripper
who fell in love with the most powerful congressman in Washington, to famous data
detectives such as John Maynard Keynes, Daniel Kahneman and Florence Nightingale.
He reveals how we can evaluate the claims that surround us with confidence, curiosity
and a healthy level of scepticism.

Using ten simple rules for understanding numbers – plus one golden rule – this extraordinarily
insightful book shows how if we keep our wits about us, thinking carefully about
the way numbers are sourced and presented, we can look around us and see with crystal
clarity how the world adds up.

![[Quote on Tim Harford's book by Professor Hetan Shah, CEO of the British Academy]."
A brilliant guide which teaches us how to be sceptical without being cynical".](
https://wfay6x.infiniteuploads.cloud/2021/08/how-to-make-the-world-add-up-harford-
cover-1024x512.jpg)

![[Quote on Tim Harford's book, next to front cover image] 'If you aren't in love
with stats before reading this book, you will be by the time you're done. Powerful,
persuasive, and in these truth-defying times, indispensable' Caroline Criado Perez,
author of Invisible Women ](https://wfay6x.infiniteuploads.cloud/2021/12/caroline-
criado-quote-on-tim-harford-book.jpg)

‘Fabulously readable, lucid, witty and authoritative . . . Every politician and 
journalist should be made to read this book, but everyone else will get so much 
pleasure and draw so much strength from the joyful way it dispels the clouds of 
deceit and delusion’
**Stephen Fry**

## About Tim Harford

**Tim Harford** is the author of nine books including “How To Make The World Add
Up”, “Messy”, and the million-selling “The Undercover Economist”. Tim is a senior
columnist at the Financial Times, and the presenter of Radio 4’s “More or Less”,“
Fifty Things That Made the Modern Economy”, and the new podcast “Cautionary Tales”.

## WATCH: How to make the world add up

Economist, journalist and broadcaster Tim Harford speaks to David Spiegelhalter,
Winton Professor of the Public Understanding of Risk at the University of Cambridge,
about his recent book, How to make the world add up: Ten rules for thinking differently
about numbers.