Ahoy there me mateys!  I enjoy reading about statistics and was intrigued by the concept of how numbers tracking in the era of the smart phones affects life.  I thought I was going to get a more serious look into the science of numbers.  Instead this book was written in a loose style of a self-help book with very little practical advice.  The theme was "numerical vaccination" which the authors themselves don't seem to follow.  I understand they are economics professors but their personal anecdotes seem to fall into all the "traps" they warn against.

There are interesting comments in here, particularly about how numbers influence news articles in both "real" and "fake" news.  However, the book seems to be a doom and gloom look into the numbers game and seems to focus on the fear aspects.  Even when I agreed with the points the authors were making, I still struggled with the point of this book.

Even their own research was lightly touched on and received a couple of paragraphs per study.  I would have preferred a text with actual citations rather than a bibliography.  Why not link to the actual studies?  Or online sources?  Also because I was reading on an e-reader, I couldn't read many of the illustrations and couldn't enlarge them.  The book felt like a gimmick.  I did find some new concepts and data here so I don't regret reading this book.  I was just expecting a lot more.  Arrrr!

MORE NUMBERS EVERY DAY is described as a "number vaccine" by the two professors, Micael Dahlen (Stockholm School of Economics) and Helge Thorbjørnsen (Norwegian School of Economics) who are its authors. They are rather anti-number, writing "we do want to bring your attention to how you are influenced by them and help you to relate to them so that the quantification doesn't make your life poorer." The text is filled with examples and research with a fairly scholarly (although sometimes humorous) tone and many examples from Scandinavia. One section which is particularly interesting - and troubling - concerns "Numbers and the Truth" where they explore fake numbers and real news. There, they note that "Studies show that when people read news articles without numbers, they judge the credibility of the statements based on the source. However, when the articles contain numbers, the source plays almost no role at all." Another section looks at the pandemic with its daily numerical updates and their potential impact on a sense of well-being and security. In each case, they provide a numbered summary with observations (e.g., be aware that numbers can get "anchored" in your head) and suggestions that may help craft a more effective "number vaccine." Well-researched with over ten percent of the book (see how I inadvertently added a numerical measure?) devoted to notes and references, MORE NUMBERS EVERY DAY provides plenty of insight on "How Data, Stats, and Figures Control Our Lives and How to Set Ourselves Free."

So many numbers, and so much data. This book brings a welcome point of view that not everything needs to be (or should be) quantified. A great relief from the obsession with quantification that has become pervasive in so many industries and is particularly damaging to K-12 education.