Number Bias

Even if you don’t consider yourself a mumbers person, you are a numbers person. The time has come to put numbers in their place/ Not high up on a pedestal, or out on the kerb, but right where they belong: beside words.

It is not an overstatement to say that numbers dictate the way we live our lives.

They tell us how we’re doing at school, how much we weigh, who might win an election and whether the economy is booming. But numbers aren’t as objective as they may seem; behind every number is a story. Yet politicians, businesses and the media often forget this – or use it for their own gain.

Sanne Blauw travels the world to unpick our relationship with numbers and demystify our misguided allegiance to them. She explores  cases in history from Florence Nightingale using statistics to petition for better conditioned in hospitals to the manipulation of numbers by the American tobacco industry  and the ambiguous figures peddled during the EU reform.