Bad Data: How Governments, Politicians and the Rest of Us Get Misled by Numbers

"(This book is also a vailable on the Bookstory website here .) Yes, it should be required reading not only for politicians but also for members of the media, because so much of our political coverage is dominated by data—in particular, headline claims. Think of Rishi Sunak’s claim in that first debate: that Labour was going to cost every household £2000 more per year. That was quite quickly debunked, and he was warned by the Treasury not to use that calculation again. But you got the sense of damage having been done. Of course, that reminds me of that £350 million ‘saving’ that would fund NHS improvements that played a role in the Brexit campaign. In migration, every three months new migration statistics are released and the headline numbers will appear, often without much in the way of analysis. What Sturge does is dig a bit deeper into what the sources of statistics are and gives us some quite remarkable of abuses. It’s a timely reminder to everyone in politics of the big role data plays in today’s political debates, but also how important it is to handle data well."